Keen Insight and Lucid Expression

If devils are said to lurk in details, then we’re right to expect some subtle troublemaking when we begin to look closely into vocabulary. I was reading a writer online not long ago who was recommending an important but now somewhat forgotten literary critic whose writing, he said, “was notable for its clarity and perspicacity.” That’s a very nice phrase, clarity and perspicacity, because it delicately discriminates between two distinct but ideally inseparable qualities: lucidity and discernment. But no sooner do we appreciate that finesse than those devils start howling their doubts: but didn’t he mean perspicuity?

The nouns perspicacity and perspicuity are often confused. They are two fine (though a bit pricey) words, and understanding the difference between them can make us more critical readers. The conceptual root of each is the same, the Latin verb specere, meaning to see; to that stem, the prefix per, meaning through or thoroughly (those two words are related as well), has then been added. The former noun, however, has apparently derived from the related Latin noun perspicax, meaning sharp-sighted; the latter from the participle of the related verb, perspicuus, which accounts for the differentiating vowel u in the second term.

All that basic linguistic information is readily at hand for any of us to find by consulting a good dictionary. What’s more important for us as readers and writers, though, is to understand the semantic difference between these two closely connected words. Both have to do with seeing clearly, but one points to an inner mental clarity and the other to its outer expression. The noun perspicacity and its adjective perspicacious have to do with acute discernment, keen judgment, insight. Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms says that those terms originally referred to physical eyesight, but are “now applied chiefly to mental sight, or insight, and suggest unusual power to see through and to understand that which is dark, hidden, mysterious”; it then gives as examples a perspicacious reader or perspicacious critic.

The noun perspicuity and its adjective perspicuous, on the other hand, refer to the quality of lucidity which may inhere in language, thought, or style and which is evident, even self-evident, to a reader or listener. Crabb’s English Synonymes, a long-respected (and imposing) work of close scholarship first published in the early nineteenth century (note the older spelling of synonymes), differentiates perspicuity from the more general term clearness by saying that “clearness of intellect is a natural gift; perspicuity is an acquired art; although intimately connected with each other, yet it is possible to have clearness without perspicuity, and perspicuity without clearness.” Crabb goes on to say that some may be clear in ideas but poor in their expression, or able to mellifluently express themselves but yet be unacquainted with the details of their topic. He then concludes his comparative discussion of the terms with this magisterial summation:

The study of the classics and mathematics is most fitted for the improvement of clearness; the study of grammar, and the observance of good models, will serve most effectually for the acquirement of perspicuity.

Indeed. But in the end, how are we to answer those doubtful devils? Did the writer mean perspicuity when he composed the phrase clarity and perspicacity? I think not, because perspicuity, or lucidity of expression, would have been then redundant of clarity, Crabb’s fine distinctions notwithstanding. The writer meant that here was an author both clear in expression and acute in discernment—an achievement which might just be able to harrow the hells of sophistry and deception.

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