Flaccid

Flaccid (pronounced flas-id or flak-sid)

(1) Soft and limp; not firm; flabby.

(2) Lacking force; weak.

(3) Slang for individuals or institutions tending towards indolence, indecisiveness or bloat.

(4) In the fitness industry, lacking muscle tone.

1610–1620: From the Latin flaccidus (flabby) from flaccus (flap-eared) a construct of flacc(ēre) (to grow weak, to languish) + -idus (the suffix used to denote “tending to” (-idus (feminine); -ida, (neuter)).  English borrowed the word from the French flaccide.  The linguistic process(es) by which the meaning evolved from “flap-eared” is undocumented and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) suggests it was imitative.  Flacid & flaccider are adjectives, flaccidity & flaccidness are nouns and flaccidly is an adverb.

Flaccidity in Surrealist Art

La persistència de la memòria (The Persistence of Memory) is Salvador Dalí’s (1904-1989) most reproduced and best-known painting.   Completed in 1931 and first exhibited in 1932, since 1934 it’s hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).  In popular culture, the work is often referred to as the more evocative “melting clocks”.

Surrealism’s intellectual undercoating was patchy, some of the latter output being openly imitative but with Dalí, critics seemed often ready to find something.  His "theory of softness and hardness" has been called "central to his artistic thinking" at the time The Persistence of Memory was painted and some suggested the flaccidity of the watches is an allusion to Einstein's theory of special relativity, a surreal pondering of the implications of relativity on our once-fixed notions of time and space.  Dalí was earthier, claiming the clocks were inspired not by Einstein but by imagining a wheel of camembert cheese melting in the Catalan sun.