🙃 Fatuous: What A Fathead Might Be
FATUOUS most nearly means: A) corpulent; B) fateful; C) inane; D) prudent. Answer inside. 👉️
If a person is fatuous, then they are kind of ridiculously foolish, empty-headed, and not even aware of it; in fact, they often (but not always) act kind of arrogant or self-satisfied while behaving nonsensically. This discrepancy between perception and reality makes fatuous so harshly critical.
📚️ Definition of Fatuous
Fatuous (adjective): foolish or unaware, often in a self-satisfied way (Ex: a fatuous conversation).
🗣️ Pronunciation of Fatuous
IPA: /ˈfæ.tʃu.əs/ (See IPA key)
Phonetic: FACH-oo-uhs
📰 Examples of Fatuous
Here are some examples of the word fatuous:
I’d say it’s hardly fatuous to ask about the credentials of the owners of the website and question their apparent lack of transparency on their “about us” page.
“Listen here, you smug, fatuous, feckless mouth-breathing troglodyte. Why don’t you even give Owen a chance to speak? Are you afraid he might have something of value to say?”
“Was it for this the clay grew tall? / — O what made fatuous sunbeams toil / To break earth’s sleep at all?” — Wilfred Owen, “Futility” (1918) - Background: The speaker is mourning a soldier’s death in war, which he views as senseless. By the end of the poem, he becomes bitter and questions why the sun ever bothered to wake the earth up and create life in the first place, if life just ends in something this senseless. The author of this poem was killed in France in 1918 one week before the end of the First World War.
Former US President George W. Bush was born into an oil-wealthy family and attended Yale and Harvard. However, historians speculate that he deliberately cultivated a folksy persona to appeal to a wider range of voters by employing occasionally borderline fatuous speech.
🗣️ Common Collocations of Fatuous
A collocation is a group of words often found together in usage, for example figment of one’s imagination, extenuating circumstances, or inclement weather.
a fatuous remark
a fatuous grin
a fatuous question
fatuous optimism
utterly fatuous
Quiz answer: C, inane.
Come back tomorrow; we’re learning the word verdure.