A wit is someone given to being witty. If sarcasm is often referred
to as the lowest form of wit, it’s because wit requires a more etymological
basis for its humor than sarcasm, which relies instead upon delivery. Sarcasm
might distract you from being able to guess which cup the penny’s under, but
wit will actually make the penny disappear. In order to best the purveyor of
sarcasm, one has to keep one’s wits about them, has to retain their mental
acuity.
The lovely thing about a mongrel language such as English is
that a singular word can contain within it many shades of meaning, all related.
Wit comes to us from the Old English witt,
meaning understanding, intellect, knowledge, and consciousness. Thus is can refer
to both the brain, the mind and thought. The phrase “to wit” means to know, and
has become a shorthand form by which to introduce facts; things that can be
accepted as being irrefutably known.
To know — to wit — in the past tense, is to wist. To have wist. Wistfully. The
singular form is to wot, or to wost. (To wast, on the other hand, is
“to be,” making for an interesting homophonic link that appears to confirm
Descartes’ assertion “I think, therefore I am. I wost, ergo I wast. It’s perhaps a witty version of cogito ergo sum, suggesting that Old
English is a funnier tongue than Latin.)
The actual grammar of the word wot is a bit scary-sounding: it’s a preterite-present verb. Things
can get quite complicated when one roots around the roots of a word. Today you
don’t hear much about wit, and you certainly won’t hear it described as wot.
The way you DO hear the word “wot” is in a wholly different, but related,
context.
Contemporary wits employ the word “wot” instead of “what” (and
in turn, “that”) in order to deliberately sound uneducated, in the manner of
someone who has no use for the rules of everyday grammar. Hence the popularity
of the phrase “that thing wot I did,” which has started to infiltrate the
idiom. Just as certain derogatory names can only be employed by those to whom
they might apply, the use of “wot” can only really be used by those smart
enough to know they are trying to be humble.
In an age where the internet and social media insists that
in order to keep up we must all become self-promoters, one can be pretty sure
that if something is introduced by the invitation to come look at “some thing
wot I did / wrote / said / drew” etc., the author is very proud of it. It is an
example of humor being employed to imply seriousness — the very heart of wit.
