The word leisure has undergone a shift since the time Ramachandra Rao used it in this context. Today, in phrases like leisure activity or leisure suit, it implies recreation or play. But the word actually goes back to the Middle English leisour, meaning freedom or opportunity. And as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear, it’s freedom not from but “to do something specified or implied” [emphasis added]. Thus, E. T. Bell writes of a famous seventeenth-century French mathematician, Pierre de Fermat, that he found in the King’s service “plenty of leisure”—leisure, that is, for mathematics.
