Reading Maureen Dowd's column this morning I came across this sentence, "But Obama’s outrage makes him seem a little jejune."
What?
After a bit of investigating, I find that jejune has quite a history and not a little controversy over its meaning. It comes from the Latin jejunus, meaning "empty stomach", "fasting". In the 17th Century it appeared in English, probably in England, and meant meagre or empty, bare land. Moving through the centuries, jejune gains in usage but its meaning changes a bit more, morphing into "youthful" "immature", "naive".
In 1992 Collins Shorter English Dictionary finally settled on "naive", "unsophisticated" as the definition.
I'm guessing somewhere along the line the pronunciation of jejune sounded to English speaking ears similar to the French word for young-jeune and that is how we got from empty stomach to naive.
So is Obama a jeune fil or a jejune young man?
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