Let’s play a game. Call out when we get to a word whose origin isn’t immediately obvious. Ready? Junior. Senior. Freshman. Sophomore. Huh?
In school, the place where you are most expected to know the how and why of everything, it’s funny that second-year students are called by a term whose roots are abstruse. Then there is the problem of “sophomoric.” We apologize in advance, but this is the actual definition: “suggestive of or resembling the traditional sophomore; intellectually pretentious, overconfident, conceited, etc., but immature.”
Sophomore derives from an earlier English term, sophumer, which is a variation of the Greek sophism, “clever device.” A sophist is literally “one who is wise,” (sophia is Greek for wisdom), but the term became derogatory in Greek culture, because it seemed a little unwise (or simply arrogant) to proclaim about one’s own wisdom. Teachers with a tad more humility came to be known as philosophers, literally “lovers of wisdom.”
At Cambridge University, the fourth oldest university in the world, second- and third-year students were called sophisters. Presumably their arguments weren’t expected to be as lucid as those of upperclassmen. First year students were “freshmen,” fresh to the field of philosophical debate, and thus free from the grueling discipline of oral argument.
Sophomoric, then, unfortunately reflects the roots of the term. Perhaps the best part of being a sophomore is that it doesn’t last forever.
August 28, 2010 ; dictionary.com
