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September 2009Word History of the Month: jadedWhen Brooke Shields memorialized Michael Jackson by declaring that "nothing was jaded" about her friend, jaded spiked on the most looked-up words list. A look in the dictionary reveals that the actress was using the sense of jaded that means "made dull, apathetic, or cynical by experience or by surfeit." Here's the story behind that term. Forget the idea that an excess of jade gemstones ever made a person cynical. The adjective jaded rode into the lexicon on a jade of a different color: jade was a 14th century term for a broken-down horse. Back then, to jade a horse was to make it weary by overwork or abuse. Jaded originally meant exhausted, but it didn't take long before a figurative adjectival sense describing a cynical or apathetic attitude was added to the older verb. |