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vaguen

verb /ˈveɪɡən/

  1. To make (something) vague or more vague; to blur, to obscure.

    informal, transitive

    [Rosemary] Pountney sees the term ‘vaguen’ in the play’s second typescript as ‘explicit testimony to [Samuel] Beckett’s policy of “vaguening” the later drafts of his plays’ (1988: 149).

  2. To become (more) vague; to blur.

    informal, intransitive

    As both artists [Samuel Beckett and Joseph Mallord William Turner] developed, their imagery vaguened. The result is imagery hazened, a studied, a crafted indistinction. Beckett thus situates himself (and his art) in the midst of such a late-modernist or early postmodernist ethos, exploring the issues of perspective and so consciousness, of perception much celebrated but doomed to distortion and incompletion, for the remainder of his career.

Where it comes from

From vague + -en (suffix forming transitive verbs from adjectives, meaning ‘to make [adjective]’), coined by Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), apparently first in a manuscript note to himself on an initial typescript of his play Happy Days (1961).

Adapted from the Wiktionary entry vaguen (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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