Adept (noun)

By Deane Barker • • tags: definition •

Definition: someone who is very skilled at something

Why I Looked It Up

So, this is a weird one, because I absolutely knew the usage and definition of “adept” as a verb. But in I Got Schooled I found this:

[…] there is a belief among certain academics that a subject is less efficiently learned from an adept than from someone who is studying it or has just finished studying it.

This is “adept” as a noun.

This brought me back to my teenage years playing Dungeons and Dragons. There was a character class called a “Cleric,” and the first two levels were:

An “acolyte” is a religious assistant.

Given the alliteration, I guess I always thought “Adept” had some religious connotation. I always remember those two character levels and thought they were somehow related: than an “adept” was a…pastor, or something?

Nope. No religious connection at all.

(This reminds me of how I thought Brain Trust was pejorative because of a comment my dad used to make.)

Links from this – I Got Schooled: The Five Keys to Closing America's Education Gap September 8, 2022
This is a book about the state of American education, written by a famous movie director. As he tells it, when he went location scouting for one of his movies, he visited several high schools, and was shocked by the disparities. What followed a couple of years of research, and the result is this...
Links from this – Brain Trust July 8, 2022
A group of advisers or experts. It’s usually used to refer to a group of people supplying advice to another person – so they are a brain trust to someone else. Specifically, three professors at Columbia were known as “the Brain Trust” to FDR during his 1932 presidential campaign.