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Pulchritude!? Boy, I had to look that one up!
by cybert00th 6y ago
Pulchritude!? Boy, I had to look that one up!
- chapium 6y agoLooking it up, I still have no idea what it means. The best I can gather is its beautifully wholesome. Other sources say beauty, but it seems like such a specific word for a form of beauty.
- FroshKiller 6y agoIt means physical beauty, like an attractive appearance.
- Izkata 6y agoWeird, I'd've guessed the opposite - the word looks as though it could've been related to "putrid".
- throwawgler87 6y agoUnderstandable. The meaning is easy to grasp intuitively if you've studied Latin for a semester or two and happen to know the word "pulchra." If not, I'm having trouble thinking of any cognates in English that are in any kind of common parlance.
- EasyTiger_ 6y agoHave never come across the word before either. Makes you think - did the person say the word to convey some kind of meaning? Or to sound super-smart to their peers?
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoKnowing developers who choose to write above an 8th grade reading level for no reason... they used that word to feel superior and make everyone who reads it feel stupid.
- iokevins 6y agoAlliteration. They wrote "paragon of pulchritude", which to me sounds like smart, dry humor. It works.
- bredren 6y agoYes, I’d also guess the dev was not a Latin scholar and that this assembly required a thesaurus.
- devnonymous 6y agoPrecisely. The phrase is pretty popular in prose, particularly when prefixed with 'perfect'.
- leephillips 6y agoIt could just be that the developer’s native language happens to be English, reads books, and he/she used a familiar word without thinking twice about it. Because this is, in fact, a fairly common word.
- grumple 6y agoI’ve read at least several hundred books in English, and probably hundreds of thousands of news stories and blog posts, and don’t recall encountering it before. It seems to appear mostly in searches for its definition and gre prep...
- leephillips 6y agoTry, say, Google ngram. Would you say that, for example, “disharmonious” is a rare word? Graph them together. Pulchritude is not even moderately rare.
- grumple 6y agoI’m not sure what you’re trying to say here; pulchritude twice as rare as disharmonious, which is relatively rare. It’s an order of magnitude rarer than effervescent, as an example, which is a word I would consider uncommon but in most people’s vocabularies. And given how much more common pulchritude is - surely physical beauty is one of the most common subjects in any language - while disharmony and effervescence are more complex and rarer in practice, I think it speaks to how little the word is used. Its synonym, beauty, is used 2000x as often.
- leephillips 6y agoExcept that pulchritude beats disharmonious for over a hundred years. And even now, it’s half as common as disharmonious, which is a commonplace word. But if you think that a word like “disharmonious” is in any sense rare, then I don’t think I can convince you with data.
- 6y ago
- necubi 6y agoYes, it comes directly from the latin pulchritudo which my dictionary gives as "beauty, excellence" and which is quite common in Latin texts. To me, pulchritude is such an ugly sounding word I can always remember the meaning as being the opposite of how it sounds. (Funny enough, I was just looking up to see if there is a name for words that sound opposite to their meaning and found this [0] discussion on the English stack exchange, which gives pulchritude as its example!) [0] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103741/name-for-a-word-whose-sound-is-contrary-to-its-meaning https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/103741/name-for-...
- Jare 6y ago"Pulcritud" and "pulcro" are not everyday words in Spanish, but pretty frequent. Mostly used to describe something that has been cared for and set up in a deliberately clean and orderly way. A guy with an unshaven face, wild hair, casual or wrinkled clothes, etc would never be described as "pulcro", even if they otherwise look very handsome, beautiful, or attractive.
- rob74 6y agoSame here... who would have thought reading random ancient source code comments could expand your vocabulary?
- ramraj07 6y agoGonna take a gander and guess the developer might have an Indian origin! Or at least studied for the GRE!
- JdeBP 6y ago"pulcher" is a fairly elementary piece of Latin vocab. It's in Book I of the Cambridge Latin Course, for example. This is much the same in other courses. So anyone, Indian or not, who has done basic Latin in school is likely to have encountered it and hence be aware of "pulchritude". * https://www.dl.cambridgescp.com/dl_course/book-i https://www.dl.cambridgescp.com/dl_course/book-i A random other example: https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/221512-gcse-latin-j282-defined-vocabulary-list-and-restricted-vocabulary-list.pdf https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/221512-gcse-latin-j282-defined...
- vatican_banker 6y agoOr anyone fluent on a romance language [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chrismorgan 6y agoI know the word but never use it myself, even among people that I know know it, because it sounds ugly. It’s the first syllable that does it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoI learned this word (actually, it was pulchritudinous) from the DOS game Hyperspeed last year when I streamed a blind playthrough of it. To date, this is only the second usage I have ever seen of it.