Word of the Day

I've missed you all, but I haven't had anything to say. So rather than come here and blather on I stayed away. But today, on a hunch, I looked up Webster's word of the day and once again it was like someone was reading my palm.

abulia • \ay-BOO-lee-uh\ • noun : abnormal lack of ability to act or to make decisions

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind," Mark Twain once wrote. "It takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up." The indecision Twain laments is fairly common; only when inability to make decisions reaches an abnormal level does it have an uncommon name: "abulia." The English term we use today comes from a New Latin word that combines the prefix "a-," meaning "without," with the Greek word "boulē," meaning "will." "Abulia" can refer to the kind of generalized indecision that makes it impossible to choose what flavor ice cream you want, though it was created to name a severe medical disorder that can render a person nearly inert.

At times I'm somewhere between the slack-jawed lady staring at all of Baskin Robbins 31 flavors (I swear it looks like more!) and "nearly inert." I just never knew there was a name for it except indecisive.