I’ve spent the last eight months editing my latest book, and the last two going through the text refining and checking and rearranging… and one of the things I’ve found that I do, is have favourite words. The same words crop up again and again, and these favourites are are different in each book it seems. I had to weed out a lot of suddenlys, hugs/huggings/huggeds, justs and faces going pale/red/white/wan/flushed… Last night in the last moments of panicky checking, I realised that I’d used the word ‘crass’ too frequently. I changed a few and as I finally finished the whole thing, began to wonder where the word ‘crass’ comes from.
Apparently it was originally Latin and came into English via French,, crassus/crasse meaning ‘solid, thick, fat, dense’; it arrived in the middle of the fifteenth century, but a hundred years later it was used in English to mean really stupid, incredibly stupid. However… there was also another little word, in Middle English, cras, meaning ‘slow, sluggish, tardy’; the two words sort of blended together and here we have crass, today!
A few synonyms i could have chosen:
- asinine
- blundering
- boorish
- bovine
- coarse
- dense
- doltish
- dull
- gross
- indelicate
- insensitive
- mindless
- oafish
- stupid
- thick
- vacuous
- witless
Having finished editing, I was able to publish! I publish my e-books through KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) and I’m delighted to tell you this book with slightly less crass in it than before, is available here:
Lois Elsden 
etymologically i suspect cras and coarse may be cognate
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Interesting… yes, maybe!
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