erudite

Latin erudire was built from the prefix e-, meaning out of or away from, and rudis, meaning rough, unworked, or crude. To educate someone was, to Roman minds, to remove the rough edges from raw material. A person born into ignorance was rudis, the same word applied to an untrained soldier, an unplowed field, or unshaped stone. The word was a craftsman's metaphor before it was a scholar's.

The past participle eruditus described someone who had been worked upon, shaped, refined. Cicero used it in the first century BC to describe men of learning: not those who had accumulated facts, but those who had been stripped of their native coarseness. The word carried a sculptor's logic. To call a man eruditus was to say that someone had done the labor of formation on him.

English borrowed erudite in the fifteenth century, when it sat among the Latinate vocabulary of clerics and humanists. By the seventeenth century, writers like Francis Bacon were using it freely in printed prose. The sculptural sense faded as the word settled in; erudite came to mean simply learned, and the labor of polishing was forgotten.

What remained was the association with a particular kind of knowledge: exact, broad, and carried without display. An erudite person in modern English is not someone who knows many things but someone whose knowledge has texture and depth. The roughness is still implied, in what they have moved past. The Latin sculptor is still at work inside the word, though no one introduces him.