📚 توضیحات تکمیلی واژه
0316 Erudite - Part 2
Erudite comes from the Latin
erudire,
to instruct, educate, polish, free from roughness or rudeness.
The corresponding noun is
erudition, extensive knowledge acquired from reading books:
“He displayed his
erudition with wit and grace.”
People and things can both be
erudite. For example,
erudite professors often write
erudite studies of obscure subjects.
Reading Verbal Advantage will help you build an
erudite vocabulary, which in turn will help you become a more
erudite person, someone who possesses a wide store of knowledge.
I should point out that my pronunciation of
erudite and
erudition is slightly different from most educated speakers. Today most people pronounce these words with a long u:
AIR-yoo-DYT and
AIR-yoo-DISH -un .
The interesting thing is that the speakers who prefer these long-u pronunciations rarely take pains to preserve the traditional long-u sound in duty, assume, student, opportunity, or prelude (properly PREL-yood, not PRAY-lood).
Yet they have trained themselves to say AIR -yoo-DYT and AIR-yoo-DISH-un presumably because the cultivated sound of the long u complements the meaning of these words.
The long-u pronunciations of erudite and erudition are not incorrect. In fact, they have been acceptable for several decades and all current dictionaries list them. However, to my hypercritical ear they smack of pseudosophistication, or sham erudition, because they ignore the etymologically significant rude dwelling within these words and illogically transform a short Latin u into a long English u.
And so I remain faithful to the older, though now less popular, pronunciations ER-uh-DYT and ER-uh- DISH-un. (For more on the pronunciation of
erudite, see my Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations.)
@erudite_english
