Vocabulary Blog

There’s probably a word for the phenomenon where once you learn a new word you start to notice it everywhere.  I don’t know what that word is, so I’m going to hope that somebody posts it in a comment.

The reason I bring this up is because I was reading an article on Wikipedia today and saw ostensible used, which was the topic of one of my previous posts.

. . . some argue that it employed ideas and methods that were relatively new at the time and, due to the ostensible success of the operation, led to Operation PBSUCCESS becoming the de facto model for the overthrow or destabilization of a defiant government for some time to come . . .

If nothing else comes from this blog, I can at least point to this as a success.

I was practicing GRE words at http://gre-word-test.com, and I sadly missed a question related to the word ostensible. I’m more familiar with the word ostentatious, but I want to be sure that I can properly distinguish between the two.

ostensible - meant for appearance; apparent
ostentatious - intended to attract notice; showy

They’re both derived from the Latin word meaning to display or exhibit.

I’ll take a break from British writers and look towards the classic American writer Mark Twain for some examples.

Here in The Prince and the Pauper Twain describes the display of a wedding ring as ostentatious.

There sat Elizabeth of York in the midst of an immense white rose, whose petals formed elaborate furbelows around her; by her side was Henry VII., issuing out of a vast red rose, disposed in the same manner: the hands of the royal pair were locked together, and the wedding-ring ostentatiously displayed.

In another writing, Twain uses ostensible to describe a horse believed to be seven, but in fact is fourteen years old.

I believed that this was insubordination, but I was full of uncertainties about everything military, and so I let the thing pass, and went and ordered Smith, the blacksmith’s apprentice, to feed the mule; but he merely gave me a large, cold, sarcastic grin, such as an ostensibly seven-year-old horse gives you when you lift his lip and find he is fourteen, and turned his back on me.