σχολαστικός

Skholastikós comes from skholḗ (leisure) — the same root as school. In Greek, a scholastikos was a person who had leisure for study: a scholar, a student, a devotee of learning. The word carried the same leisured connotation as its parent. When Latin borrowed it as scholasticus, it kept the meaning: a schoolman, a teacher, a learned person. Scholasticus was a straightforward compliment.

The word narrowed dramatically in the Middle Ages. Scholasticism became the name for the dominant philosophical and theological method of medieval universities — the systematic use of Aristotelian logic to analyze Christian doctrine. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham were scholastics. Their method involved posing questions, marshaling arguments for and against, and reaching conclusions through logical deduction. The word scholastic ceased to mean 'learned' and began to mean 'learned in a specific method.'

The Renaissance and the Enlightenment turned scholastic into a pejorative. Humanists like Erasmus mocked scholastic philosophy as hairsplitting — obsessed with logical distinctions that had no connection to reality. 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' is the caricature of scholastic reasoning, though no scholastic actually asked the question. The word that had meant 'devoted to learning' came to mean 'devoted to pointless intellectual exercise.'

Modern English uses scholastic in two ways: as a neutral adjective meaning 'of or relating to schools' (scholastic achievement, scholastic aptitude) and as a historical term for medieval philosophy. The SAT was originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test — using the word in its neutral 'relating to school' sense. The testing company later changed its name to just 'SAT,' perhaps sensing that scholastic carried baggage it wanted to avoid.