Hello there my fabulous philomaths! It’s time for another episode of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents! Unruffle that feather in your cap, because today’s word is: superbious.

Superbious is an adjective meaning proud, insolent or overbearing. For example, ‘Johnathan was rather superbious about his debate championship win, but didn’t realise his fly was undone as he walked around the party.’ It is usually referred to someone who has pride in an excessive or exaggerated way. It comes from the Latin ‘superbiosus’ meaning proud of insolent, which came from ‘superbia’, meaning pride, which in turn stems from ‘superbus’, meaning superb or proud. What a long journey!

The earliest documented use was 1509, and where it originally had a more positive meaning, superb, grand, noble or magnificent, over time ‘superbious’ evolved to have a negative connotation like haughty, vain or insolent. Curiously, ‘superbious’ does qualify for the scrabble dictionary, though it would be worth 14 points. This is perhaps because it has fallen out of use today.

It does, however, make an appearance on Urban Dictionary, a website for definitions of modern words and examples of how they are used in current conversation. Urban Dictionary defines ‘superbious’ as ‘great, amazing, super’ and gives the example, ‘Superbious! I’m glad that you are here.’ An exclamation of sorts, you might say, perhaps deriving from ‘superb’, with the suffix ‘ious’, and so creating ‘something that is superb’. Fascinating how words, evolve from one meaning, to another, and almost back again, without even knowing that the world already existed in the first place!

You might even find yourself listening to the song ‘791 Superbious Snollygosters’ from the album ‘Darkwave Sinofias’, but you’ll have to listen to find out which version they’re referring to!

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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