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Reader question: Please explain this sentence, particularly "outsize optimism": "At 25, I still had an outsize optimism about my own capabilities." Outsize? My comments: First of all, we are not talking about shoes or feet sizes. Now, to paraphrase: When the speaker was young, at the age of 25, he or she had an exorbitantly large amount of optimism about what they can do. In other words, they believed they could accomplish all sorts of improbable things. And they were, as it were, very unrealistic. Their optimism was outsize or outsized. Well, at 25, they were still, as it were, young. Anyways, outsize literally means OUT of normal SIZE, i.e. much larger than normal or usual. Let's use shoes as an example. If your feet are 25 centimeters in length and you wear 28-cm shoes, why, you're wearing outsized shoes, which are enormously too large. Out as in outfight, outperform, outsmart, meaning exceeding or surpassing others. If you outperform all your classmates in an exam, for example, you have the best grades. You may also have heard of someone being described as having an outsize or outsized ego. In this case, this someone also has a much higher opinion of themselves than perhaps other people give them credit for. In other words, he or she consider themselves to be far more esteemed or important than others consider them to be. | 
