I heard this word for perhaps the first time in a podcast, and fell in love.
The word delighted me because it condensed into one word what I’d love to bring to these writings, via personal point of view, a home-grown web-weaving1, wide-net category & tag taxonomies, and odd juxtapositions (IE positioning images near words in an occasionally paradoxical manner instead of a more traditional illustrative manner).
My favorite everyday, go-to dictionary is Merriam Webster. And it says in short, perspicacious refers to that of acute mental vision or discernment, with the nuance of also displaying the perception and understanding of subtleties others tend to miss.
To me, the word contains an emotional “aha” within it, or at least carries the potential for an internal flash of understanding for the reader around a topic. A perspicacious person – if skillful enough – could illuminate something in the reader’s minds eye that they perhaps had not seen before.
With skill, these realizations could be delightful (of the light).
The etymology of the term shows nearly every meaning across cultures (from Sanskrit to Old German) touch upon, or emanate from, the human sense of vision. AKA, the SPEK part, as it appears in aspect, spectacles, spectacular, and even species, and spectrum.
As a daughter of an optometrist, who did not practice the art, but instead built institutions for practitioners of the art of optometry to practice and further teach the art, learning a brand new word in a family of words that I like is a special auspice.
Thank you for reading. If you haven’t already, please check out a lushly studied and lovingly crafted body of work by Maria Popova at The Marginalian. She calls on the greatest artists poets and thinkers of of all time to digest and augment their works with clarity, and in correct form. Her personal creative work also includes these beautiful Bird Divinations.
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT 😉