Did You Know?

When George Orwell's novel 1984 was published in the late 1940s, a displeased critic said it broke "all records for gloomy vaticination." (In Orwell's favor, another critic asserted, "It is impossible to put the book down.") While it's about as difficult to predict the future of a word as the future of the world, hindsight reveals that "vaticination" has endured better than other words based on Latin vates, meaning "prophet." "Vaticinian" (prophetic), "vaticinar" (prophet), "vaticinatress" (prophetess), and "vaticiny" (prophesy) have all faded into obscurity (although two synonyms of "prophetic," "vatic" and "vaticinal," also keep the "vates" lineage alive today).