gnomic

The Greek gnōmē meant an opinion, a maxim, a judgment. It traced to the verb gignōskein, to know, which also gave Greek gnōsis and gnōmōn, the sundial's upright pin that reads the hour by shadow. The Greek poets of the seventh and sixth centuries BC, among them Theognis of Megara and Phocylides, wrote verse built around single-sentence truths. Their genre was named for their primary unit: the gnōmē.

Latin borrowed gnomicus from the Greek, applying it to any writing dense with maxims. When scholars of the 18th century revived the term in English, they were reaching back to the Greek lyric tradition directly. Thomas Warton used gnomic in 1781 to describe the Greek poets of wisdom. The word entered dictionaries stiff with classical authority and never softened.

The secondary meaning, cryptic and enigmatic, came from misreading. Gnomic utterances in Greek poetry are compressed, not obscure. But compression reads as mystery to those not trained in the idiom. By the 19th century, English writers were using gnomic to mean puzzlingly short, detached from any reference to ancient verse. The Greek poets would not have recognized the compliment.

The same root, through very different channels, produced gnome in the sense of the little underground creature. The alchemist Paracelsus coined Gnomus around 1530, possibly from a Latin word for earth-dweller, possibly from a play on gnōmē. Gnomes were said to guard buried treasure and know the secrets of the ground. One family tree, two very different branches.