Five-Dollar Words At A Deep Discount

by Kevin Burton

   Some lamps that my mother has and loves, I don’t like. I think they’re ugly.

   For years my insult of choice was to call them “obtuse.”  But I was using that word incorrectly. 

  My good buddies at Merriam-Webster say obtuse means: “not pointed or acute” or “ of an angle exceeding 90 degrees but less than 180 degrees.”

   Mom never called me on this because I am usually good with words. I should have looked up obtuse.

   Just as when reaching for a note at the edge of one’s singing range, you risk a cringe-inducing moment if you miss, and use a word incorrectly. 

   Merriam-Webster has given a list of words it says people often have to look up to get the meaning correct. I present some of them below.

   If these words provide precision to a thought, fine.  To use these or any words simply to impress, doesn’t impress me. 

Nonplussed

   There’s so much going on with nonplussed. First of all, if non- means “not” (nontoxic) or “unimportant” (nonissues), what is being negated? What is the opposite of being plussed?

   It turns out that nonplus comes from the Latin words non plus, meaning “no more,” and originally referred to a point in reasoning or argument at which “one is unable to proceed or decide,” according to Noah Webster’s definition from 1828. It meant “a state of bafflement or perplexity,” a synonym of quandary. 

   Nonplussed, therefore, means “perplexed.”

   But there is a further point of confusion: since the mid-20th century, nonplussed has been increasingly used to mean “unimpressed” or “unsurprised,” and this use, though often considered an error, has made the confident deployment of this word a fraught issue for many.

Anodyne

   Sometimes words sort of seem to telegraph their meaning: pernicious sounds like a bad thing rather than a good thing, and beatific sounds like something to be desired as opposed to something to be avoided.

   Anodyne doesn’t give us many clues in that way. It turns out that anodyne is a good thing: it means “serving to alleviate pain” or “innocuous,” from the Greek word with similar meanings.

Supercilious

   Supercilious describes people who are arrogant and haughty or give off a superior attitude. It comes from the Latin word meaning “eyebrow,” and was used in Latin to refer to the expression of arrogant people, and this meaning was transferred to English.

Anathema

  Anathema means “something or someone that is strongly disliked” and was initially used to refer to a person who had been excommunicated from the Catholic church. It came from Greek through Latin into English with the meaning of “curse” or “thing devoted to evil,” but today refers to anything that is disapproved of or to be avoided.

   There is a strangeness about the way this word is used in a sentence. Because anathema is usually used without an or the, as in “raincoats are anathema to high fashion” or “those ideas are anathema in this class” it may seem just odd enough to send people to the dictionary when they encounter it.

Bemused

  Bemused is so close in sound to amused that they have blended together in usage, but they started as very different ideas. Bemused originally meant “confused” or “bewildered,” a meaning stemming from the idea of musing or thinking carefully about something, which may be required in order to assess what isn’t easy to understand.

   Many people insist that “confused” is still the only correct way to use bemused, but the joining of meanings with amused has resulted in the frequent use of this word to mean “showing wry or tolerant amusement,” a shade of meaning created from the combination.

Solipsistic

   Solipsistic is a fancy word that means “extremely egocentric” or “self-referential.” It comes from the Latin roots solus (“alone,” the root of sole) and ipse (“self”). As this Latinate fanciness implies, this is a word used in philosophical treatises and debates. The egocentrism of solipsism has to do with the knowledge of the self, or more particularly the theory in philosophy that your own existence is the only thing that is real or that can be known.

   Calling an idea or a person solipsistic can be an insult that identifies a very limited and usually self-serving perspective, or it can be a way to isolate one’s perspective in a useful way.

Perspicacious

   Being perspicacious means having an ability to notice and understand things that are difficult or not obvious, and it comes from the Latin verb meaning “to see through.”

   Perspicacious means “perceptive,” and is often used along with words that have positive connotations like witty, clever, wise, alert, and insightful.

Peripatetic

   Peripatetic means “going from place to place,” and comes from the Greek word that means “to walk.” You can say someone who moves frequently has a “peripatetic existence,” or someone who has changed careers several times has had a “peripatetic professional trajectory.”

   The root word “to walk” is usually more of a metaphor in the modern use of this word—it means frequent changes of place, yes, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are wearing out your shoes.

   The original use of this word did use “walking” as a more literal image, however: it was a description of the way that the philosopher Aristotle preferred to give lectures to his students while walking back and forth, and the word has subsequently taken on a more metaphorical meaning.