desuetude

Alas, desuetude has fallen into desuetude!

Could you please convince them to let you write the dictionary, rolig?

Used often by Conrad.

n.b. great commentary rolig.

The dictionaries define this word as "a state of disuse or inactivity," but that does not capture the romantic nostalgia that saturates this word. The disuse is potent precisely because of a former, not-quite-forgotten usefulness, a past vitality. Desuetude is, as it were, an etude on the passing of time.

The exaggerated exultation of the Futurists and Vorticists about machine-age death and destruction can partly be traced to the glut of pallid degeneration narratives on which they would have been drip-fed: dead-city poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and Henri de Régnier and Gabriele D’Annunzio, wispy lyrical novels and countless atmospheric travelogues that revisited the same tropes and clichés of urban exhaustion and desuetude.
- Patrick McGuinness, "Bruges, Paris and the spectres of Symbolism," Times Literary Supplement, 20 Dec. 2006, online: http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25338-2512863,00.html