Prurience is too much interest in sex — especially in other people’s private lives, or in bedroom gossip — named in a way that shows you do not like it. A newspaper that fills a page with those details while clicking its tongue is showing prurience. So is a stare that lasts too long. It is a noun, and a bookish one: you meet it in reviews, in serious papers, in essays, almost never at the dinner table. Ordinary wanting is just desire. Prurience is the greedy, peeking kind. It is the noun that sits beside the adjective prurient. Though actually, prude and prurience sit near each other in the dictionary and pull opposite ways. A prude is too shocked by sex; prurience is too hungry for it. English uses both as complaints. Neither is a compliment, and they are not the same family.