• wiseacre •
Printable Version Pronunciation: waiz-ay-kêr • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: (Slang) I am sure you have already guessed that today's word does not refer to a guru's homestead. It means a smart aleck who makes wisecracks, someone who is too big for his britches, an upstart who makes conceited, sardonic, insolent comments.
Notes: We are usually free to confuse this word with wisenheimer; their meanings overlap but do not coincide. A wiseacre is someone who makes wisecracks, sarcastic comments intended to show off the speaker's superiority. A wisenheimer may do this, too, but a wisenheimer is basically just a smarty-pants who thinks he knows more than he actually does. The word wisenheimer expresses our appreciation of German intelligence by combining English wise with a piece of German names like Frankenheimer, Schottenheimer, and Oppenheimer.
In Play: Wiseacres love to ruffle feathers: "Some wiseacre shook hands with the company president with his left hand because, as he put it, he eats with his right one." Although the meaning above is accurate, we often use this word to refer to people who really are smart, so smart in fact that it makes us jealous: "That wiseacre is always telling me better ways to do my job!"
Word History: Today's Good Word is another piece of work by folk etymology, the reanalysis of a borrowed word to make it more compatible with the borrowing language. It began as Middle Dutch wijsseggher "wizard, soothsayer", comprising wijs "wise" + seggher "sayer". Clearly, English wise and wizard come from the same Proto-Germanic root for "wisdom". Middle Dutch wijs and English wise were closed enough for English speakers but the 'eggher' we heard after wise had to be changed to something more familiar; for whatever reason, we chose acre as the substitute. (Sara Goldman is no wiseacre but she does have the wisdom to suggest Good Words like today's, for which we heartily thank her.)
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