My sister and I have a thing we call “smart words.” When in doubt or in a factual wasteland, we have a word to throw into the mix to raise our conversational IQ. Hers is “indubitably.” Mine is “egregious.” Egregious. I first heard it back in the glory days – SAT prep. I was 16, lithe, and precocious. I knew pretty much every word the unsightly teacher Adriana would yell out to the cafeteria full of zoned-out high schoolers during each week’s vocabulary review.
“DUBIOUS!” she would scream, stretching her lip-glossed pout into a shape not seen since “Alien.”
“Does anyone know what dubious means?”
While some half-baked kid from the boonies took a stab at it, I answered by sketching what Adriana would look like in 10 years after extensive plastic surgery. And so it went every week, until about halfway through when she introduced me to my love, my light, my egregious. I had heard the word before and attempted using it in the hope that I could place it so strategically that nearly any adjective of multiple syllables could work. But now, armed with its meaning (conspicuously or outrageously bad), I could think and talk smart!
The key to a smart word is not just knowing it, but understanding it. Adriana spewed out the meaning as quickly as she had caked on her foundation, but she didn’t tell us why it meant that. So I investigated. And what I found was more exciting than the new addition to my verbal arsenal. Rooting from the Latin “egregius,” the word for nearly a century was true to its etymological meaning – “distinguished, eminent, excellent.” Sometime near the end of the 16th century, the word took on an ironic twist and was more broadly applied as “exceptional,” either good or bad. Then later, it only meant horrendously bad. It was presumably used enough to warrant such a rapid change of meaning. Maybe it was the lack of modern plumbing or the plague, but I think it had more to do with fewer (meaning no) computers and more literature.
Back when relaxing diversions were spare, people turned to books and plays for entertaining escapes. Around the time when “egregious” was morphing, Shakespeare was writing and inventing thousands of new words by the day. When people read or heard them, they absorbed these captivating words and tossed them around casually. Skim a list of common Shakespearean insults, and you will get the idea.
Books today are not obsolete, but they face fierce competition with anything online. Blogs, Gchat, e-mails and the like are a way of life and their shorthand language has become our vernacular. Very rarely does a word like egregious get overused because people bid friends a brief adieu with a “brb” even in person and say “lol” instead of actually laughing. I do it, and it drives my friends crazy. Countless professors have expressed disgust at students who sign off with a “ttyl” in an e-mail. Can you imagine what they must think it means? Tough teacher you, lady. No? I’ll work on it.
I am not saying that we should greet friends with “salutations” or announce “I am chortling!” when we laugh because we would sound like tools, and it’s pretty ineffective.
But having a few smart words to throw into conversation – and actually knowing what they mean – is never a bad idea. It richens our vocabulary and will probably make the person you’re talking to want to learn their own smart word.
Terri Pous is a Medill junior. She can be reached at [email protected].
