Buzz
The next time you feel compelled to point out your opponent's ignorance, try softening the critique by using one of these charming, old-fashioned terms for ignorance.
1. Lack-Latin
This term, like many others, evolved from a literal meaning to a figurative one. If someone was a 'Lack-Latin'—or, in its full form, 'Sir John Lack-Latin'—it meant that Latin was foreign to them. In the 1500s, this was a way of calling someone ignorant or foolish, eventually making it synonymous with terms like lackwit, numbskull, and doofus.
2. Benighted
Anyone wandering after dark is literally 'benighted,' a term that has been in use since at least the 1500s. By the next century, its meaning expanded. The figurative sense, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, describes someone 'involved in intellectual or moral darkness.' John Milton captured this sense ominously in 1637: 'He that hides a darke soule, and foule thoughts Benighted walks under the mid-day Sun.' An 1865 example from the Pall Mall Gazette takes a more ignorance-centered view: 'Respectable old Russell Whigs, on whom charges of moral corruption operate much more powerfully than charges of intellectual benightedness.'
3. Unirradiated
For those terms related to the absence of light, here's one akin to 'unenlightened,' 'blinded,' and 'in the dark.' Animals, who aren't concerned with human politics or sports, are often considered ignorant in this sense, as illustrated in an OED example from 1914: 'An animal life, a life unirradiated by hope or aspiration or sentiment or by the striving for beauty.'
4. Bookless
Since the 1500s, this melancholy term has had a literal meaning: a place or person devoid of books. In today’s digital age, literal booklessness has only grown. However, from the 1700s onward, 'bookless' has also referred to someone who is 'ignorant of books or not well-read.'
5. Loreless
This rare and similar word refers to someone completely devoid of lore—or more precisely, knowledge, facts, data, and information. 'Loreless' appeared occasionally in the 1300s and rarely since, resurfacing in 1836 in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine with the phrase: 'The poetry of his loreless soul.'
6. Flatty
Not all forms of ignorance are negative. Sometimes, calling someone ignorant can even be a compliment, depending on who’s doing the calling. For example, a 'flatty' is someone ignorant of criminal behavior, particularly thievery. The term is likely related to 'flatfoot,' a slang term for a police officer. Green’s Dictionary of Slang records a version of 'flatty' referring to a clueless cop.
7. Incognoscent
This variant of 'incognizant' may be rare, but it’s quite delightful. It was used by G.H. Taylor in his 1827 work, *The Excursion of a Village Curate*, in a sentence that doesn’t show much deference to an elderly person: 'I pardon you, my choleric incognoscent octogenarian.'
8. Mumpsimus
While most words have somewhat hazy origins, *mumpsimus* does not. According to the OED, this term originates from a story in Erasmus’s *1516* work, where an uneducated English priest, corrected for misreading 'quod ore mumpsimus' during Mass, stubbornly replied: 'I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus.' So, a mumpsimus isn’t just ignorant—they’re willfully ignorant.
9. Ultracrepidarian
Ultracrepidarian individuals can be exceptionally intelligent and well-versed in certain areas—but they often can’t resist offering opinions on subjects well beyond their expertise. As philologist Fitzedward Hall observed in 1872, 'His assumption of judicial assessorship, as a critic of English, is, therefore, to borrow a word from Hazlitt, altogether ultra-crepidarian.' In short, he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.
