If uncouth means “crude” and “unrefined”, does couth mean “sophisticated?”

The answer must be yes because we have made it so. That’s not what it meant originally, but enough people have made the association that couth with this definition does now exist in the Merriam Webster Unabridged and the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word uncouth is a very old one, while couth only gained this new “distinguished” meaning recently. Well, relatively recently; I see from the OED that it is in fact in a citation back in 1896.

This process of forming a new meaning for a word based on an older meaning of a seeming compound word is called backformation. So couth is a backformation of uncouth, made by assuming that something couth has to be the opposite of something uncouth.

Uncouth takes us a little further back than 100 years though. It shows up first in King Alfred the Great’s writings of 1100 years ago. Back then it didn’t mean “crude” or “unrefined” as we think of uncouth today. Instead it meant “unknown.” Over the centuries something or someone unknown (at least as the word uncouth applied to them) came to mean something or someone that was awkward or that didn’t fit in. A simple step then from not fitting in to being unrefined.

Back in King Alfred’s day couth didn’t mean “sophisticated”; it meant “known.” We can still hear an echo of this in the phrase kith and kin. If you go to a big family reunion you would be surrounded by your kith and kin and originally this meant your countrymen and relations; the people known to you and the people in your family.

The first time uncouth was used specifically to mean “uncultured” was in 1732 by a guy complaining that he and his entire country were seen as uncouth. Sir Charles Wogan was an English Catholic fugitive living pretty high on the hog in France and Spain and writing to Jonathan Swift, the guy who wrote Gulliver’s Travels. Swift lived in Ireland and was trying to help Wogan out by getting him a publisher in Dublin. Wogan had been born in Ireland and was bemoaning the attitude of the English toward their common homeland.

Just a few years later in 1740 Samuel Johnson used the word uncouth as well. Although Johnson seems to have had a low regard for Scotland, his comments on Ireland seem pretty sympathetic and his use of uncouth was directed at neither country but instead at South American Indians.

I guess it’s common to belittle what we don’t know.