By my desk, I have a page-a-day calendar. In my email I get a few word-a-day emails (in several different languages, since of course I know all the words in English đ ). And on Twitter, I get my lack-a-day: whatâs gone missing now? Ah well, so it goes.
Not to be lackadaisical about it, but yeah. When you see a lack, and you lament it, you can say âAh, lack!â as you might say âAh, loss!â to a loss. Or, to go with alas for a loss, you say alack for a lack. Thatâs where it comes from.
But it has grown past that. Once it became a one-word exclamation, it was also available to swap in for woe or pity, or, of course, alas. You could say âwoe to the dayâ or âpity the dayâ or âalas for the day,â but you could also say â like Julietâs nurse in Shakespeareâs Romeo and Juliet â âAlack the day!â Or, if youâre not lamenting a specific day, you can say, like many people in literature and life since, âAlack a day!â
Or even just lack-a-day. Or, perhaps to match phrases such as ups-a-daisy, you can say lack-a-daisy, like a character named Betty in Tobias Smollettâs 1748 novel Roderick Random:
With these words she advanced to the bed, in which he lay, and, finding the sheets cold, exclaimed, âGood lackadaisy! The rogue is fled.â
And from all of that came the somewhat whimsical adjective lackadaisical, first seen spelled lack-a-day-sical by Laurence Sterne in his 1768 Sentimental Journey:
Would to heaven! my dear Eugenius, thou hadst passed by, and beheld me sitting in my black coat, and in my lack-a-day-sical manner, counting the throbs of it, one by one, with as much true devotion as if I had been watching the critical ebb or flow of her fever.
Now, lackadaisical doesnât express a whimsical mood, or at least itâs not supposed to refer to one. And yet thereâs something more whimsical, quizzical, even nonsensical, and perhaps musical, than physical or dropsical about it. Or just⌠slack, lax, and lazy, but with more syllables. Maybe even happy-go-lucky. It sounds like a string burbled by a chickadee looking on a daisy.
And so we see it used often to mean more âcarelessâ than âdespondentâ, more Pooh than Eeyore. Here are some quotes from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, with publication sources cited (they donât give the article and author):
So, the theory goes, pollinators that drink spiked nectar get lackadaisical about grooming and careen around in a disheveled state delivering unusually large amounts of pollen.
âScience News
The spelling is slightly different, but people were lackadaisical about such things in those days.
âAnalog
âItâs easy to get lackadaisical about these things, especially flying domestically. And we shouldn’t, ever.â
âUSA Today
To begin with, he was surprisingly lackadaisical about politics for someone who wants to reshape it.
âNational Review
The Oxford English Dictionary defines lackadaisical as âResembling one who is given to crying âLackaday!â; full of vapid feeling or sentiment; affectedly languishing.â That seems a bit strong for the above, doesnât it? Merriam-Webster (m-w.com) gives âlacking life, spirit, or zest : languid.â But even that is a bit strong for most current instances. âUnmotivatedâ or âunconcernedâ would be more to the point.
Itâs as though English speakers just havenât had the⌠whatsits⌠to maintain the original strength of meaning for this word. Not so much that theyâre filled with woe and utterly demotivated, or even that theyâre making a point of fecklessness, as that it justâŚÂ doesnât seem important to them to do so. The word has a more common and suitable use based on what it, you know, sounds like. Not much good old Lackaday! but lots of modern lackadaisical.