Insipid (pronounced in-sip-id)
(1) Without
distinctive, interesting, or stimulating qualities; vapid.
(2) Something
or someone dull or uninteresting; lacking character or definition.
(3) Food
or drink lacking sufficient taste to be pleasing; bland, unappetizingly
flavorless.
1610–1620:
From the sixteenth century French insipid
(without taste or perceptible flavor), from the Late Latin insipidus (tasteless), the construct being in- (in the sense of
negation) + -sipidus (savory; tasty),
a form of sapidus (sapid) from sapere (have a taste (and used also to
mean “be wise”)). The figurative (ie not
of food or drink) meaning (uninteresting, dull) emerged in English in the 1640s
and it’s believed this was under the influence of Medieval Latin or the Romance
languages, where it was a secondary sense.
The noun insipidity was in use by the early seventeenth century. The choice of synonym can depend on whether
what is being described is food & drink or something (or someone) else and
the options include banal, bland, ho-hum, innocuous, trite, vapid, tasteless, bland,
wearish, boring, vacuous, dull, bland, characterless & colourless. In English, in some senses the use has been
influenced by insipient (unwise, foolish, stupid; lacking wisdom). Insipient was from the Middle English
insipient & incipient, from the Old French insipient, ultimately from the Latin
īnsipiēns. For the fastidious, the comparative
is “more insipient”, the superlative “most insipient”). Insipid is an adjective, insipidity & insipidness
are nouns and insipidly is an adverb.
Sapid (pronounced sap-id)
(1)
Having taste or flavor (and used specifically to mean “savory”).
(2) Agreeable
to the taste; palatable.
(3) Agreeable,
as to the mind; to one's liking.
1625-1635:
From the Latin sapidus (tasty), from sapere or sapiō (to taste). The
original meaning in English was “having the power of affecting the organs of
taste (when used of food & drink or other substances)” while the figurative
sense suggested something “gratifying to the mind or its tastes”. The adjective sipid has the same meaning as
sapid and was a mid-nineteenth century back-formation from insipid (on the
model of “gruntled” from “disgruntled”) whereas sapid was a direct borrowing
from Latin. Both sapid & sipid can
be used to mean “having a taste or flavor; savoury” but unlike insipid which
remains in wide use (both in the original context of food & drink and
figuratively), neither have ever attained much currency and it’s not
unreasonable for both to be listed as obsolete.
Sapid is an adjective, sapidity & sapidness are nouns.
In
a sense, what words flourish (or at least endure) in English is because of the
operation of something of a popularity contest.
While there are style guides, text books and grammar Nazis to tell us
which words to use and in what manner, English has no body such as the French
government’s Académie Française (council
for matters pertaining to the French language) which publishes the a variety of
documents which may be said collectively to define what is “official
French”. The Académie had an interesting political history, beginning as a
private venture it received the imprimatur of both church & state when in
1635 it was granted a royal charter by Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642; chief
minister (chancellor or prime-minister) to the King of France 1624-1642) during
the reign of Louis XIII (1601–1643; King of France 1610-1643) but was dissolved
1793 during the French Revolution (1789), partly because of the mob’s
anti-royalist feelings but also because there was some resentment among the
peasantry (an in the provinces generally) to the notion of a Parisian elite
deciding whose dialect was “right” and whose was “wrong”. That’s exactly the same dispute which now
bubbles in US universities between (1) those who insist there is “correct”
standard English while other forms are dialectal variations (ethnic, regional,
class etc) and (2) those who argue for a cultural equivalency between all
forms, most notably AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) and its many
forks. In 1795 the new regime in France
created the Institut de France
(Institute of France) as a kind of clearing house for all matters relating to
what was “acceptable” French culture, absorbing some pre-existing scientific,
literary and artistic bodies and it was to the institute that Napoleon
Bonaparte (1769–1821; leader of the French Republic 1799-1804 & Emperor of
the French from 1804-1814 & 1815) in 1803 restored the Académie Française as a division.
Spain’s
Real Academia Española (Royal Academy
of Spain) is a similar body but perhaps surprisingly (given all the stereotypes
of the Prussians) there is in Germany no central authority defining the German
language, several organizations and institutions working (cooperatively and
not) together standardize and update things.
The most authoritative body for German orthography is the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung
(Council for German Orthography), the membership of which includes representatives
from other German-speaking countries (Austria, Switzerland et al) and its
mandate extends to overseeing spelling and orthographic rules, something not
without controversy, especially since the great spelling “reform” of 1996. In the spirit of the post-1945 spirit of
avoiding where possible the creation of all-powerful single institutions, it’s
the Duden dictionary and Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute
for the German Language) which exert great influence in in maintaining and
documenting German vocabulary, grammar and usage, but both tend to be observational,
recording changes in the language rather than seeking to enforce rules (ie they
are descriptive rather than prescriptive). German thus evolves through the combined
influence of these institutions, public usage, and scholarly input, rather than
through a single authoritative academy and internationally it’s probably the Goethe-Institut (Goethe
Institute, named after the German author & philosopher Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)) which most promotes the study of German
language & culture through its worldwide network of some 160 centres.
English
is more democratic still, the survival of words and grammatical forms dependent
on the users and even before the British Empire saw the tongue spread around
the world the foreign influences were profound, the Latin, Greek, French &
Germanic threads the most obvious and even to speak of the “Old English” is
misleading to all but those in the field because to most, the “Old English”
really isn’t recognizable as “English”.
Not only does modern English thus evolve but so do the other blends such
as “Spanglish” (a hybrid of Spanish & English), Hinglish (Hindi &
English) and its absurd to speak of “pure English”, even the way BBC announcers
used to speak (in the so-called “RP” (received pronunciation) often including
fragments picked up from the Raj and around the world. While the Académie
Française may try to keep French as pure as possible, English shamelessly
is linguistically slutty.
In this democratic way, insipid has endured because it fills
a niche that sapid & sipid never found, in both usage & meaning. Vividly, insipid conveys the notion of something
lacking flavor, excitement, or interest, whether literally (vapid food or
drink) or figuratively (dull conversation or ideas). This negative association has a broad and (regrettably)
frequent application in everyday language, there so often being a need to decry
things or people as uninteresting or failing to make an impact. By contrast, although sapid & sipid both
mean “food having flavour”, there’s less need because that’s expected and
what’s usually sought is a way to say the quality is lacking and terms of
emphasis came to be preferred: “flavoursome” “tasty” and such taking over
although none were as precise as the practical & versatile “insipid” which
proved the perfect one-word descriptor whether literally or figuratively. Insipid is useful too because it’s nuanced in
that it although used usually as negative, it’s also a “neutral word” in the
sense of “bland”. When the Daily Beast was searching for similes
& metaphors in their review of Irish
Wish (released in 2024 as the second edition of Lindsay Lohan’s three film Netflix deal), they opted also to “damn with faint praise” observing because the
Netflix’s target audience “merely want to
watch something that isn’t insipid and horribly made”, maybe the film (sort
of) succeeded. So insipid has survived
because it fulfils needs while sapid & sipid are now little more than linguistic
curiosities.
Insipid, sipid & sapid: The votes are in.
Because
of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a
tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of
certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially
over decades. As a record of actual
aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts
Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the
technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition)
when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should
improve). Where numbers bounce around,
this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2)
some quirk in the data harvested.
