Vaporescent

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

  1. Capable of evaporating or dissipating into a gaseous state, or figuratively fading away and becoming ephemeral
  2. Characterized by a tendency to transform into vapor or to vanish gradually like mist, suggesting transience and immateriality
  3. Characterized by a tendency to evaporate, dissipate, or fade away gradually in a manner resembling the behavior of vapor
  4. Having the quality of gradually transforming into vapor or becoming increasingly ethereal and evanescent over time

Etymology: An adolescent and an adult are the same Latin verb caught at two different moments. "Adolescere" meant "to grow up." Its present participle, "adolescens," described someone still growing, while its past participle, "adultus," described someone who had finished. The difference lives in a small Latin syllable, "-esc-," which grammarians call inchoative: it turns a verb into a process just begun, a state on its way to becoming something else. Vaporescent is built on that syllable. Its first half is "vapor," Latin for steam or a warm exhalation, the haze rising off water or earth. The word reached English through French as "vapour" in the later Middle Ages and kept a wide sense: mist, fumes and, for centuries, the supposed exhalations of the body that clouded the mind. That is why melancholy people once suffered from "the vapours." The second half, "-escent," first came into English ready-made inside words borrowed from Latin, such as "convalescent," growing strong, and "effervescent," boiling over. "Incandescent," glowing white-hot, arrived the same way, through French from Latin "incandescere." In time English speakers began attaching the ending themselves, especially to describe light and change. "Fluorescence" was coined in 1852 by the physicist George Gabriel Stokes, who named it after the mineral fluorspar on the model of "opalescence." Vaporescent belongs to this second, homemade kind. It is not an inherited Latin word but an English assembly of a Latin noun and a Latin ending. What it keeps from its ancestry is that inchoative precision, the same distinction that separates "obsolescent" from "obsolete." Something vaporous is already mist. Something vaporescent is still in the act of rising, like the puddle on hot pavement caught halfway to air.