PROCRASTINATE

[Dr. Goodword]

• procrastinate •

Pronunciation: prê-kræs-tê-nayt • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Verb, intransitive

Meaning: To postpone, to defer action, to put off doing something, to delay.

Notes: Procrastination must be common among English-speakers, for this Good Word has a large and healthy family. The action noun, as you can see, is procrastination, while the personal (agent) noun is procrastinator—that's someone who procrastinates. Procrastinators tend to be procrastinative or, as others say, procrastinatory. Both are good adjectives, no matter what your spellchecker says.

In Play: The motto of all procrastinators is, "Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow." I assume that none of our readers are procrastinators who will put off reading today's Good Word until tomorrow. Now, lest you think I am procrastinating, let me reel off an example of this very Good Word now: "I always procrastinate buying Christmas presents until the last minute and seldom have a wide selection to choose from."

Word History: Today's Good Word is another of the long line of English words shamelessly lifted from the Latin lexicon. It comes to us from procrastinatus "delayed until tomorrow", the past participle of procrastinare "to delay until tomorrow". This verb comprises the prefix pro- "forward" + crastinus "tomorrow's" + the verbal suffix. Crastinus is the adjective for cras "tomorrow", a word without a past, so far as we know. We do know it is unrelated to crassus "thick", whence came the English word crass.

[Stargzer]

I think I'll reply to this Goodword another time ...

[Dr. Goodword]

I think you got it wrong - our motto is "never put off till tomorrow what you can put off to the next day". I would ask the gurus at the Procrastinator's Society for verification, but I have not yet got around to joining. I believe they are doing good work, having recently got around to predicting the outbreak of World War II (which I understand they managed with 100% accuracy). Now if we had been in power at the time, simply subscribing to our other watchword "better never than late" would have completely averted that tragedy.

A surprising number of "gots" in that paragraph. Can't say I like it. But much worse is that American favorite, "gotten" which - dountless due to television - is steadily gaining ground here in SA. Can't imagine how such a word could've come into being, let alone gotten so prevalent (oops).

By the way, there is much to be said for putting off buying Christmas presents, and in fact my own experience is totally at odds with the statement "seldom have a wide selection to choose from". The thing to do is the buy from the after Christmas sales and stash them away for the next season. My wife does that, picking things up at sales throughout the year and stashing them in the "presents box", which we then mine as necessary for various occasions at a later time.

[engineer27]

our motto is "never put off till tomorrow what you can put off to the next day".

My motto is "Never put off till tomorrow what you can get out of doing altogether."

[Stargzer]

You're an engineer. You sound like Wally. Do you work for a pointy-haired boss? Are you Wally? Wally is my idol!

[skinem]

Just got my notice a day late from the Procrastinator's Society that it's next meeting has been postponed...glad I'd put off going.