Dora_Busted

Word of the day: Nescience [ nesh-uhns, nesh-ee-uhns, nes-ee- ] noun lack of knowledge; ignorance. Nescience, “lack of knowledge, ignorance,” comes straight from Late Latin nescientia, a noun formed from nescient-, the stem of nesciēns, the present participle of nescīre “to be ignorant, not to know,” and the Latin (and Greek) noun suffix –ia. In Latin (and other archaic Indo-European languages, with the exception of Greek), ne– was the original negative for sentences: thus the pair sciō “I know,” and nesciō “I don’t know.” The usual sentence negative in Classical Latin is nōn, probably from earlier noenum “not one (thing),” itself a strengthening of ne with oenum (Classical Latin ūnum). Something similar happened in English, the adverb not being a reduced form of nought (also naught), a compound of the negative adverb ne and the noun wiht “thing, wight.” Nescience entered English in the first half of the 17th century. Ex: “The unexpected vantage point can help induce a beneficial nescience that disarms us of existing tools and systems of thinking.” David Gray, "Wanted: Chief Ignorance Officer," Harvard Business Review, November 2003