Perspicuity

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˌpəːspɪˈkjuːɪti/

Definitions

  1. The quality of being expressed or presented in a manner that is easy to understand and clearly comprehensible
  2. The capacity to be grasped readily by the mind due to transparent and unambiguous presentation
  3. The state of being lucid and comprehensible through clarity of expression and logical arrangement

Etymology: Before it meant clear writing, it meant clear glass. When the word first appeared in English, in the late fifteenth century, it described transparency in the most literal sense: the quality of something light passes through, something you can see straight to the other side of. Its root is a Latin verb of sight. "Perspicere" joined "per", "through", to "specere", "to look", and from it came the adjective "perspicuus", "transparent", which could also mean "evident" or "plain to the mind". The noun "perspicuitas" carried both senses, and Roman teachers of oratory adopted it as a technical term. Quintilian, writing on style in the first century, declared "nobis prima sit virtus perspicuitas": for us, let the first virtue be clarity. English borrowed the noun from Late Latin, much as French produced "perspicuité". By the 1540s the figurative meaning had taken over, and the word came to mean clearness of statement, prose a reader sees through to the thought behind it. That sense became a pillar of English rhetoric. In the eighteenth century the Scottish rhetoricians George Campbell and Hugh Blair each devoted extended discussion to perspicuity, treating it as the foundation on which every other grace of style must rest. There is a trap built into the word. Its near twin "perspicacity" comes from the same verb but by way of "perspicax", "sharp-sighted", and it belongs to the observer rather than the thing observed. Writers have tangled the two for centuries, and usage guides have spent just as long separating them: perspicacity is seeing through things, while perspicuity is being easy to see through. That a word praising plain expression should be so easily misused, and so hard to say, is a joke the language never meant to tell.

Synonyms: clarity, lucidity, transparency, clearness, intelligibility

Antonyms: ambiguity, obscurity, confusion, uncertainty, vagueness