the.com/bigot
Someone who mistook their first opinion for a fact and never got the memo.
means A person who clings to their own beliefs with stubborn intolerance, treating anyone who disagrees as wrong or beneath them.
from Murky and much-debated. The word surfaces in French by the 1500s as a slur for religious hypocrites, especially aimed at certain zealots, but where French got it is genuinely unsettled. Old folk tales claim it comes from a Norman duke's dismissive oath 'by God' (supposedly mangled into 'bigot'), but historians treat this as charming guesswork, not fact. What's solid is the meaning's drift: from a term for excessive religious zealotry to today's broader sense of someone pigheadedly intolerant of anyone who thinks differently.
- origin
- old french for hypocrite, meaning unclear
- key trait
- certainty that outlives the evidence
- not synonym
- disagreement; bigotry requires refusing to listen