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 Political 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.