Word of the Day Spotlight: How 'Trite' Surged Back into Everyday Vocabulary
The etymology of trite reveals a physical, tactile metaphor that predates modern printing presses. The English word entered the language during the mid-sixteenth century, drawn directly from the Latin adjective tritus, which translates as "worn," "rubbed," or "familiar."
Tritus was the past participle of the Latin verb terere, meaning "to rub," "to wear away," or "to thresh grain." Roman agricultural laborers used the verb to describe stones smoothed flat by cart wheels, paths trampled bare by foot traffic, and grain husks pounded down until brittle.
By the seventeenth century, English critics applied the metaphor to rhetoric. Just as a river stone loses its sharp contours under rushing water, an expression rubbed thin by thousands of careless speakers loses its conceptual edges. When you describe a remark as trite, you are calling it an idea that has been ground down into gravel.
