Meaning
A person who disbelieves in human sincerity - who assumes every motive is selfish, every virtue a posture. The original Cynics preached virtue through nature; the modern cynic mostly preaches that nothing is worth preaching. Cynical is the everyday adjective; the capital-letter Cynic still names the philosopher with the jar, whose creed was freedom, not sneering. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
The name began as either a place or an insult: the first Cynics taught at the Cynosarges gymnasium, the place of the white dog, and dog, kyon, was also hurled at them for their shameless manners - Antisthenes taught there, and Diogenes embraced the label gladly, saying other dogs bite their enemies but he bit his friends to save them. Diogenes made the school immortal: living in a jar, defacing the currency (a proverb he earned literally, having fled Sinope over forged coins), answering that he was a citizen of the world, and training for virtue by hardship and indifference. The modern sense is the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' inheritance: scorn hardened into the disbelief in sincerity or goodness of human motives that Wiktionary gives as the standing definition, with citations from a 2000 Guardian swipe at the nay-sayers and doubters to Wally Lamb's 2008 self-defence - not a cynic, a banged-up realist.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a cynical view
- cynical
- cynicism
Usage Examples
- A cynic, the saying runs, knows the price of everything and the provenance of nothing on the menu.
- By November the committee's resident cynic had been right twice, which he mentioned at every opportunity.
- Her cynical take on the merger - someone needed a trophy before Christmas - proved understated.