lacuna.
“Lacuna” is a formal word for “gap” — e.g.:
o “‘London Bridge’ . . . isn’t likely to answer the question, since it simply fills a literary lacuna.” Book Rev., “Celine Away,” Village Voice, 11 July 1995, at 12.
o “Female gymnasts inhabit a very strange and specific lacuna between girl and woman.” Jonathan Van Meter, “Shannon! Jaycie! Dominique! And Again!” N.Y. Times, 20 Oct. 1996, § 6, at 58.
The word has two plurals, “lacunas” and “lacunae.” Although “lacunas” might be thought preferable as the native-English plural, “lacunae” appears to be well established as a foreign plural: it’s more than 12 times as common in print.
For information about the Language-Change Index click here.
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Quotation of the Day: “Style has many components. The difficulty of mastering style is that they are devoid of absolute existence. Rhythm, melody, vocabulary, and composition do not live independent lives of their own; they are interconnected like chess pieces. Just as it is impossible to move a pawn without changing the position of all the other pieces on the board, so it is impossible to ‘correct’ in a literary work the rhythm alone or the vocabulary alone without affecting the other components of style. When I cross out a word, I change the structure of the sentence, its music, its rhythm, its relationship with its environment.” Konstantin Fedin, “Notebook,” in Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexei Tolstoy, and Konstantin Fedin on the Art and Craft of Writing 256, 257 (Alex Miller trans., 1972).
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