Well, I was looking for a word to describe the eventual loss of energy of a ripple in a pond, and "entropy" came to mind. upon further examination, Google's "define" function came back with this: which sort of fits, but not quite. At the same time, if you take into account the metaphor of people you could broadly (and poetically) interpret that definition into one describing the degradation of age. really, this is all afterthought. It was the word that came into my mind, and I used it because my insecure definition of it described what I wanted it to describe. C'est la vie. hopefully I'm not in trouble ;)a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.