I have had trouble ever since high school finding words I didn’t know, like when we were s’posed to look up 2 or 3 new words we had read and didn’t know the meaning of, and write out their definitions. Then my roommate told me to read Thomas Wolfe. She was right, his oeuvre yielded a plethora of words I had not yet encountered! The first one I remember was “prognathous” which described Monk Webber’s protruding jaw.
So I get excited even today when I find a word I never encountered before! And it happened yesterday. Y’ready?
“Opsimath”.
….it means a person who takes up learning, the quest for knowledge, later in life. I read it in a review of the movie “Poor Things” starring Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe (which I highly recommend, it’s just so much damn fun! Although certain segments are frankly pornographic and too long). The heroine, Bella, who has an infant brain in a grown woman’s body ( I don’t think that’s a spoiler, pretty obvious from the beginning) becomes a voracious reader, she won’t stop for nuthin’—it reminds me of a trip we took where I was reading A.S.Byatt’s “Possession” and my BMD claimed the book had ruined his trip, because I was so absorbed in it. (GREAT book BTW!)
I reckon maybe I AM an opsimath, since I didn’t learn much in school and college, really, and began my decades long quest to know everything after formal schooling was over.
How could I use my new word in a sentence? I know! I could call my BMD an opsimath of beekeeping! He just took it up and is totally bee-sotted with it.
Welp—just a little bibelot of a meditation from a lexophile..hope you enjoyed it!
ST UnWoked & UnVaxxed! 
Don’t you hate trying to confirm the spelling of some word but can’t find it in your trusty dictionary?
Hypatia, by your OP I am reminded of the curse of the high IQ. I actually discussed that topic with one of my professors way back when I still cared.
We need to do a better job of developing and supporting our highly intelligent poor white boys. An entire nation, perhaps the whole world even, would be rewarded. Genius is a terrible thing to waste.
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Tru dat! Like the guy in Hillbilly Elegy, now a U.S. Senator!
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A big part of the problem is that I/He/We am/is/are the disposable sex.
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Perfect example. There are more.
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Meritocracy is good for a people.
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My ew laptop’s eyboad is havig issues!
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New words these days seem to come disproportionately from a Greek language origin.
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Why do you think that is?
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It was funny because a day or so before this OP I had looked up some word (I’ll try to remember and give it to you later.) and its root was from ancient Greece. I think because of my Latin, limited German, and Spanish; most new English words I can sort of figure out what they might mean. On the other hand, I only took one semester of ancient Greek so my ability to decipher words borrowed from that language are minimal.
Makes sense mai?
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Yes in fact, trying to figger out the roots of “opsimath”, I went off track because there is a goddess, Ops, apparently a Sabine goddess, the equivalent of Roman Rhea. She’s a goddess of fertility and plenty. So I thought the first syllable referred to her. But evidently not, “opsi” means “late” in Greek. Her name is probably the root in the words “opulent”, maybe “optimal”.
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Two new examples: Needed to look both up today and as expected they are borrowed from the Greek.
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