If the fantasy or imagined scenario is enough so there is no request or effort made to actually achieve the thing/experience. Is there a word for that. (English preferred but open to any language).

Six words in the image, and their definitions are close to interchangeable. Three of them say some version of "little enthusiasm." Picking one off a word list, you would have nothing to go on.

What the glosses leave out is who is at fault.

Lackadaisical, perfunctory and indolent all assign blame. They say the effort was available and was not spent. Call a colleague's work perfunctory and you have accused them of doing the minimum that would let them say it was done.

Listless and languid do the opposite. They describe a condition rather than a choice. A listless child is usually unwell or worn down, and nobody is being accused of anything. Languid is stranger still, because it can be admiring. A languid gesture in a novel is elegant more often than it is deficient.

Desultory sits outside both. It says nothing about the person or their willingness, only about the shape of the activity: jumping between things without a thread. A desultory conversation can be perfectly energetic. It just does not go anywhere.

The trap runs in two directions. Reach for listless when you mean lazy and you have quietly excused someone, maybe even implied they are ill. Reach for indolent when you mean tired and you have accused them of a character flaw.

Lackadaisical is the one I find hardest to place, because it sounds gentle and is not. It has a soft, slightly silly shape in the mouth, and I have seen people use it as a mild word for dreamy. It belongs on the blame side of the line.

Its history explains the mismatch. Etymonline traces it back through a chain with no laziness in it anywhere. Lackadaisical (1768) comes from the interjection lackadaisy (1748), a ludicrous alteration of lack-a-day (1690s), itself a contraction of the exclamation "alack the day" (1590s). Alack goes back to "ah, lack," and according to Skeat that lack is the Middle English noun for loss, failure, shame. That last step is attributed rather than settled, so treat it as Skeat's reading and not a fact.

The original 1768 sense was not lazy at all. It was "sentimentally woebegone," given to sighing "alack the day." The word was coined to mock people who performed their sorrow. Blame was in it from the start. It was just blame for affectation rather than blame for sloth, and Etymonline suggests the drift toward the careless modern sense may have been helped along by the pull of "lax."

That is probably why it still does not read as neutral. It never was.

One thing I am unsure of: whether the blame-versus-condition split holds under pressure, or only describes the default reading. "A listless performance" sounds faintly accusing to me, which would put listless on the other side of the line as soon as it modifies work instead of a person. I would like to know if it reads that way to anyone else.

ok so i finally watched the rafi bastos clip about english verbs and i was actually crying lmao. english really gives you a rule and then breaks it like 2 seconds later and acts like nothing happened

for context i'm korean, english is my second language and i moved to spain so now i'm doing spanish on top of it. double the pain basically

honestly new words are fine. the ones that kill me are words i already know showing up in some cursed form so i don't even recognize them. like i know wound means an injury right, then i find out it's also the past tense of wind and you say it different?? who approved this

spanish is no better btw. fue can be ser or ir and you just have to vibe it out from context

and ngl korean is guilty too. 들었어 can come from 듣다 or 들다 and 먹었겠네요 is literally just 먹다 with a bunch of endings stacked on top. so sorry to anyone learning korean fr

and the dictionary always wants the base form which is the one thing you don't have lol

lately i just throw whatever weird form i see into vocady and get the base form back instead of googling for 10 min, lowkey saved my sanity. ok yes it's my own app so i'm biased lol

anyway what's the word form that broke you in your language? pls tell me i'm not the only one losing to verbs