It’s crunch time. Papers, projects and assignments of all kinds are due right now. So why do students — and especially the seniors among us — feel lackadaisical? Ah, wait, that’s our last word of the quarter. Many thanks are due to fellow wordsmith Katie Hoffman for suggesting it.

To be lackadaisical is to feel lethargic, languid and lacking in interest — in an adjective, apathetical. As benefiting our last word of the spring, it has an amusing etymological birth. According to Linda and Roger Flavell’s Dictionary of Word Origins, lackadaisical comes from the 16th century phrase expressing grief, “alack the day” or “alackaday,” meaning “woe to the day” or “shame to the day.” The word morphed into lack-a-daisy (or lackadaisy) by the end of the 1700s, and finally to our lackadaisical form by the 19th century, when it became quite the fad word.

In other words (so to speak), someone who exclaimed “Alack the day!” on a regular basis was a lazy whiner or a lackadaisical goof.

Indeed, the first usage in modern, written English came along only in 1768, in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, with the line, “Sitting in my black coat, and in my lack-adaysical manner, counting the throbs of it.” Now, I’m not sure what “throbs” are, but I do know that Sterne was an Anglican clergyman, humorist and writer who had “a penchant for bawdy innuendo,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is best known for his free-flowing novel Tristram Shandy, which solidified his status as a controversial and influential author, inspiring such figures as disparate as Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens and Friedrich Nietzsche.

A good later example of our word can be found in 1834 in William Thomas Beckford’s Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal, with the line, “Lackadaisical loitering on the banks of the Arve.” Beckford was the eccentric heir to a Jamaican sugar cane fortune and was noted for his extensive collection of art and curiosities. He was also the author of the English Gothic fantasy novel Vathek.

So as you sit in the near-summer sunshine in the Quad feeling lackadaisical, think back on the slightly odd characters who coined this word that signifies classic apathy.

This is the end of the wordy line, I’m afraid, dear etymologists. I hope to return in a special edition or two this summer, and then again in the fall. Please send me more ideas in the meantime, and I’ll duly note them.

Enjoy your summer season, and try to be lackadaisical once in a while. Until next time, cheers!