Elegiac describes a quiet, remembering kind of sadness — the feeling that someone has died, or that a time, a place, or a way of life is gone and will not come back. An elegiac poem, an elegiac film, an elegiac tone: not loud crying, more like looking back and missing what was there. It is a bookish, grown-up word for reviews, literature class, and serious newspapers, not the playground. Writers use it for more than funerals: a childhood summer, an old town, a shop that closed. Though actually, in a poetry class it can also mean “written in the old Greek and Latin verse form called elegiac couplets”, a technical sense you can ignore unless you study classics. It is not a fancy way to say elegant.