Visual Dictionary: Sagacious
Welcome to Visual Dictionary, a series of posts about words that are better expressed in pictures.
This monk is sagacious.
Sagacious is the adjective form of sage, a wise person. A wise person is sapient (like Homo sapiens).
A very perceptive person could be called sharp, astute, perspicacious, or canny.
An educated person is erudite; an intellectual person is cerebral.
Let’s try an Antonyms problem:
PERSPICACIOUS:
A. inept
B. ambivalent
C. tepid
D. tantamount
E. opaque
Choose your own answer, then click “more.”
PERSPICACIOUS means mentally sharp, perceptive. We want a word that means dense, stupid. Believe it or not, that word is opaque.
Opaque is, literally, the opposite of transparent. (Those who are in the habit of buying women’s hosiery have seen “opaque” on packages of tights; the word indicates that the tights are not see-through). Metaphorically speaking, an opaque person is dense; just as light can’t pass through something opaque, knowledge can’t quite permeate an opaque person’s brain.
By the way, inept means unskilled, ambivalent means having mixed feelings, tepid means lukewarm, and tantamount means equivalent.
The answer is E.