Salutations, logophiles! A warm welcome to today’s installment of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. Now, I am going to ask those of you with a mischievous penchant to please, keep your mind out of the gutter! - as we discuss today’s word: lucubration.
Yes! It sounds the same! But it is not! For lucubration means writing or study, often lasting late into the night. For example, ‘after several hours of lucubration, I was able to finish writing this interesting episode.’ See? Not the same at all. It usually refers to the activities of ‘night owls’, and although often used facetiously today, really has no comparable synonym.
Lucubration is the noun of action from the past participle stem of the Latin lucubrare, which means ‘to work by artificial light’. Lucbrare comes from the stem of ‘lucere’ meaning ‘to shine’. All of these derivatives come, of course, from the original Latin ‘lux’ meaning light. Today, lux is a unit of illuminance, equal to one lumen per square metre. Whatever that means.
Lucubration itself has evolved through many iterations of definitions. In the 1590s, lucubration specifically referred to a ‘close study or thought’, but by the 1610s it had morphed to mean ‘a product of such study or thought, literary work showing signs of too-careful elaboration.’ Quite the ‘glow up’, you might say. In the 1800s, the term had been broadened to refer to any intensive study, day or night, or a composition, especially a weighty one, generated as a result of such study. Today, lucubration is most often used as a plural and implies pompous or stuff scholarly writing. I always find it fascinating that older words with such clear, concise meanings often evolve to such blunt and negatively connotated definitions. Ah well. There shall be no lucubration on the subject from me.
Isn’t language wonderful?
