Morris Cohen & Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method
(1934), p. 381, chapter “Sophistical Refutations”:
The word “sophist”, which
originally denoted a wise or learned man (like the word “savant”) has, through
historical accidents, come to mean one who argues to make the worse seem the
better cause.
Savant itself has
survived intact in its original French, in the sense of ‘scientist’; but in English has suffered a sad
fate, becoming a synonym of idiot-savant. The latter is a precise term, and very
useful, though a bit long; yet the
promotion of its second member to synonomy -- and with it, the destruction of a
fine old word -- is probably due more to Politial Correctness, since nowadays
one is not permitted to apply the term idiot
to those who (in the traditional medical usage) are in fact idiots, but only to
fools.
pejoration. We have seen how the pejoration of savant came about -- a trajectory
peculiar to this term. But what of
sophist, and its (commoner and)
equally pejorative derivatum, sophistry? (Btw -- pronounce these as SOH-fist,
vs. SAH-fis-tree.)
Our authors dismiss the causes as “historical
accidents”; but while that term
might reasonably apply to the special fate (in English only) of savant, in the case of sophist, there is rather more regularity
at work.
Compare the semantic trajectories of casuistry, dogma, and pedant, which originally were positive
words.
Two explanations immediately suggest themselves, which,
though polarly opposed, may yet both be in play:
(a) Intellectuals (boo) tend to be given to hand-waving
flim-flam.
(b) Intellectuals (yay) are insufficiently appreciated by the
peasantry.
But there is yet a third, more sinuous path to semantic
devolution, well illustrated by the term cretin.
The term has latterly fallen out of use; whether from the taboo that
successively struck its near-synonyms idiot
and imbecile, I know not. But its origin is
extraordinary: the word is an
etymological doublet of Christian.
So meteoric a decline(**) cannot be explained by parallels
to (a) and (b), in particular since it took place entirely within Christian communities:
we’re not talking about some City College intellectuals deploring the
nescience of the Bronx. And
the pejoration proceeded, by what only intitially appears a paradox, by its
seeming opposite: euphemism. This original use of Christian was not to defame the village idiot, but to express
compassion.
The sinking of well-intended euphemisms to sneer-terms is inevitable, so long as popular
attitudes to the referents remain unchanged. Every so often the Speech Police come along and tell us not
to use this word or that, but this neologism instead. For a while the civic-minded comply, while the playgrounds
simply scoff: “That’s -- so -- gay …”
(**) For some reason, people usually speak rather of meteoric rise. Now, rocket-like rise
would make sense; but meteors have
no internal engines, and they obey the law of gravity. They …. fall, folks ….
~
Interesting as well, and quite different, is the disparate
evolution of the derived adjectives, sophistical
and sophisticated. The former word is now rare, but, to
the extent that it is used, is pejorative; how closely it is any longer tied in speakers’ minds with
the common term sophistry, is
unclear. Sophisticated, by contrast, is
a word of common currency, and quite unsplattered by the derogatory
implications of sophist and its other
derivata. This, despite the fact that, by its very
meaning, it seems ripe for the sort of social decline that struck genteel and (in some contexts) refined, instead, it retains the
admiring overtones still found in
German raffiniert.
For other cases where bland word-endings pack a semantic whallop, check out these essays:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/morphology
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