Big words: meretricious

In my previous job, I was required to write such that a (mythical) interested 17 year old could understand. My current employer thankfully doesn’t assume that its audience is quite so ignorant, but nonetheless I can’t write the way I like to at work, which is I one of the reasons I started this blog.

I could go on and on about how I feel about the dumbing down of our society, but since this blog is about things I like, I’m instead just going to present my favourite big word: meretricious.

Meretricious sounds positive, because it sounds like “merit”, but it’s actually a pejorative term meaning “like a prostitute”. Interestingly it has the same etymology as merit – it come from the Latin for “to earn”, as it means “like a woman who earns”.

Please forgive the quality of this photo, my trip to Macao was before I started studying photography.

I first came across the word meretricious in an article about Las Vegas, which is a rather meretricious place, though it’s not, I think, as meretricious as Macao, where the above photo was taken – The Venetian Las Vegas is simply Las Vegas pretending to be Venice, The Venetian Macao is Macao pretending to be Las Vegas pretending to be Venice!