I learned a new word over the weekend, perspicuous.
Here's the context: During the September 13, 2023 episode of the Slate Culture Gabfest, Is Rotten Tomatoes Certified Rotten, the Slate Plus part of the show centered around the topic of global warming as it relates to summer sports. Specifically, is it getting too hot in too many places to have summer events like Wimbledon and the World Cup.
This is a topic somewhat close to my heart as every summer Japan is consumed by a wild, passionate interest in high school baseball. Teams from all over Japan compete to be in the tournament and the winners are generally considered hometown heroes. It's generally a positive thing in the culture but it has been taking heat* in recent years for the toll it takes on the players. Especially when they're being asked to play in 35°C1 heat.
In fact, this year, NHK came under criticism for continuing to show the tournament on t.v. even while heatstroke warnings filled the sides of the screen. The tournament organizers have taken measures to keep the players cool with ice vests and fans and a cooling time out after the fifth inning, but it begs the question, is it even worth it anymore?
And that's the hard question. Because people love sports. Even when we know they are causing irreparable damage to the athletes, even when we know that training regimes can often be abusive, even when we know that sports organizations the world over are dens of financial corruptions, we still love our sports.
Cohost Stephen Metcalf attempted to explain this, saying:
This is why we mere Earthlings, we mere humans, watch sports. It’s this odd combination of super, heightened drama and stakes that play out in the most perspicuous way and most heightened and specific way. A ball bouncing either on one side of [the] line or the other side of the line; extraordinary capacity for human beings to [?] disciplined, focused, effort and excellence, frankly. And at the same time, they’re silly and disposable2.
Which is, I think, a good point and one well-made, or, rather, I would think that if only I knew what perspicuous meant. Merriam-Webster to the rescue:
plain to the understanding especially because of clarity and precision of presentation
Ah. So, in other words, Metcalf is saying that sports are important because they are so easily and plainly understood, which allows us to enjoy the human capacity to excel while acknowledging that they are not, in the grand scheme, important. Cool. I definitely agree with that. But let's talk more about our new word perspicuous.
First things first, I have to admit, I at first thought he had used the word perspicacious and that that was one more word to add to the ever-growing list of words I've been saying wrong all my life. But no, they are in fact, very different words. Merriam-Webster again:
perspicacious
having or showing an ability to notice and understand things that are difficult or not obvious
So, almost the opposite then. If perspicuous means plain and simple, easy to understand, perspicacious is having the capacity to understand the things that are not plain and simple. It's worth noting that the two words are related, however, as Merriam-Webster's entry for perspicuous3 continues:
Both words come directly from Latin adjectives that mean the same thing they do: perspicuous from perspicuus, and perspicacious from perspicax.
We can go a step deeper and take both words back to their PIE roots. As Etymonline tells us:
Proto-Indo-European root forming prepositions, etc., meaning "forward," and, by extension, "in front of, before, first, chief, toward, near, against," etc.
But okay, let's talk synonyms. Perspicuous is a good word, but it's also a showy word, one of those ones you use so you can define it by example as Metcalf does in his usage. What are some other words we can use in place of perspicuous?
Well, aside from clear itself, there are a lot of words that represent similar meanings and we begin to see a pattern of words that mean transparent and words that mean illuminated (both equally good synonyms for perspicuous, by the way.) For the transparent side of the aisle we have luculent for the word nerds and straightforward for the...more straightforward types. On the illuminated side we have lucid and its cousin pellucid, neither of which are to be outdone by luminous.
As to sports and the heat of summer, I like sports, I really do, but the fact that we need to re-evaluate what we consider acceptable in light of global warming is all too clear and plain to see.
The Pitch
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What We’re Listening To
I don’t have a book recommendation this week. What I do have is a song recommendation. It’s taken me a minute to process the loss of Jimmy Buffet, which occurred just at the beginning of September. I always think that celebrity deaths won’t affect me and then, bam, there goes someone else whose music has been with me my entire life. So, anyway, here’s one of my favorites. Thanks, Jimmy.
95°F for the rest of us.
I'm copying from the machine-generated transcript here, so there are some gaps. I've tried to note them where I could. I've also added punctuation that I think matches the tone Metcalf used when speaking.
Interestingly, perspicuous is also related to conspicuous and promiscuous. Food for thought?