We think of sophisticated electronics as advanced and technically superior.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

We think of sophisticated people as benefiting from a wealth of experience.

So why is it that when sophisticated first appeared in English around the time of Shakespeare it meant “not pure” or “not genuine.” Worse, 200 years before that the word sophistication had meant “actively misleading.”

Obviously the meaning has changed a bit.

The root of the word is sophist from Greek which meant “wise” and “learned” or “pursuing knowledge,” which is pretty close to what we think of as sophisticated today.

Sophist is also at the heart of the word philosophy, which translates literally as “lover of knowledge.”

More than 2000 years ago two groups of Greek thinkers had a falling out.  One group was called the sophists, the other group was called the philosophers.

The philosophers did deep thinking and tried to explain the world.  The sophists started taking money to teach people how to explain the world in a way that would benefit their client.

Sounds like some lawyers today.

This philosophy-for-money model made people think poorly of them.  So poorly that to be a sophist came to be seen as to contaminate good arguments with hair-splitting ideas.  As a result something that was sophisticated was something that was no longer pure.

It wasn’t until 1895 that the “wise” and “learned” meanings at the heart of sophisticated reasserted themselves so that a person who was sophisticated wasn’t a conniving weasel-word spewing spin-doctor, but instead, as is described in the Oxford English Dictionary “a person free of naivety.”

It wasn’t until 1945 that a thing could be technologically superior and be called sophisticated.