Today's Word "Nescient"
Published in Vocabulary
nescient \NE-shent, NE-si-yehnt\ (adjective) - 1 : Ignorant, lacking knowledge; 2 : agnostic, believing that man is incapable of understanding the nature of the universe.
"Mr. Frank's heart tightened ever so slightly before yet another sea of nescient freshman faces in the auditorium."
"Nescient" has few relatives. The noun from it is "nescience" while "nesciently" is the adverb. It has a cousin, "nescious," with the same meaning, which is related to "nice" (see Etymology). It is distantly related to nescio "a claim of ignorance, of not knowning," from the Latin word nescio "I don't know." This word is a useful noun for our times: "US courtrooms today resound with the nescios of corporate executives squirming on the witness stand." It's a borrowing from Latin "nesciens," the present participle of nescire "to be ignorant," derived from ne- "not" + scire "to know." The Latin word belonged to a family that included "nescius," borrowed into English as nescious. In Old French, the same word was reduced to "nise" and was borrowed into Old English as "nice," meaning "foolish, silly," a meaning that inexplicably migrated to what it is today.
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