Vocabulary Shopping: Ingenue, Precedent, Lilliputian
Modcloth is an online women’s clothing store, and their product names often include puns — for instance, “By Land or By Seersucker,” or “Un-twill We Meet Again.”
Sometimes, it’s kind of hard to get the joke without a formidable lexicon:
An ingenue is a “naive, innocent girl or young woman,” or the role of such a woman in a play or movie, or an actress who plays such roles. So while it might sound bad to be “naive,” the word “ingenue” is often used positively to refer to the new “it girl” in the movies.
Ingenue is related to two other words that are much more likely to appear on the GRE — ingenuous and its antonym, disingenuous.
Ingenuous means “lacking in cunning, guile, or worldliness; artless,” or “openly straightforward or frank; candid.” (You can just memorize that inGENUous means GENUine — that’s a pretty good trick, right?) That is, ingenuousness is good when you want someone to be honest with you, but it’s a terrible quality for your lawyer to have — you need him or her to be crafty and cunning.
Disingenuous means “not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating” — in other words, not genuine.
This play on words references the expression “set a precedent.”
Precedent shares a root with precede, “to come before.”
A precedent is “an act or instance that may be used as an example in dealing with subsequent similar instances.” For instance:
Eleanor Roosevelt set a precedent for First Ladies’ publicly leading substantial projects rather than merely hosting dinner parties and quietly supporting uncontroversial charities.
Ha! This, of course, is a play on lilliputian, meaning “very small.”
Read more about lilliputian in this post: Vocab at the Movies: Gulliver’s Travels.