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This is a comfortable word, smacking of a Victorian pater-familias warming himself at the fire as he holds forth to his dutiful wife.
Consuetude
means custom or familiarity. The adjective, consuetudinary (the sort of word only a lawyer could bring out with a straight face), means customary. The noun also means “an unwritten law established by usage, derived by immemorial custom from antiquity; a ritual of customary devotions”.
Sounds like a cross between Common Law and praying to your house gods, doesn’t it?
Desuetude, au contraire, mean “disuse, discontinuation”. It’s derived from the Latin: de (negative) and suescere (to become used). The dictionary notes that it is formal; you’d never have guessed, would you?
Neither word, of course, has anything to do with “suet”, a “solid fatty tissue accumulating round the kidneys and omentum* of the ox, sheep, etc”. Except, possibly, if you equate the pomposity of words like “desuetude” with Corporation stomachs, very round, with waistcoats and watch-chains stretched across them.
*Omentum: “fold of peritoneum proceeding from one of the abdominal viscera to another”. No, I didn’t think you’d really want to know, but dictionaries are a bit like that, aren’t they? Like chocolates, it’s very hard to put them down once you’ve started.
Time to make my consuetudinary cuppa. See you tomorrow!
Comments welcome, below.
All definitions today courtesy of Chambers Dictionary, 11th Edition, London 2008.
