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Saturday November 21, 2009

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sagacious [suh-GAY-shus]

adjective

1. Having or showing keen discernment and sound judgment; wise; farsighted.

• "For six years, we also had a special link - direct access through a door that linked our two offices. Not once did we disagree on her selection of pieces for Commentary. Invariably ahead of the news, Mary Lou was prescient, intuitive, sagacious and indefatigable. She was also a good and dear friend."
  Donald Lambro, "Pulitzer-winning journalist Mary Lou Forbes dies at 83; Editor of Times' Commentary pages", Washington Times, Jun 29, 2009
• Sagacious advice aside, I'm cynically hard-wired to see this book as nothing more than a crass money-maker hastily launched to capitalize on the attention garnered by Wallace's sudden and shocking death. That Little, Brown recently announced that it will also publish Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King , in the spring of 2010 galvanizes my cynicism.
  Tim Jacobs, "Wisdom v. opportunism", The Globe and Mail, Apr 18, 2009
• From her very infancy she doubted, for example, the widely accepted theory that the moon was composed of green cheese; and this heresy was the first intima­tion her parents had of the sceptical turn of her mind. Of course her parents were vastly annoyed, for their maturer natures saw that this youthful scepti­cism portended serious, if not fatal, conse­quences. Yet all in vain did the sagacious couple reason and plead with their headstrong and heretical child.
  Eugene Field (1850 - 1895) An American writer. The Mouse and The Moonbeam (1919)

Origin of the Word

Sagacious, approximately 1607, derives from Latin sagax, "of quick perception."