Impetuous

adjective

Acting or deciding upon something with little to no forethought
Aggressive or instantaneous in nature

Usage

As much as we might try to give careful thought to every decision we are confronted with, the modern world presents us with too many to give each the attention they deserve. If you’ve ever quickly scrolled to the bottom of the Terms and Conditions for your new gadget in spite of the tiny voice in your head that encourages you to try and read it, you probably know the feeling. While there’s no way to avoid shortchanging some decisions for others, if you try not to make impetuous choices where you could stand to think it over for a few minutes, you’ll probably be okay.

Impetuous is an adjective which describes a person or a thing, usually an action or idea, as arriving at an outcome impulsively or without much critical thought. Characterizing people as impetuous would mean that, whether as a pervasive character trait or just their present mood, they make their decisions spontaneously and haphazardly. Accordingly, an impetuous choice would be one that was not fully thought out. For example, your impetuous father, frantically trying to catch his favorite show later that night, might immediately buy the biggest, newest TV he saw, and one could distinguish this as an impetuous purchase.

Though it principally denotes haste or minimal consideration in a decision, impetuous also implies that this rashness stems from impatience, foolhardiness, or even ire. For one’s conclusions to be impetuous suggests that they would not be so if the individual considering them were in a more cautious, contemplative, and calm state of mind, or if external factors like time constraints did not influence the situation. An otherwise rational individual, for instance, might impetuously order a meal that accidentally breaks their diet if they were given a shortened lunch break unannounced.

A less common but still accepted usage of impetuous indicates when an action is physically quick and forceful. For example, you could say that a nail gun is a more impetuous way of driving a nail into a timber, as it is literally faster and more pressurized, than doing so with a hammer by hand. Literally or figuratively, an impetuous deed makes its effect immediately and potently felt!

Example: His impetuous choice to order the first thing he saw on the menu stemmed from sheer hunger.

Example: She made such an impetuous knock on the door that it shook the whole apartment.

Origin

The word impetuous ultimately derives from the Latin verb impretere, which means “to assault” and is comprised of the prefix in- for “toward” and pretere for “to charge forward.” Impretere gave rise to the Latin impetus, which literally means an “assault” or “attack,” and which was also appropriated directly into English in its own right to mean “a thing which initiates or propels.” This transitioned into the Late Latin word impetuosus, meaning “forceful” or “rash,” and, from there, was adapted into the Old French impetueux, meaning “aggressive” or “strong,” sometime in the 13^th century. It finally appeared in Middle English in the late 1300s to mean “irritable” or “short-tempered,” gaining its sense as “impulsive” before the end of the following century.

Derivative Words

Impetuously: This adverb form of impetuous indicates when an action is done in an impulsive or aggressive manner.

Example: As she saw her bus pull up across the street, she impetuously leaped into the street to catch it.

Example: Eager to assemble the skeletal structure of the new house, the builder impetuously hammered in the nails at each corner.

Impetuousness: Impetuousness is a noun which signifies the nature or the instance of acting rashly.

Example: His impetuousness in always insisting on finding a shortcut home often got him lost.

Impetuosity: In addition to denoting the nature of spontaneous decision-making, this additional noun form also describes the quality of irritability or anger.

Example: Her proclivity to make snide remarks was only one manifestation of her impetuosity.

Example: He had such impetuosity that he could not stand to wait in line for coffee for more than five minutes.

Similar Words

Impetus: The English word impetus, which is taken directly from a common ancestor of impetuous in the Latin word impetus, refers to a thing which initiates or encourages some action or result. Something can be considered an impetus if it can be picked out as a major or notable cause in some development taking place. More generally, impetus can be used to mean a power or force that causes literal movement.

Example: The sale on sushi was all the impetus he needed to pick some up to eat for dinner.

Example: As staggeringly far away as the sun is, its immense gravitational pull is the impetus for the orbit of all the planets around it.

In Literature

From Richard Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think?:

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are.

In this reflective passage, Feynman cautions us, as a human race, to make decisions and discoveries with an eye to the future. He does so by reminding us that we, as a species, have not been civilized (or even in existence at all) for very long and, thus, are susceptible to the kind of recklessly rash, or impetuous, actions that have the potential to set back human progress where it otherwise may have made great strides.

Mnemonic

Impetuous people leave rational deciders incredulous.
It’s almost impossible to make a good impetuous decision!