What is sporadic?

What Does sporadic Mean

The Greek word sporadikós , which can be translated as "scattered" , came to medieval Latin as sporadicus . From there comes the adjective sporadic , which refers to what is fortuitous or eventual .

For example: "The famous writer had a step sporadic in this region, where in his youth he worked in a vintage" , "We had some complaints sporadic, but in general people are happy with our management" , "It was a sporadic affair, never we had a formal relationship ” .
The sporadic, in short, is something occasional . It is not closely linked to a past event, nor is it its consequence; it also does not continue to develop in the future .

An individual who only smokes a few cigarettes a month can be considered a sporadic smoker . Different is the case of heavy or frequent smoker , who already has this habit incorporated into his routine.
This is part of the so-called sporadic or occasional consumption , which these people carry out intermittently, allowing long intervals of time to pass between one intake and another. In general, this way of consuming tobacco and other similar products is closely linked to the search to be part of a group, although it can also arise from the need for relaxation or pleasure.
Sporadic use does not reach the level of an addiction , and this makes it more difficult to justify: the individual has the faculties to communicate with his environment without having to engage in this harmful activity, but his lack of self-confidence pushes him to take refuge in narcotic substances to disinhibit.
Suppose a novelist assumes the presidency of a writers' association for two months, as a temporary replacement for the incumbent president who suffers from an illness . When this man manages to recover, he takes up his position. The novelist who supplanted him was, in short, sporadic president of the institution, since he had never been one before and has no intention of being one again in the future.
An actor with a sporadic role in a soap opera, for his part, appears only in some chapters. He does not embody a character with a constant presence in the series, but he hardly has participation in a certain story within the main plot.
A person who always mobilized in his own car, finally, you can use the services of a taxi sporadically : only when your vehicle breaks down, something that is rare.

Among the synonyms that dictionaries provide us for the term sporadic , we can highlight the following, some of which have already been mentioned in the previous paragraphs: loose, eventual, fortuitous , occasional and isolated . It should be noted that it is also possible to replace the adverb corresponding to this word with the expression from time to time : "It is an activity that I do sporadically / from time to time . "
With regard to antonyms, we have simply the following two: regular and constant . Unlike what can happen with opposite words like open and close or movement and stillness , the contrast that takes place between sporadic and its antonyms is particular in that it is not about the two vertices, so to speak, of the use of energy, but from two less extreme points.
To understand this observation, we can imagine a line that at one end has the concept "never" and at the other, "always": neither "sporadic" nor "regular", to name just two of the previous examples, are found. at these points, because they do not reach the same degree of periodicity. The sporadic is superior to the fortuitous , which, in turn, surpasses the rare or unique ; for its part, the regular does not happen all the time , although it does have a higher degree than the sporadic.