From Daily Writing Tips:
Can you explain clearly the difference between urgency and exigency? Thank you. Also, any thoughts on the concept or process of “moonshoot”? Heard the term when President Biden was talking about cancer.
The nouns urgency and exigency are not synonyms, but they are related in thought.
Exigency
An exigency is an urgent need or unforeseen calamity. Anything, ranging from a wildfire to a car breakdown is an exigency: a situation that calls for immediate action to set things to rights.
Exigencies can be chronic. People living in poverty have daily exigencies relating to food and shelter. School districts must weigh the exigency of plant maintenance costs against hiring needs.
Here are some usage examples from the fraze.it site:
In determining exigency, the board should consider the degree of urgency involved.
This will have a posting if the event is delayed due to weather or other exigency.
Analysts note that the ideological volte-face is a matter of exigency, rather than conviction.
They were there, crammed in but alive, disciplined by exigency to subsist on tiny rations of tuna, biscuits and sips of milk.
Fort Bend ISD is one of several districts this year to declare financial exigency, a move that allows the elimination of jobs.
Urgency
Urgency—the perceived need for immediate action—is often in the eye of the beholder.
The urgency required following a disaster, like a flood, is apparent to everyone. Urgency to act to prevent disaster, on the other hand, is not necessarily felt by everyone.
From marketing experts to environmentalists, millions of words are expended daily in an effort to prompt people to feel a sense of urgency about one thing or another.
. . . .
The expression “to shoot for the moon” has been around at least since 1911, with the meaning, “to set one’s goals or ambitions very high; to try to attain or achieve something particularly difficult.”
Link to the rest at Daily Writing Tips
Friends used to say that the dirty little secret of homeschooling was how often the important had to give way to the urgent. I think exigent would have been the better word in this context.
Some good friends homeschooled all of their many children and I couldn’t imagine how the mother of the family could handle all the work, supervision, etc.
For that family, homeschooling worked out very well. To the best of my knowledge, every one of the children was admitted to a selective university and a couple are practicing medical doctors.