Now You Know

Back in January (18th – “Phil O’Logue…”) I blogged about pedant and polymath, and made note to myself that some day I should blog on the related words sapient and sagacious. I’ve finally gotten around to it.

Pedant and polymath both have to do with learning and knowledge. So do sapient and sagacious. But where pedant and polymath carry some sense of “a show of learning” (particularly pedant) sagacious and sapient do not.

I have used the adjective forms for comparison, but be aware that the sagacious is the adjective form of the word sagacity. Sagacious appears in about 1600, after about 60 years of the use of the word sagacity. The noun form of sapient, sapience, is recorded from as early as the 1300s, but has fallen into such disuse that it is only found as a final sentence in etymonline.com’s entry on sapient.

As with so many words of that time, sagacity came to English from the Middle French sagacité which came from the Latin sagacitatem (or the nominative sagacitas as my dictionary has it). Sagacitatem is the “quality of being acute” and the root word is sagax or sagacis, which refers to “quick perception”. The dictionary definition is “penetrating intelligence and sound judgment.”

An interesting side meaning came to be in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the word was also used to refer to an acute sense of smell in animals. So that prize bloodhound, hunting dog, or truffle-hunting pig was referred to as having sagacity (or being sagacious).

Sapient means full of knowledge, wise, discerning, and sagacious (my dictionary actually used the one word to define the other). This word came to English a little earlier than sagacity, and according to one source came through Old French (sapient) from Latin (my dictionary says it came to English from Middle English from Latin, but who really cares other than a pedant?) The Latin word is sapientem (nominative sapiens, which is the present participle of sapere). Sapere means “to taste, have taste, or be wise”.

I’m sure you’re wondering if this is the same Latin root from which we get homo sapiens. (Maybe you’re not, but I haven’t reached my word limit yet.) Here is the entry from etymonline.com’s explanation of homo sapiens:

[It first appeared in] 1802, in William Turton's translation of Linnæus, coined in Mod.L. [Modern Latin – I bet you didn’t know there was such a thing, did you?] from Latin. homo "man" (technically "male human," but in logical and scholastic writing "human being") + sapiens, present participle of sapere "be wise." Used since in various Latin or pseudo-Latin combinations intended to emphasize some aspect of humanity, cf. Henri Bergson's Homo faber "man the tool-maker," in "L'Evolution Créatrice" (1907). Homo as a genus of the order Primates is first recorded 1797.

So in current usage, what’s the difference (what’s the good word)? I have seen sagacity/sagacious used for an acute insight or knowledge, whereas sapient merely as awareness or a normal level of knowledge. On a spectrum I would put it as ignorant/dumb/knowledgeable/sapient/sagacious.