perdency

Perdency is a neologism that has appeared in a small body of contemporary discussions about processes, decisions, and states that remain unresolved. There is no widely accepted definition, and the term is used in varying ways by different authors.

In decision theory and cognitive science, perdency is sometimes described as the tendency of a deliberative process to linger in an undecided state when competing options or hypotheses are equally plausible and information is incomplete. In systems design, project management, or information flow, perdency can refer to tasks, messages, or states that stay pending longer than expected, contributing to delays or bottlenecks. Some writers have also used perdency in speculative discussions about the persistence of mental representations before commitment, though such usage is informal and not standardized.

Etymology for perdency is not established in scholarly usage. It appears to be a blend of pendency or pending with a noun-forming suffix, produced in informal or exploratory writing rather than through formal linguistic derivation. As a result, its precise sense can vary by context.

Relation to existing terms is an area of overlap. Perdency shares ideas with pendency, indecision, latency, and persistence, but proponents argue that it aims to capture a distinct pattern: a state that is ongoing and unresolved across domains, rather than a binary pending/not-pending distinction.

Reception has been cautious. Critics note that without a clear, consistent definition, perdency risks ambiguity and confusion. Proponents who use it emphasize its utility as a shorthand for describing extended pending states in diverse systems. Examples of usage remain limited to a small number of online discussions and exploratory writings.