I saw this and felt an odd sense of recognition. The word looked familiar to me, but I wouldn’t have been able to define it. And the definition certainly stood out. One of my recurring themes is our bad-faith attempts to escape the burden of our own agency, and here we have a one-word encapsulation of the problem: people who “want” to read books, but spend hours scrolling social media instead. Maybe Augustine was the first to recognize it before it had a name: Lord, grant me scrolling chastity, but not yet.
I looked through some of my dictionaries and found velleity in one that I know I read in its entirety, so that may account for my superficial recognition of it. It seems likely that I could have also encountered it elsewhere, but intuited the meaning via the context of the surrounding paragraph, and thus never looked it up. I’m familiar with the experience of only knowing a word through writing, not speech, and thus not knowing how it’s pronounced, but this is an experience of knowing a word by sight, not substance. It may have been in my receptive vocabulary, not my active one.
Psychology has a term, “familiar strangers,” for the people we know through proximity without necessarily knowing them personally. Some words may be like that. I’ve seen them in passing, but we’ve never been officially introduced. I’ve seen velleity in the marketplace, but I didn’t know what it did for a living. Now, I think, we’re going to be bosom-buddies.