Word of the day: sophisticated
“Sophisticated” means refined, cultured, and even complicated. A “sophisticate” is a person who embodies those qualities. But all this is only recently, in etymological terms. “Sophisticate” meaning a person dates only from the 1920s, and even “sophisticated” was used in our modern sense — and applied to people — starting in about 1895. Using “sophisticated” to mean something complicated is even more recent; it was first used in 1945 (by C.S.Lewis in “That Hideous Strength“).
The word itself, though, is much older. And that means that “sophisticated” used to mean something else. Several other things, in fact. In the 1600s “sophisticated” meant a substance mixed with something else. A 1607 play by Thomas Dekker used it that way:
“The drinks even in that golden cup, they swears
Is wine sophisticated, that does runne
Low on the lees of error.”
In the olden days “sophisticated” was also applied to literary works, and meant that the work had been altered during copying (by monks on parchment, that is) or printing.
Before “sophisticated” showed up as an adjective, and far before “sophisticate” was used as a noun, “sophisticate” was a verb meaning “to mix with a foreign substance. This sense goes back at least as far as the 1400s. It was used in a work called “The Book of John Mandeville“:
“It fallez out tyme bat marchands sophisticatez pepper.”
(It often happens that merchants sophisticate pepper.)
The word comes from Medieval Latin (sophisticare), and that came from Greek (sophistes), where it meant, of all things, someone who accepts payment for instruction. You might have heard of the “sophists,” thanks to Aristotle, who thought they were the lowest of the low. Really they were teachers, and “sophist” comes from the idea that they were paid to be tutors. Some of them were probably the kind of teachers you might have found in Trump University, and there was linguistic fallout from that too; the Latin word “sophisma” means a false conclusion or a fallacy, which some of those scam-artist teachers apparently became very well known for. That’s probably the sense that carried over into English when “sophisticated” meant mixing in some sand or grit into the pepper you’re selling.
The “mixing in other stuff” led to the later meanings of “sophisticated,” too. The more substances you mix together, the more complicated the end product is. It also becomes altered from the way it originally was. The same thing happens to a manuscript if you make a mistake copying or printing it. And if you hang around with different kinds of people, you might acquire different ideas, facts, and opinions, making you more complicated and less like you were before. In other words, “sophisticated.”
