caducity
Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
- noun The frailty of old age; senility.
- noun The quality or state of being perishable; impermanence.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- noun A tendency to fall or decay; hence, the period of declining life; senility; feebleness; weakness.
Examples
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The attitude that words may be discarded -- indeed, that words have caducity at all -- is not salubriously abstergent, but reflects an agrestic nisus that all cultivated English speakers must eschew.
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Were I to conjecture, I should say that the whole will centre, before it is long, in Mr. Pitt and Co., the present being an heterogeneous jumble of youth and caducity, which cannot be efficient.
Letters to his son on The Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman
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But they wrought their awful romances of crime in lands where the sun of supreme civilization, through a gorgeous evening of Sybaritic luxury, was sinking, with red tints of revolution, into the night of anarchy and national caducity.
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As for the labour and sorrow which his Majesty K (ing) D (avid) speaks of, I know of no age that is quite exempt from them, and have no fear of their being more severe in my caducity than they were in the flower of my age, when I had not more things to please me than I have now, although they might vary in their kind.
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The emphatic affirmation of a supermundane, spiritual order of reality and the equally emphatic assertion of the caducity of things material fitted in with the essentially Christian contention that spiritual interests are supreme.
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I do not speak of the ordinary caducity of language, in virtue of which every effusion of the human spirit is lodged in a body of death.
Note
The word 'caducity' comes from a Latin word meaning 'falling'.
