And Another Thing | 10 January 2009

Are you sophisticated? Here’s how to find out

The word ‘sophisticated’, though commonly used, especially by persons who turn out on close investigation to be unsophisticated, is tricky, and truly sophisticated people avoid it altogether. Now, having got that off my chest, let us try to define it. One difficulty is that the root of the word can mean opposite things. Thus, a sophist can be either ‘a wise or learned man’ (OED), or ‘one who makes use of fallacious arguments’. Macaulay, in his History, ferociously calls Catholic theologians, especially casuists, ‘this odious school of sophists’. ‘Sophistry’ nearly always means ‘deceptiveness’. To sophisticate, used as a verb, is to mix commodities and render impure, to adulterate, deprive of simplicity, and make artificial. Hazlitt, himself a fascinating mixture of intellectual sophisticate, rare for his epoch, and downright naivity to the point of idiocy (falling hopelessly in love with a nasty servant-girl), sometimes used the word, verbally or adjectivally, as a term of abuse. The hint of criticism lasted throughout the 19th century — thus in the 1880s it was noted that plain names for girls, like Sarah or Mary, were being ‘sophisticated’ into Celestine or Mariette.

The use of ‘sophisticated’ in its modern sense occurred only in the third decade of the 20th century, though the OED cites Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as an early authority. When used with approval, envy and admiration, it is essentially a 1920s word, cropping up in the early Aldous Huxley of Crome Yellow and Antic Hay, and applied to young women as well as men. Huxley’s Mrs Viveash was sophisticated and so was Nancy Cunard, on whom she was based. It quickly moved into the cultural field, puzzling pundits and know-alls unable to decide whether Sons and Lovers, let alone Lady Chatterley’s Lover, were sophisticated or not or even faux-naif, thus forcing them into dishonest compromises or having it both ways.