To explicit your final recommendation: > 1. Having obtained worldly experience, and lacking naiveté; cosmopolitan. > 2. Elegant, refined. > 3. Complicated, esp

To explicit your final recommendation: > 1. Having obtained worldly experience, and lacking naiveté; cosmopolitan. > 2. Elegant, refined. > 3. Complicated, especially of complex technology. > 4. Appealing to the tastes of an intellectual; cerebral. > 5. (obsolete, UK) Dishonest or misleading. > 6. (obsolete, UK) Impure; adulterated. The word comes from the Greek sophists, who are defined as being remunerated, by opposition from philosophers. The association seems to be that they use fallacious arguments to defend their thesis; and by extension is used derogatorily for anything deemed too fancy. So I think what you're saying is that a collective appreciation for precision improves as society evolves in the same way that the word “sophisticated” has mostly become meliorative.