Different Uses of Peruse

Hello, you’ve got A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Evan Childress. I’m calling in from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, Evan. Welcome to the program.

Thanks. I’ve long had a problem with the word perused. My mother ingrained in me that it meant to read carefully or, you know, examine a document. But it seems like everybody uses it sort of in the opposite way, sort of to skim over something or, you know, do a cursory job. So I was wondering if you knew how this shift came about or whether I’m just wrong about what it means.

No, Evan, you’re not wrong at all. I was going to ask, was your mother a real stickler for grammar in other ways?

Oh, yes. She’s a word person and a writer herself. So, yeah, and I actually, interestingly, when I was first, I actually learned the word while I was studying for SATs with her. And I would continuously get it wrong and actually think that it meant to kind of read over briefly. Yeah, so, and whenever I use it, people interpret it in the opposite way.

Yeah, exactly. I just try to avoid it entirely because of that confusion.

Right. That’s what I would do, too. I would just stop using the word altogether. I mean, it’s a shame that you have to do that, but maybe if we give it a timeout, we can go back to it in a few years.

Yeah. But the short version is that your mother was exactly right. In fact, the oldest sense of the word peruse means to use thoroughly, to use up, to exhaust. I mean, it was a really intense word. And somewhere along the line, people started using the other version of it.

Yeah, it’s really interesting the way that those shifts just seem to happen.

Yeah, and it’s curious because for a long time it had that sense of reading something very closely, very thoroughly, but it’s sort of like oversight, you know?

I mean, think about the word oversight, which can mean…

A couple of different things.

Yeah. I suspect what happened here, Evan, is that people were reaching for a word that they didn’t quite understand in order to sound more sophisticated. And in that way, that almost always leads to mistakes where people speak with an unnatural vocabulary. And I suspect that peruse was if you were looking in your thesaurus for synonyms for the word to read, you might choose that word without understanding its nuances.

I hadn’t thought about that.

It’s often the mistake that people make when they want to sound more educated than they are. And that’s not a judgment. I’m just saying we all do that. We want to sound sophisticated and formal and might push our vocabulary in directions it ought not go.

So you’re right. Technically, it means to look at something very, very carefully and thoroughly, to pore over something, P-O-R-E, over something.

Yeah, peruse does not mean just to browse casually and just to skim. It does not mean that at all.

Well, it’s of limited comfort since I can’t really use it anymore.

Well, sorry about that.

Yeah, it’s what they call a skunked word. It’s kind of, in its misuse, it is kind of ruined for legitimate uses.

Right.

But I bet you did well in the SAT, right?

Thanks a lot.

Yeah, sure, no problem. Thanks for calling, Evan.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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