Now You Know

As I said on Wednesday, it isn’t often that television uses words that are hard to understand. Any hard to understand or deep subject is abstruse. Or, to make sure you understand, abstruse means hard to understand, deep. (Deep is the word my dictionary used. It hardly seems abstruse enough for the definition of abstruse.)


Abstruse appeared in English in the 1590s, either from the Middle French word abstrus, which had come to Middle French in the 16th century, or perhaps directly from the Latin abstrusus, which is the past participle of abstrudere, which means conceal. It literally means “to push away”, because “ab-“ means away and “trudere” means to push or thrust.

Esoteric, for those in the know (the cognoscenti), is an adjective meaning “intended for or understood by only a chosen few, as an inner group of disciples or initiates.” It is used ideas, doctrines, literature, and other similar items. Those ideas, doctrines, literature, etc. are known as esoterica.

Having come to English in the 1650s from the Greek word esoterikos, which means “belonging to an inner circle”, it was originally associated with the mystic Pythagorean philosophic doctrines that started to develop about 500 B.C. However, etymonline.com says “according to Lucian, the division of teachings into exoteric and esoteric originated with Aristotle.” Esoterikos is formed from esotero, which means “more within” (the comparative adverb of eso, which means “within”) and is related to eis, which means “into” and en, which means “in”.

The plural noun esoterica (a Greek or Latin scholar will need to provide the singular form) appeared by 1807 as a Modern Latin form of the Greek word.

The word exoteric is an adjective referring to things external, like “the outside world”. It also is the opposite of esoteric in its application to ideas, etc. “not limited to a select few or an inner group”. It is something suitable for even the uninitiated, or that can be understood by the public or hoi polloi. It is formed by the changing of the prefix from inner (eso-) to outer (exo-). Which makes one wonder why we don’t have words like esoumbilical and exoumbilical, words I have just made up (see blog of 10/24).

A cognoscente, as used above, is a person with special knowledge in some field, especially one of the fine arts. The plural is cognoscenti. It has a sense of inside knowledge that the word expert doesn’t have. Cognoscente (pronounced koe-nyoe-shen-tay by the cognoscenti, the g being silent) is an Italian word adopted into English without spelling change in 1778. In Italian it means connoisseur, and came originally from the Latinized word conoscente, which literally means “knowing man”. It has the same root word, cognoscentum, as our words cognition, cognizant, and, believe it or not, connoisseur.

A connoisseur, by the way, is a person who has expert knowledge and keen discrimination in some field, especially in the fine arts or matters of taste. It came to English in 1714 from the French, who in Modern French spelled it connaiseur. In Old French it was spelled conoisseor, which was a form of their word for “to know”, conoistre. Conoistre came from the verb form of the Latin present participle cognoscentum, the verb form being cognoscere.

In the case of the initiated, all roads lead to Rome. Now you know, but don't tell anyone else.