And Another Thing | 10 January 2009

Are you sophisticated? Here’s how to find out

The word ‘sophisticated’, though commonly used, especially by persons who turn out on close investigation to be unsophisticated, is tricky, and truly sophisticated people avoid it altogether. Now, having got that off my chest, let us try to define it. One difficulty is that the root of the word can mean opposite things. Thus, a sophist can be either ‘a wise or learned man’ (OED), or ‘one who makes use of fallacious arguments’. Macaulay, in his History, ferociously calls Catholic theologians, especially casuists, ‘this odious school of sophists’. ‘Sophistry’ nearly always means ‘deceptiveness’. To sophisticate, used as a verb, is to mix commodities and render impure, to adulterate, deprive of simplicity, and make artificial. Hazlitt, himself a fascinating mixture of intellectual sophisticate, rare for his epoch, and downright naivity to the point of idiocy (falling hopelessly in love with a nasty servant-girl), sometimes used the word, verbally or adjectivally, as a term of abuse.