Trend Watch

Laconic

The black box recordings of the crashed Germanwings plane ...

When:

Lookups spiked on March 26, 2015.

Why:

Investigators who listened to the black box recordings of the Germanwings plane that crashed in the French Alps describe the co-pilot's conversation as "laconic" in the minutes before he locked the captain out of the cockpit.

Laconic means "using few words in speech or writing," or "concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious." It comes from the Greek word meaning "person from Laconia," the region in Ancient Greece whose capital was Sparta. Spartans were known as ferocious warriors, but also had a reputation for terseness that led to our modern meaning of laconic.


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