Propinquity - A Close Look at a $10 Word

John McPhee employs some interesting terminology in his intriguingly titled book, The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. Speaking of Olcott, the test pilot tapped to fly, or at least attempt to fly, a prototype airship -- an "aerobody" as its zealous lead backer William Miller dubbed it -- McPhee wrote:

Why Miller hired him to test the 26 was in part the result of propinquity. Olcott's daylight work was at Aeronautical Research Associates of Princeton, Inc., in Princeton Junction, and a couple of rooms above a bank on Nassau Street in Princeton happened to be the home and only offices of Aeron Corporation.

Propinquity is an interesting word choice. You can make reasonably good assumptions about its meaning from the context if it acts as stumbling stone along your reading path. The term simply means "nearness."

According to the OED, the nearness indicated by the term may refer to spatial closeness, temporal closeness, blood relation or kinship, or similarity in nature, belief, or disposition. But all nearness, just the same.

So why propinquity, this $10 word? Why not proximity, an equally multisyllabic term with deep roots in good ol' Latin? Or, to be as direct as possible, why not simply nearness?

Perhaps in the early '70s when McPhee was penning Pumpkin Seed, propinquity was not quite so arcane a term. Perhaps for McPhee it is one of those preferred terms that many a writer cherishes, like a particularly fine tigereye marble, brought out on rare occasions. Or maybe it's just one of many terms that an accomplished wordsmith knows and uses to convey an idea without any particular intent to be fancy.

And convey McPhee certainly does. He is a magician with words, conjuring graphic images out of ink marks on plain paper. Take his description of an auto mechanic's tool:

Fitzpatrick got out a pair of gooseneck pliers that could have removed a tooth from the Statue of Liberty.

Or his description of the mechanic wielding those pliers:

Fitzpatrick was in his forties -- a short man, around five feet eight. His face was weather-lined, handsome, tough, and sad. There was a sense of grandeur in it, and a sense of ironic humor. His hair was dark and graying, and neatly combed. His body looked hard. He had a muscular, projecting chest. His stomach and abdomen were as flat as two pieces of sidewalk. He had the appearance of a small weight lifter, a German-shepherd owner, an old lifeguard. He was smoking the stub of a thin cigar.

The storyteller who writes in vivid pictures like this, who spins out page after compelling page on a topic as mundane as oranges, who can convince readers with zero interest in aerodynamics that perhaps the world gave up too soon on dirigibles, that storyteller is bound to control a vast vocabulary as myriad as the Pantone shades available to a graphic artist.

Propinquity, proximity, contiguity, vicinity, adjacency, nearness, closeness…