Next prison term you find the urge to make your spar partner cognisant of his lack of knowledge , buffer the blow with one of these onetime - timey terms for ignorance .
1. Lack-Latin
This is one of many words that began with a literal signification that shifted to the figurative . If a mortal was alack - latin — or , to apply the full insult , Sir John Lack - Latin — Latin was Greek to them . Back in the 1500s , that meant they were a bit of a dum - dum , so this word became a equivalent word for lackwit , numbskull , and doofus .
2. Benighted
Anyone roaming around after dark isbenightedin the literal sense , which has been around since at least the 1500s . By the following century , the meaning had broadened , as import incline to do . The figural definition , good manners of the Oxford English Dictionary , say someone who is benighted is “ involve in cerebral or moral darkness . ” This use by the poet John Milton from 1637 is ominous : “ He that hides a darke soule , and foule thoughts Benighted walks under the mid - day Sun . ” An example from 1865 in thePall Mall Gazetteis more ignorance - centric : “ Respectable old Russell Whigs , on whom charges of moral corruption operate much more potently than charge of intellectual benightedness . ”
3. Unirradiated
utter of lite - out terms for ignorance , here ’s onesimilar tounenlightened , dim , andin the dark . Animals , who do n’t follow human political science or sports with much enthusiasm , are thought of as ignorant in this sense , as seen in an OED example from 1914 : “ An fauna biography , a life unirradiated by hope or aspiration or opinion or by the striving for smasher . ”
4. Bookless
Since the 1500s , this sad , sad word has been literal , meaning a place or person with no books . In our current electronic wonderland , literal booklessness has multiply . But since the 1700s , booklesshas also meantignorant of books or not well - read .
5. Loreless
This similar ( and rare ) worddescribes someone who is utterly miss in lore — or , more specifically , knowledge , fact , datum , info , etc . Lorelesswas spotted now and then in the 1300s and rarely since . It turned up in 1836 inTait ’s Edinburgh Magazine , in a description of “ The poesy of his loreless someone . ”
6. Flatty
Not all ignorance is regretful . Sometimes calling out a person for their want of knowledge is complimentary , depending on who ’s doing the career : For instance , aflattyis unwitting of the ways and means of criminality , especially being a stealer . The condition is patently related toflatfoot , a Book for a police officer;Green ’s Dictionary of Slangrecords a reading offlattyreferring to a clueless pig .
7. Incognoscent
This variation ofincognizantis rare but wonderful . It appeared in G.H. Taylor’sThe Excursion of a Village Curatein 1827 , in a sentence that does n’t exactly show respect to an senior : “ I pardon you , my choleric incognoscent octogenarian . ”
8. Mumpsimus
Most words have origins that are vague at sound , but notmumpsimus . According to the OED , this watchword came to be “ apparently in allusion to the tarradiddle ( 1516 in Erasmus ) of an illiterate English priest , who when corrected for reading ‘ quod oremumpsimus ’ in the Mass , reply , ‘ I will not change my old mumpsimus for your young sumpsimus . ’ ” So someone who is a mumpsimus is n’t just ignorant ; they ’re obstinately nescient .
9. Ultracrepidarian
Ultracrepidariantypes can be very smart and quite knowledgeable about something — but they have a bad wont ofblabbing about matters outside their area of expertness . As philologue Fitzedward Hall put it in an 1872 object lesson , “ His supposal of judicial assessorship , as a critic of English , is , therefore , to borrow a word from Hazlitt , whole ultra - crepidarian . ” In other Book , he does n’t know what he ’s talk about .
A interpretation of this story ran in 2017 ; it has been updated for 2022 .
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