Word Herd: A Polyglot Approach to Expanding Your Vocabulary
Word Herd: A Polyglot Approach to Expanding Your Vocabulary
I hope it does not strike you as supercilious
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Recently, while reviewing the welcome statement that I often pin at the top of the articles I post in Extra Muros, I was struck by the thought that, while I liked the sound the word ‘supercilious’, and was pretty sure that the word was less than complimentary, I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant.
So, word nerd that I am, I went straight to Google Translate to search for the counterparts of ‘supercilious’ in some of my favorite foreign languages. While this resulted in considerable enlightenment, I soon grew tired of all of the typing, cutting, and pasting. So, I asked Chat GPT for a little bit of help.
Thus was born the following table.
The first thing that I noticed was the frequency with which ‘arrogant’ appeared in the table. The second was the close connection between most of the other translations and the word fragments associated with altitude and being on top: alt, haut, hoch, hög, hoog, hov, över, sober, and, of course, super.
The one outlier on this list was the French word dédaigneux. To make sense of that adjective, I used the old ‘é marks a spot where es used to live' trick. This yielded desdaigneux, which, I surmised, had something to do with ‘disdain.’
This little exercise taught me of two things. First, the odds are very good that any given word one encounters has taken up residence in more than one language. Second, I must remember to refrain from telling people from Catalunya and the Langue d’Oc region of France that they are superb.
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That's not just cilious, that's super-dooper-cilious.