Why “perdendosi” is a great word
A musical direction indicating that the sound should gradually fade away, diminishing in volume and often tempo until it disappears. From the Italian perdendosi, the gerund of perdersi ("to lose oneself, to vanish"), from Latin perdere ("to lose, destroy"). Unlike morendo, which connotes a dying away with the finality of a last breath, or decrescendo, which denotes a controlled decrease in loudness alone, perdendosi implies a more comprehensive vanishing, a dissolution of the musical self. It is the last, faint echo dying in a cathedral vault, the trail of smoke dispersing into grey air, the slow unwinding of a thread until it simply ceases to be—the self-effacing surrender of sound to the space that receives it, leaving behind not absence but the memory of something that chose to become unfindable.