• erudite •
Pronunciation: ee-ru-dait • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: A person who is rude on the Internet—in e-mails, Tweets, Facebook pages, etc.
Notes: This new word is sometimes still spelled with a hyphen, e-rudite. It can also be used as an adjective, 'The president is so erudite, I'm surprised that anyone listens to his tweets'. The erudites practice eruditery or eruditism.
In Play: We may think these people are in control of the Web: "We have to resist the erudites' take-over of the Internet!" They resort to all sorts of impolite practices, subtle or not: "Don't you hate the erudites who send you e-mail messages all in caps?"
Word History: Today's Good Word consists of e- + rud- + -ite, where e- is short for electronic which has been influenced by the intensifier e-, as in e-normous, e-specially, and e-levate. Rud- you should recognize as rude. -Ite is the usual terminator denoting a group of people having a certain questionable character such as ludd-ite and social-ite. So someone considered an erudite is one who belongs to a group of especially unsophisticated and probably depraved individuals who communicate electronically. (Let us not be so erudite as to forget to thank April Phule for submitting this brand new Good Word. Let's also thank our old South African friend Chris Stewart for remembering April Fool's Day in America, Brazil, and Czechia back in 2008. [Dr. Goodword never forgets.])
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