It's the Word of the Day podcast for November 5th.
Today's word is lout, spelled L-O-U-T.
Lout is a noun.
A lout is an awkward, brutish person.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The Daily Beast by Nick Shager.
Fortunately for Vince, Jake is about to sell their mother's house,
and the proceeds should cover his deep debts.
As is often the case with ne'er-do-wells, however, Vince doesn't make anything easy.
An actor, Jason Bateman, casts him as an arrogant lout,
who's always playing the angles to his own benefit, dam the damage he causes to everyone else.
The word lout belongs to a large group of words that we use to indicate a particular sort of offensive and insensitive person.
That group also including such terms as bore, oaf, jerk, and churl.
English speakers have used lout in this way since the mid-1500s.
Well before the 12th century, however, lout functioned as a verb with the meaning to bow in respect.
No one is quite sure how, or even if,
the verb sense developed into a noun, meaning an awkward, brutish person.
The noun could have been coined independently, but if its source was the verb,
perhaps the awkward posture of one bowing down led over the centuries to the idea that the bowing person was base and awkward as well.
With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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