Today’s Words That Work: Celerity

Celerity (suh-LER-ih-tee) — from the Latin — is swiftness.

Example (as used by Miranda Seymour in a New York Times review of The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson): “With a celerity that today seems almost indecent, the consoling words delivered in 1910 by Canon Henry Scott Holland at the funeral of Edward VII were adapted to fit the mood of a country that couldn’t come to terms with the enormity of its loss [the death of three-quarters of a million British servicemen during World War I].”