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Make Your Point > Archived Issues > LAGGARDLY

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pronounce LAGGARDLY:

LAG urd lee
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connect this word to others:

Imagine you've got a garden. In it, you can have only one of these two things: slugs or mud. 

So, slugs or mud?

I'd pick mud. Slugs worry me; it's not just the goo, they're also so vulnerable and slow.

I mention this because English offers a slug-based word and a mud-based word for things that are slow. Both are great, and you can take your pick. If you shudder at the slug inside sluggish, you might prefer the lag inside laggardly, which suggests mud instead. If a sluggish person seems to ooze along at 0.05mph, then a laggardly person seems to be squelching their way through mud one soggy footstep at a time.

See if you can come up with a synonym of sluggish and laggardly that starts with L and suggests weakness or fatigue: it's l___uid.

And another that starts with L, one that suggests forgetfulness, as if from sleeping for way too long: that one's l_____gic.

(To reveal any word with blanks, give it a click.)   

definition:

One of the oldest meanings of the word "lag" is "to get wet, or to get muddy, and therefore to walk slowly." We're not even sure where this "lag" came from; some sources suggest it may be Scandinavian, but it's definitely old, possibly from the 1300s.

By 1702, we were using "laggard" as an adjective to mean "too slow" and as a noun to mean "a person who moves too slowly."

And now we use "laggardly" to mean "moving too slowly, like a person who can't keep up."

grammatical bits:

Part of speech:

Often an adjective: "Their pace was laggardly."

And an adverb: "They wander laggardly through the game."

Other forms: 

The verb is "lag," and its other forms are "lagged" and "lagging."

People and things who lag behind are "laggards."

how to use it:

Pick the formal, somewhat rare word "laggardly" when you want to call attention to how slow something (or someone) is.

You might complain about literally laggardly things and people, like a laggardly Internet connection, or a laggardly clump of teenagers blocking a busy hallway.

Or get more abstract and complain about laggardly wages, economies, bureaucracies, paces, progress, responses, thoughts, storytelling, etc.

You could also complain that things or people are laggardly at something, or laggardly in doing something.

examples:

"We define a revolution as the rapid and thorough displacement of a regime or system by a new and very different regime or system... The world’s first economic revolution was the Agricultural Revolution... and took a laggardly 7500 years or so to do its thorough replacing."
  — Dave Maney, Forbes, 1 March 2013

"Even before election night began [in 2020], the country had witnessed nationwide scenes of determined voting at astonishing levels. The sleeping giant of the US electorate – traditionally among the most laggardly at voting among the developed countries – had suddenly stirred."
   — Ed Pilkington & Oliver Milman, The Guardian, 4 November 2020

has this page helped you understand "laggardly"?

   

Awesome, I'm glad it helped!

Thanks for letting me know!
If you have any questions about this term, please message me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.


study it:

Explain the meaning of "laggardly" without saying "slow" or "lagging behind."

try it out:

In a novel, William Beebe wrote:

"I am thinking of a very wonderful thing and words come laggardly. For it is a thing which more easily rests quietly in the deep pool of memory than stirred up and crystalized into words and phrases."

That's relatable, right? Talk (or just think) about a wonderful memory of your own that makes your words come laggardly.




before you review, play:

Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.

Our game this month: Poetic Connections!

Check out three snippets from a poem, along with three words we've studied—some beautiful, some outrageous—and decide which word you'll connect to each snippet. To see the definitions, highlight the hidden white text after each word. And to see an example, head here.

Try this set today:

"Butter" by Elizabeth Alexander

Snippets:
1. "butter better than gravy staining white rice yellow"
2. "butter glazing corn in slipping squares"
3. "glowing from the inside out, one hundred megawatts of butter"

Words:
A. burnish (meaning... to polish to a shine)
B. pellucid (meaning... allowing light to shine through)
C. tincture (meaning... a shade, trace, smattering, or light touch)

To see one possible set of answers, scroll all the way down; if your answers don’t match these, that's fine: all that matters is that yours make sense to you.

review this word:

1. The opposite of LAGGARDLY could be

A. PRIOR.
B. PROMPT.
C. PREPARED.

2. In Salon, Erin Keane mused, "I wish I could tell you that an era of joy is just around a corner we're close to clearing: New year, new you, new us, new world. But that's not how it works. Our laggardly renewal will _____ up to us... _____ and shy."

A. waft .. tender
B. sidle .. sleepy
C. barge .. awkward




Answers to the review questions:
1. B
2. B

Suggested answers to the game:

I’d connect burnish to snippet 2 for the glaze added to the corn, pellucid to snippet 3 for the glow from the inside out, and tincture to snippet 1 for the light touch of yellow on the rice.


a final word:


I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love.

I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words.


From my blog:
On vocabulary...
      36 ways to study words.
      Why we forget words, & how to remember them.
      How to use sophisticated words without being awkward.
On writing...
      How to improve any sentence.
      How to motivate our kids to write.
      How to stop procrastinating and start writing.
      How to bulk up your writing when you have to meet a word count.

From my heart: a profound thanks to the generous patrons, donors, and sponsors that make it possible for me to write these emails. If you'd like to be a patron or a donor, please click here. If you'd like to be a sponsor and include your ad in an issue, please contact me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.

A disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.

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