Here are some extremely unlikely sentences using as many examples of a single word root as I can manage without violating too many rules of grammar or sense.
A pilot named Henry Hampton, while flying homeward from Bohemia to Birmingham, crashed in the remote hamlet of Hampstead and his ghost now haunts the airport’s hangar.
That somewhat contrived sentence has nine examples of the Germanic root ham-, meaning home. Henry is German Heimerich, ruler (as in reich) of the home. The original definition of “haunt” is “be at home”. Bohemia is “home of the Boii”, the Keltic tribe which inhabited that area in Roman times. Hangar is heimgard, home-guard, originally a kind of barn or shed for carriages before it became a storage place for airplanes In many English place names like Birmingham, Hampton (“home town”), Hampstead (“homestead”), etc., the original meaning was farm or manor house, not town, and a hamlet is a double diminutive — ham-el-ette. I mentioned the “tre/pol/pen” rhyme for Cornish names earlier; for the English the rhyme goes, “In ford, ham, ley, and ton, The most of English surnames run.” (-ley is “lea”, Old English for meadow, also seen in Waterloo.)
11Apr09 The original meaning of town was an enclosed space, particularly a farmstead, before being used for a population center. The “-don” or “-ton” on the end of English place names is usually “farm”, not “town” in the modern sense. (C.f. “-ham” in the previous paragraph, and note that village also originally meant “farm”.) Town is almost certainly related to Keltic dun, which meant fortress. Down (a hill) and dune are because the Kelts and many other peoples built their forts on easily-defended hilltops, and houses and shops grew around them. (C.f. German burg/berg, with the triple meaning of mountain, castle, and town.) Down as the opposite of up started life as adune, downhill. Zaun is the German word for hedge, so that’s another “enclosed” borrowing from Keltic.
17May09 Allegedly, Indo-European had two different words bhergh-, one which meant protect and one which meant high. These wound up totally confused, because fortresses and towns were normally built on hilltops. The “protect” version also led to bury and borrow, while the “high” word led to borough and its relatives, as mentioned elsewhere.
An ordinary subordinate who coordinated the ordinance was ordained into a religious order and was adorned with many ornate ornaments. This made him ornery.A Latin (not ie) ord- root meant to arrange or equip. This begat order, ordinary, ordain, ordinal, ordinance, coordinate, primordial, and subordinate. “Ordin-” got condensed to orn-, leading to ornate, ornament, and adorn. Suborn, to bribe, seems to be an “arrange under the table” metaphor. One surprising relative is ornery, originally a dialect pronunciation of “ordinary” in the sense of “worthless”.
A continually entertaining tenor tenaciously and intentionally maintained his tenure.
All are from the Latin tenere, to hold. A tenor “held” the melodic line in Gregorian chant, and the original meaning of entertain is still seen in “entertaining an idea”, i.e., holding it within. To maintain is to “hold in the hand”, and to continue is to “hold with” something or other. Tenacious and tenure are straightforward; other obvious members of the family include tenant, tenable, retain, detain, and obtain, while an untenable opinion “cannot be held”. Slightly less obvious are abstain (hold away from) and sustain (sub-tenere, to hold from below, to support). Tetanus (aka lockjaw), means “rigidity” or “spasm” in Greek. A lieutenant is Frenchified from Latin locum tenans, hold the place of — c.f. “in lieu of”. (The original meaning of intent was “stretch the mind” — see the discussion of the thin tent below for other “stretch” relatives, as well as the previous information about détente.) The Hindu philosophy called Tantra is Sanskrit for “loom” on which thread is held and stretched, used metaphorically to mean a framework or system. See tone for many more words from the same ie root, which meant both “stretch” and “hold”.
Even lovers of French have a hard time believing that lieutenant, locomotive, and couch come from the same root. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, a lieutenant “holds the place” of another. Couch started out as a verb, to lay into place, and it’s Latin collocare, to place with, also from locus, place, more obviously seen in location and local. Locomotive, meanwhile, goes clear back to about 1600 as an adjective describing things which could “move to a place” under their own power. (Humans are locomotive; trees are not.) It was also used to describe people who liked to travel — some historian described Hadrian as “the most locomotive emperor Rome ever had”. (For fanatics about Latin grammar, loco is the ablative of locus, so it means “to a place”.)
A poor and pusillanimous pedophile named Paul was a quite puerile pauper; he avoided poverty by keeping poultry and a few pony foals.
All are from the Indo-European pau- root meaning “small”. 23Oct09 “Pauper” and “poor” are the same word, successively whittled down by French from Latin pavo-pars, small portion (part). A pusillanimous person has a “small soul”. In addition to the above, Greek paedo- (child) produced pediatrician, pedagogue (child leader), orthopedic (straight child), and encyclopedia (universal education). 21Jun09 (All of these are spelled with the correct Greek “paed-” in England. The American spelling of “orthopedic” would seem to imply “straight feet”, for instance.) Besides the pony, foal, and poultry, other small animals include the pullet and the filly. Latin “puerile” means “childish” — the Latin words for boy and girl are puer and puella. Puny looks like it might be related, but not so — it is postnatus, born later, by way of French puisne. By the way, pedophile was sometimes used in a non-sexual sense; some old quotations call Jesus a pedophile because he liked children.
While Gerald was convalescing at the Ronald McDonald house after his valiant effort in Vladivostok, he showed ambivalence about another invalid named Walter, and his evaluation prevailed.
The Indo-European wal- root meant to be strong. In Germanic this appears mainly in personal names. In addition to Gerald (strong spear), Ronald (strength of the gods), Donald (earth strength), and Walter (army commander), one could also mention Oswald (God’s strength), Harold (Herewald, which is simply “Walter” with the syllables reversed), and probably Waldo. About the only Germanic word from this root which is not a personal name is wield, to rule. Slavic vlad- also means “rule” in personal names like Vladimir, while the Siberian city of Vladivostok “rules the East” in Russian. In Latin the root became val- with meanings of both “strength” and “worth”. 27Jun09 Vale! is the imperative of valere, to be strong or well. The Romans used it to mean “goodbye”; a valedictorian is one who gives a farewell address. The “worth” subset includes valid, value, and equivalent (equal worth). Surprisingly, so is valor, which originally was a synonym of value. Avail, prevail, and the chemical valence are still “strength”, though, and of course an invalid is “not strong”. To convalesce is to “strengthen together”, but an ambivalent statement has worth [truth] both ways. Note that Ronald and Donald are contrasted — heavenly strength vs. earthly strength, so “Ronald McDonald” — “heaven is the son of earth” is somewhat dubious theology.
The last syllable of Vladimir means “peace” in Slavic, also seen in names like Miroslav and the Russian space station Mir. The ie root really means to bind or have a contract with, leading to Greek miter (headband) and the biological mitosis and mitochondria, both from the Greek for “thread”. Dimity is a kind of cloth with two warp threads — c.f. twill. Further east, the name of the Indo-Iranian god Mitra or Mithras literally means “partner”; he was the god of Contracts.
The sentient but sentimental sentinel assented that he had sensed a scent but sensibly and resentfully dissented from (and refused to consent to) his sentence.
All are from Latin sentire, to feel.
In an excellent culmination of the march, the colonel sent his column of troops down the collonade and then up a hill near Stockholm.
The ie root is kel-, to be high or prominent. Hill is Germanic and the -holm in place names is a Scandinavian word for island. All the rest are from Latin. A colonel was named from the column of troops he commanded, and the column of troops because it went “up and down” the direction of travel as opposed to a rank, which went crossways. The rest are pretty straightforward — the definition of excel is to elevate, and a culmination is a peak.
The devout devotees vowed to vote.
All are from Latin vovere, to vow or pledge, originally to speak in public. Devout and devote are two spellings of the same word.
Stray vagrants and vagabonds are often vague but seldom extravagant.
All are from Latin vagus, wandering, as is vagary. Extravagant literally means “wandering away”; its Italian form is extravaganza. “Stray” is what the French did to “extravagent”, retaining more of the literal sense. In anatomy, the vagus nerve is responsible for your “innards”. It starts out in the back of the brain, descends through the middle of the neck, and ends up in the intestines, controlling the tongue, throat, heart, and lungs on the way, not to mention intestinal peristalsis, vomiting, hiccups, the feeling of hunger, etc. It is sometimes called the pneumogastric nerve by those who like extra syllables. The fact that the vagus is not routed via the spinal cord is the reason why a person with a broken neck can still breathe and their heart still beats. There are even cases of women with a completely severed spinal cord achieving orgasm via the vagus nerve, which reaches all the way to the uterus. Some experts think these “wander” words are all from Indo-European weig-, which means bend or wind, in which case wander itself is a relative. See witch hazel, wicker, weak, and the Vandals for the rest of that family.
The gallant William of his own volition will benevolently will his wealth to a voluptuously well-endowed volunteer.
All are derivatives of an ie root wel-, to wish or will. The first syllable of Germanic personal names like William (i.e. Wilhelm) and Wilfred means “strong-willed” or “firm”, as does the French gallant. Latin voluptus meant “pleasure” (that which was willed or desired), while all the others are pretty obvious. Benevolence translates exactly into English as “good will”, just as malevolence is “ill will”. Your last will [and testament] of course contains your last wishes.
The parents prepared for the emperor’s parade on the ramparts by repairing their parasols and separately paring several apples.
The basic meaning of Indo-European pare- was to make ready or defend against, which easily accounts for some of my examples — prepare is “make ready before”, repair is “make ready again”, and the verb to pare is “make ready” [to eat]. A parade was a procession prepared in advance. Emperor and its adjective imperial are from a Latin word for a military commander in charge of strategy, while rampart is perverted from Latin re-ante-parere, a fortification “prepared in advance”, and a parasol defends against the sun, just as a parachute defends against a fall and a parapet defends the breast, from the pect- root seen in pectoral and expectorate. Parry seems to have started out as the French fencing command parez!, defend yourself! A repertory company of actors is ready to put on any of several plays — that is, they have a repertoire or catalog. 04Aug09 Apparatus is another Latin word for something prepared in advance; the French form is apparel. Note that these are not related to the Greek terms in para- (parallel, parochial, parabola, parish, paradigm, etc.) where the meaning is “beside”.
I couldn’t say they prepared to repair to the ramparts because that “repair” is unrelated. Etymologically, it is the same word as repatriate, to return to one’s fatherland or simply “go home”. Patriotism also extends Latin pater to the metaphorical “land of one’s fathers”. The Romans already had this sense — c.f. the phrase pro patria. (It says something about biology that “fatherland” is used in aggressive contexts, while motherland isn’t.)
One variation of the basic “make ready” sense was to set in place. Separate is literally to “set beside”, and the French versions of that produced several and sever. Another variation of “make ready” was to produce, leading to parare, the Latin word for “give birth”. A mother is technically the one and only parent, and hopefully she did not suffer from post-partum depression “after the birth”. (Actually, fathers have also been called parents from ancient times, mainly because medical opinion was that a child was solely the product of its father, who was responsible for the “seed” of the child, and the mother was merely the fertile ground where the seed grew. I do not know how our ancestors accounted for children who looked exactly like their mothers.) Last but not least, Grimm’s Law gets invoked to account for fearr, a Germanic word for “calf” now seen as the second syllable of heifer.
Confusingly, Indo-European had a second pare- root whose definition was to allot or apportion. Its descendants include part, apart, apartment, parcel, particle, parse, party, repartee, portion, proportion, and several others. Depart has changed meaning quite a ways from the original literal meaning of “divide up”. The marriage vow was originally “until death us depart”, and phrases like “they departed all the food” were common. By extension, the root came to mean “divvy up equally”, and so Latin par meant equal, now seen in par itself, parity, pair, peer, and compare, to “pair with”. As mentioned elsewhere, participate is Latin parti-capere, take part (or partake).
On this continent, not many people contain themselves and continue to be contented with continence.
All these are members of the Latin continere (“hold together”) family. A continent is “contained” as a single piece of dry land, and the modern sense of continue is from “hang together”, seen more easily in continuous and continual. The contents of a box are “held together” in one place, while the adjective sense (I am contented with this explanation) is from an extension of “held together” to “restrained” to “self-restrained” to “satisfied”. The intermediate of “self-restrained” is of course responsible for the meaning of continence, whether in matters sexual or urinary. Meanwhile, how you hold yourself is your countenance. See that tenacious tenor above for more “hold” words from Latin tenere.
The cattle grazed on the green grass growing in the meadow.
In this sentence, the same Indo-European root is used four times in a row. The gro- root means to grow. The original meaning of green was “growing” before it became a color word, while grass is “that which has grown”. To graze, meanwhile, is to eat grass.
Austin, Augusta, St. Augustine, Augsburg, and Zaragoza bookstores held an auction of many authors one August to augment their auxiliary cash.
All are from the Latin aug-, auct- root meaning to grow bigger and better. In an auction, the bids continuously increase, i.e., are augmented. Author once meant “grower” or “increaser” in general, before being restricted to the creator of manuscripts. August was originally an adjective meaning grand. The month name is from the title of the Roman Emperor Octavian, self-proclaimed Caesar Augustus, who was quite definite that if his predecessor Julius got a month to himself, then, by the gods, so did he. There’s a legend that he was responsible for February’s shortness — supposedly the month of Sextilis only had 30 days, but since July had 31, Octavian borrowed one from February to fatten his month. (Unfortunately for this good story, Sextilis seems to have always had 31 days.) During Octavian’s lifetime, the Romans sardonically (if seditiously) remarked that there couldn’t be any more than another ten emperors, because after that they would run out of months. Fortunately, Octavian’s successor Tiberius decided not to confiscate September, but by coincidence the Julian/Flavian line of emperors did die out after twelve. (C.f. Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars.)
As for the place names, Austin, Texas is an English contraction of [Saint] Augustine, as mentioned elsewhere. Zaragoza, Spain, is a contraction of Caesaraugusta, the original name of the Roman colony, while Augsburg, Germany is half-translated from Latin [Urbs] Augusta. Augusta, Georgia is named for the mother of King George III. Augusta, Maine, however, is named for the daughter of the local congressman.
Other “grow strong” words from the same ie root include Germanic eke [out], nickname (an ekename, additional name), and wax (as opposed to wane). From Latin we get auxiliary (a reinforcement) and authority, which meant the creator’s power to force obedience. 17May09 An augur tried to increase chances of success, often at an inauguration. Unfortunately for dieters, a Germanic waist is yet another growth.
In her deliciously delectable lace, the dilettante cowgirl twirled her delicate lasso in front of the delicatessen and elicited delightful applause.
Rather improbably, the whole delight family, including delicious, elicit, dilettante, delectable, delicate, delicatessen, etc. are related to the lasso. The Latin verb lacare meant to lure or deceive. One relative was laqueus, a noose or snare, leading to latch, lasso, and shoelace, i.e., shoe-latch. From there, French developed the name of the far more delicate collection of loops called lace. Anyway, the original meaning of delicious was “tempting, able to lure into a snare”, so a delicacy was once the bait of a trap. Surely any discussion of “bait” has to include Ambrose Bierce’s definition of the term: “That which makes the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty.”
One more member of the lasso family is luscious, which seems to be a back-formation from “delicious”. Luscious certainly ought to be related to lust and/or luxury, but the experts say all three words are unrelated. (Lust and lascivious are from a las- root that meant “eager” or “wanton”, while luxury and de luxe are from a Latin word for “extravagant”.
Don’t waste your time, avoid vain, wanton people who want to devastate your vacation.
I’m very proud of that sentence, which manages to contain seven derivatives of the Indo-European eue- root, which means to leave or abandon, with a secondary sense of lacking or empty. Most of my seven are obvious, given that definition, with “wanton” probably the only exception. It’s a blend of “want” (i.e., need) and an Old English word that meant to discipline, so the original meaning is “lacking discipline” or “untrained.” Other words from eue- include wane, vast, vanish, evanescent, vacuum, evacuate, and vacant. Vain, vainglory, and vanity progressed in meaning from “empty” to “useless” to “foolish” to “having a high opinion of oneself.” The “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” cliché from the Bible means everything is useless (in vain), not conceited. Shakespeare seems to have invented the word vasty, in a scene where Glendower boasts, “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” to which Hotspur cynically replies, “Why so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?” 23Sep09 Vaunt and avaunt are from the conceited sense, though — both originally meant to brag.
Along the same lines, beetles might bite into some bitter bait while trying to abet a fissure in a boat.
Indo-European bheidh- meant to cut or split off. A beetle bites things, a bitter taste is “biting”, the original boat was a dugout log, and a fissure (from Latin) is a “split”, as of course is an atom after nuclear fission. The original meaning of abet was to hunt with dogs, and then to entice with food. Both senses of “bait” (bait a trap or bear-baiting) are also from “bite”, and a drill bit bites into an object. A bit of something is of course a bite, but a 32-bit computer is unrelated, being a syncopation of “binary digit” as mentioned elsewhere. (Also mentioned elsewhere, atom means “uncuttable”, so “atomic fission” is an excellent oxymoron.)
To bite the dust is a phrase which most people probably associate with Cowboys and Indians, but in fact it was a favorite cliché of Homer 2,500 years earlier. Almost every English translation of the Iliad uses either “bit the dust” or “bit the sand”. Groveling, q.v., is a synonym.
Unlike elected officials, most people do not think it is either proper or appropriate to appropriate another’s property.
The root of all this is the Latin word for “ownership”. Property is obvious, as are “proper noun” and “proper motion”. A proprietor is the owner of a business and often has a proprietary attitude. To appropriate was to annex another’s property, whether legally or not. Gradually, “proper behavior” came to mean correct behavior, not merely that which was peculiar to a particular person, giving proper actions, proper fractions (which follow the rules), propriety, and the adjective “appropriate”. Interestingly, improper speech once was quite proper in polite society. Going back to the “one’s own” sense, a proper thought was something to be taken literally, while improper meant “metaphorical”, leading to now-startling usages like “Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the most improper books ever written,” or “The 23rd Psalm is quite improper.”
The “real” root is per- which has a bunch of meanings (the whole for, fore, pro-, and proto- families among others), but in particular, one set means “near” or “against”, Latin prope. This produced approach, reproach, approximate, and proximity. Other English derivatives include fro and from. Amazingly, frame is essentially the same word as “from”. The original definition of the verb to frame was to make progress. That progressed to “improve” or “make ready”, hence the carpenters’ work in framing a house, as well as to frame a thought. The picture frame came later, from the “put timber together” sense. A “frame-up” still has a hint of the original meaning of prearrangement.
16Apr09 English has appropriated Latin per to mean “for” in quite a few usages — not only Latin phrases like per diem and per capita but also naturalized “per day”, “per hour”, and so on. Similarly, pro is used to mean “for” in “pro and con[tra]”, although as a prefix (provide, proactive) it usually means “before”.
17Nov09 The unrepentant prisoner found the penitentiary to be a painful penalty and pined for a subpoena to release him from his punishment.
All are from the Latin poen- root that meant a punishment or fine. Penitentiary was originally a religious adjective in phrases like “penitentiary confession”. Penitent, penance, penal and repent are of course from the same root, while impunity means to have “no punishment”. The original meaning of pain in English was “penalty”, still seen in phrases like “under pain of death”. Both pain and pine (borrowed at different times from Latin) acquired the related meaning of suffering, helped along by the cliché “pains of childbirth”, which probably first meant “penalty”. Pine in particular was originally transitive, to torture; the oed has a quotation about some prisoner being pined until he confessed. Pain then softened even further to “trouble” or “effort”, giving phrases like “to take great pains” about something, “no pain, no gain”, and the single-word condensation, painstaking. (Painful once was used to mean conscientious.) A subpoena is named from the Latin first words of the legal writ — Sub poena duces tecum…. — “Under penalty [of law] you will appear….” 17Nov09 Impudent is not related; that’s Latin for “no shame”. At this point you may be sensitized enough to Grimm’s Law to wonder if a “fine” is a Germanic relative of the “penalty” family. It’s not; it is a Latin relative of “finish” instead
You may also be wondering if pen, an enclosure, is related to penitentiary. Nope — see pond instead. (That reminds me — for some reason, Americans started colloquially using yep (or yup) and nope for “yes” and “no” sometime about 1890.)
The horn of a very cerebral rhinoceros gave it a migraine, but reindeer, unicorns, and triceratops avoid cranial and cervical problems by eating carrots and ginger.
The Indo-European ker- root means horn. In Latin this produced corn-, as in unicorn, cornet, cornucopia (horn of plenty), corner, Capricorn, (goat’s horn), the horny cornea which covers the eye, etc. The painful corn on one’s toe also is “horny” skin. In Greek, the ie root produced keros in rhino-keros, nose-horn, Monoceros (unicorn in Greek, the name of a constellation), and keratin (yet more horny skin). The triceratops dinosaur is Greek tri-kerat-ops, three horns [over the] eyes. Carrot (also from Greek) and ginger (from Persian) are “horn” words, from their shape. Grimm’s law changes ker- to her- or simply hr-, and so we have Germanic reindeer, originally spelled “hreintier”, i.e., horned animal. (Tier- is simply the German word for animal — the German for zoo is Tiergarten. As late as Shakespeare, English “deer” meant any wild animal, and the word is also seen in wilderness, wild-deer-ness. See “dust and fume” elsewhere for more relatives.) Other Germanic horned animals are the hart and the hornet. The original definition of hurt (and of hurtle) was “violently collide”, so they are possible relatives by way of rams butting their heads.
In Latin, the word was also generalized to “forehead” (where horns were usually attached), leading to cranium, cerebrum, and cerebellum. Migraine is a French perversion of Greek hemikrania, half-forehead, because the pain normally only attacks one side. (The English further massaged the word all the way to megrim.) In later Latin, that forehead drifted downward, ultimately giving cheer (literally, “face”), and cervix, anatomical Latin for “neck”. (Anatomists in fact not only have the cervix between head and shoulders, but also the cervix uteri, (neck of the uterus), cervix femoris, (thigh bone), cervix vesicae, (bladder), and cervix dentis, (the line where tooth meets gum). As a result, cervical cancer is quite a ways from the cervical vertebrae.)
Discriminating critics agree that for a hypocrite to secretly riddle someone with bullets certainly makes that person a certified criminal.
All these are derivatives of the Indo-European krei- root that means to sift, discriminate or discern. “Riddle” in this sense is a Germanic word hriddel that means “sieve”. (The unrelated mysterious riddle is a “read” word.) Crime, criminal, etc. arise from the sense of “judgement” or “decision”, as do discern and ascertain. A secret is “separated off”, probably by someone who is discrete. To certify is to “make certain”, using a certificate. Greek relatives include critic (one who decides), crisis (a critical decision point in a drama or illness), and the criterion used to make a decision. A hypocrite was originally a stage actor, who “answered back”, and to recriminate originally meant to make a counter-accusation in court. Garble, to mix up, would seem to be the opposite of discern, but actually, it is another “sift” word; the current meaning appears to be from the idea of garbling ingredients when cooking. Finally, excrement is that which is “sifted out”.
sure and its derivatives look like they might be related, but they are part of the Latin care family, q.v.
The mercurial mercenary was quite merciful to the commercial merchant, taking only a Mercator map.
Have faith and all shall be made plain. The basic merc- root means fee or reward. Both mercenaries and merchants charge fees for services or goods, so no problem there. Mercantile, merchandise, commerce, and market are related. The map projection was devised by one Gerhard Kremer, who Latinized his surname (which means “trader” in German) to “Mercator”. Mercury was the Roman god who was patron of both merchants and thieves (showing that the Romans had a sardonic sense of humor) as well as being the messenger of the gods. Both the planet and the liquid metal are from the “fast-moving” sense implied by the god with his winged heels, and mercurial means “quickly changeable” as applied to a person’s emotions. Meanwhile, the original meaning of mercy was a reward, with the implication that it was one to which a person was not really entitled, and that is still a strong sense of the word as used today. Note that in French merci means “thank you”.
Speaking of Latinized names, other examples are Copernicus (Koppernik), Columbus (Colon), and Confucius (Kung Fu Tsze, Kung the Master). For hundreds of years, the treatise on metallurgy and mining was De Re Metallica by Agricola, whose real name was Georg Bauer — “Farmer Farmer” in Greek and German! Everybody knows Wolfgang Mozart’s middle name was Amadeus, but it wasn’t. That’s a Latin translation of his middle name as given on his birth record, Gottlieb, God’s Love. (He himself never used Amadeus, by the way. As an adult he signed his name either “Amadeo” or “Amadé” in Italian or French style.)
Those who resolve to use solutions of LSD tend to be dissolute and lost, with absolutely no resolution or analytical ability, and with no hope of absolution or solvency.
There is an Indo-European leu- root that means to loosen, divide, or separate. The Germanic descendants include loose, lost, less, and lorn. (Forlorn is “completely lost”.) Geologists use the German term loess for fine, wind-deposited “loose” soil. Greek provides several terms in lys-, to separate, such as dialysis, (separating across), analysis (separating out), hydrolysis (breaking apart through the action of water), and paralysis. That last doesn’t look like it belongs, but it is perfectly good Greek “loosened from beside”, i.e., enfeebled or disabled. (By the way, the French squeezed that word all the way down to palsy.) In cell biology, a lysosome is where food particles are broken down and digested, and of course Lysol® loosens dirt. Finally, lysergic acid, the /L/ and /S/ of LSD, (LysergSaure-Diathylamid in the original German), is a product of the breakdown of ergot, a fungus affecting grain.
The Latin words in the opening sentence are through the compound se-leu, to “separate out”, turned into the verb solvere, to loosen. These can be obvious, like soluble substances that can dissolve in liquid to form a solution. To solve a problem is to “take it apart” to see how it ticks. In absolution, one is “separated away” or freed from a judgement. The original meaning of absolute was “detached”, which then drifted to “freed from defects, perfect”; presumably the state of a former sinner who has been absolved. To resolve started out as a synonym of solve, specifically, to understand, then to decide. A resolution is a decision, and someone who is resolute has no doubts. Dissolute literally means “loose”, now applied to loose morals or loose living, but once used in the literal sense. Opticians and astronomers resolve an image by breaking it into its finest components, and talk about the resolution of a lens or telescope. Finally, a person who is solvent has solved his or her financial problems.
It is barely possible that a collection of words with the meaning of loose or weak might be related to the above — for example, sleep, slack, slake, lax, relax, languish, leash, lush, and release. Slacks are of course the opposite of tights. The etymological definition of lease is “let” or “allow”, while Law French laches means negligence — failure to file a claim or assert a right in a reasonable time, for example. In a beautiful example of apparent sarcasm, the Spanish Inquisition used “relax” to mean “burn at the stake”, in phrases like “fifteen heretics were relaxed yesterday”.
29Aug09 Pollute is not related — that’s from a different leu- root that meant dirt via the Latin word for mud, lutum. The metaphorical sense of morally impure is a hundred years or so older in English than the physical — 1382 vs. 1548. “Air pollution” wasn’t recorded until 1955, though.
A person with either diverse or divers romantic diversions can easily become involved in a nasty divorce.
These are Latin divertere, to turn aside or divert. Technically English has produced both “diverse”, not of the same kind, and “divers”, several, but the two words are easily confused even in context. Consider phrases like “a coat of divers [or diverse] colors.” In the first sentence, I was distinguishing between diverse (very different) and divers (very many) interests, either of which could lead to trouble. See the section on worms and wrists for a whole bunch more “turn” words.
The pessimism of an impetuously competitive incompetent Mesopotamian hippopotamus’s perpetual appetite repeatedly gave it the symptoms of ptomaine.
All those are ultimately from the Indo European pet- root which meant to rush. From this, a whole bunch of metaphorical meanings developed in Greek and Latin, including to leap, to seek, to desire, to fly, to flow, and to fall. Impetuous people leap at things, perpetual means “continually seeking”, appetite is Latin ad-petere, to desire toward, and a petition seeks an answer. A symptom is Greek sym-ptoma, to fall together, used to mean “accident” or “misfortune”. Lines which are asymptotic do not fall together. Also from the “fallen” sense is ptomaine, a modern medical word based on the Greek for “fallen one”, i.e., corpse. Stretching things even further, Greek potomos meant a (flowing) river, leading to hippo-potomos (river horse) and Meso-potamia (land between the rivers i.e., the Tigris and Euphrates — modern Iraq). Still another extension, from the “fly” sense this time, led to Greek pter-, wing, seen in modern words like pterodactyl (wing finger), helicopter (helix or spiral wing), and lepidoptera (the scientific name of moths and butterflies, literally “scaly wings”). That lep- root is also seen in leprosy, characterized by scaly skin. Apteryx (no wings) is the scientific name of the flightless kiwi. From the “wing” sense we get Latin penna (see the Pen and Pencil discussion back at the beginning) and Germanic feather and fin. (Seals and walrus are called pinnipeds — fin-feet — and the fins of penguins really are wings.) The Latin past participle of pet- is pess-, and a pessimist thinks things have “fallen far”. Centripetal force “seeks the center” (as opposed to centrifugal, which “flees the center”), to repeat is literally to “attack again”, and to compete was originally to “seek with”; a competitor originally was a fellow-seeker, not a rival. Competent is a cousin; Latin competere meant both “seek with” and “coincide”, and the latter sense developed into “convenient” and “suitable”.
Floyd’s polio shot caused him to turn pallid, but he was totally appalled when a pale falcon clawed his palomino.
The ie pel- root meant pale or grey. A palomino is a pale horse (originally it was a pale dove instead), and to appall means to turn pale. The disease poliomyelitis is characterized by “grey myelin” attacking the nerves, the Germanic falcon is a grey bird, and the fallow deer is another pale animal. 26Apr09 (Falcon in its current spelling is probably folk etymology in the Romance languages — Latin falco means “hook” or “sickle” as applied to the bird’s talons.) Continuing westward, both Floyd and Lloyd are from Welsh llwyd, grey. There is another group of pel- words where the meaning is “dust”, so they might be related. If so, then we can count pollen, polenta, powder, and pulverize, while both pulp and poultice come from the Latin word for porridge, made from flour.
Myelin (from the Greek term for marrow) is the electrical insulation wrapped around nerve fibers, so when it is damaged, nerves “short out” and cease to work correctly. Not only Polio, but also Leprosy, Multiple Sclerosis, and Guillain-Barre syndrome involve myelin failure either in the peripheral nerves or the brain.
A riled-up revolutionary named Nellie Walker kept a large volume of revolvers hidden in a welded vault in her helicopter, and as a diversion, she waltzed in a hog wallow.
A somewhat unlikely scenario, but the ie eulu- root of all those words meant to roll or turn. Most English relatives are by way of Latin volvere — revolve, revolt, convolution, vulva (“wrapper”), etc. Samuel Colt coined the term “revolver” as the trade name of his new repeating pistol. Involve is the opposite of evolve. To “involve” is literally to “roll up in”, while evolution is “rolled out”, originally applied to a volume (i.e., a scroll) of text. (Even when one considers all the weird examples in this document, the transfer in meaning of “volume” from “scroll” to “big book” to “bigness” to “amount of sound” is remarkable.) Rolling the scroll back up again was devolution. The architectural sense of vault is the older; it’s a synonym of “arch” — the “jump over” sense (pole vault) came later. The original definition of valve was a swinging door, which is why the clam and its relatives are called bivalves. Rile, to stir up, is from the French version of “roll”, and it originally meant to muddy the waters.
For some reason, a Swedish automobile has a perfectly conjugated Latin name; Volvo is the first person singular present tense of volvere — “I roll”. The Toyota Prius is a pure Latin adjective meaning “first”. (The comparative is prior and the superlative primus.) We are also afflicted with a Japanese car with an Old Persian name, the Mazda, meaning “good”. The chief god of the Zoroastrians was Ahura-Mazda, where the first word means “spirit”, related to Latin anima, with the same meaning. Ahura-Mazda was the god of light, which is why General Electric once used Mazda as their brand name for light bulbs.
If you have followed all this, you might be thinking, “But what about ‘welded’?” The original verb meant to boil or bubble — we still speak of a “rolling boil”. The past tense was “welled” or “weld”, which changed its meaning to “molten” in phrases like “the plumber used welled lead.” Meanwhile, the hole-in-the-ground sense of well is from the idea of water welling (bubbling) up in a spring.
In Germanic, a waltz is a “rolling” dance, while a wallet is the “roll” of money in your pocket. Surprisingly, walk is also a “roll” word — early quotations talk about the “walking sea”. To wallow involves rolling around in the mud. In Greek, the “turn” root became heli- as in helix, helicopter, etc. A very unexpected relative is the name Helen, Greek for “brightness”, but originally a (twisted) torch. (Note that torch itself also means “twisted”; it is a relative of torque, etc.) Nellie, Nell, Ellen, Lena, Eleanor, and Nora are all forms of Helen. C.f. Nan and Nancy as forms of Anne, from Hebrew Hannah. 26Dec09 (John (Hebrew Jahanan, God’s grace) and Hannibal (Punic “grace of Ba’al”) also contain the Semitic hnn root meaning “grace, favor”.)
The most famous Helen, of course, was Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships” in the immortal words of Marlowe. Recently this phrase was used to create the international scientific standard of feminine beauty, the milliHelen or mH, defined as the amount of facial beauty sufficient to launch exactly one ship. This is a very precise measurement, so if a particular young lady is described as having 743 mH, everyone knows exactly how pretty she is. One virtue of the milliHelen as the unit of beauty is that the scale is open-ended in both directions. It is conceivable (although unlikely) that a truly stunning beauty might be judged at 1500 or 2000 mH, adjusted for inflation, and the other end of the scale doesn’t need to stop at zero. Whereas a score of 0 mH means the subject is so plain she could not launch a single ship, a rating of -10 mH implies that the face in question could sink ten ships instead. A correspondingly precise scale for male attractiveness has never been necessary, since that has always been measurable in dollars, euros, or whatever.
26Oct09 The straitlaced and strict district attorney distressed the strong defendent by stringently restricting him in a constricting straitjacket.
Latin stringere (to tighten) is responsible for all these, in addition to string, astringent (ad-stringere, bind to), strain, stress, straitened circumstances, dire straits, and the geographical strait. As mentioned elsewhere, Detroit is “the Strait” (i.e., the Narrows) in French. The kitchen implement called a strainer forces things through tight places. 26Oct09 The original meaning of “district” was “area of jurisdiction”; it’s the past participle of “distress”.
A straitjacket is sometimes misspelled
“straightjacket” by the unwary. C.f. straitlaced,
originally used of a corset. Straight and narrow is
another mistake — the actual biblical passage (the King James
version of Matthew 7:13) says
Pleonasms are surprisingly common in casual speech.
For example, when I make a mistake, I call myself a stupid idiot.
(There are smart idiots?) How about, “I saw it with my own
eyes!” (as opposed to with your eyes?), or “I had advance
warning.” Other common phrases include enter into, close
proximity, unsolved mysteries, mental telepathy, and thousands more.
Legal terminology is full of apparent pleonasms: cease and desist, aid
and abet, null and void, terms and conditions, first and foremost, and
many more. Sometimes they are intentional — consider Yogi
Berra’s “This is deja vu all over again.”
All these were produced by the ie eurg- root
that meant “work” or “do”. Germanic
work and Greek energy are really
obvious, but an organ (either the musical instrument
or the body structure) is Greek organon, tool, an
organism is a “worker”, the related
adjective is organic, etc. In military jargon, a
“work” was a defensive structure, such as an
outwork, an earthwork (mound of
dirt), and the bulwark made of boles — tree
trunks. As mentioned elsewhere, boulevard is Frenchified from
“bulwark”. George is only slightly less obvious;
it’s Greek geo-erg, earth worker, i.e., farmer. King
George III of England was affectionately called “Farmer
George” by his subjects, and a georgic is a
poem with a rural setting. An orgy (q.v.) was originally a religious
festival (i.e., an activity) in honor of Bacchus or Dionysus. Since
these gods were the patrons of wine, the orgiastic rites tended to be
somewhat rowdy.
Surgeon is really obscure, but it started out as Greek
chirurgeon, hand worker, while allergy is a
20th-century coinage to mean “action by another
substance”. The scientific unit of work is the
erg, and I’m sitting in an
Ergon® office chair, a back-formation from
ergonomics, the study of efficient working
environments. In liturgy, the first syllable is
Greek leitos, public, from a root that also gave
lay and laity, so the literal
meaning is “a public work”. The inert chemical element
argon is Greek a-ergon, no work.
Inert itself looks like it should be “not
working” but is not; it is “no art”
instead. Urge also looks like it might be related to
the family, but not so — see wretch and
wreck. Last but not least, the definition of
organic has changed from “related to a living
organism” to “a chemical containing carbon”
(c.f. organic chemistry) and then to “a very expensive food
product grown with shit”.
All five of those words are from the Latin gerere, past
participle gestus, to carry, do, or act, although
considerable drifting of meaning has occurred. A
jest was once any kind of an action, as still in the
French beau geste— a good deed. A gesture was
originally how a person carried or conducted himself or herself.
Belligerent is a compound of bellus (war) and gerere,
acting in a war-like manner. (To rebel is to make
war again.) Lastly, to suggest once meant simply to
“carry out” some action. Gestation is
another “carry” word, and the grammatical
gerund is, in fact, the gerund of gerere. If
you think these are getting far-fetched, I suppose there’s no
point in trying to convince you that congest,
digest, ingest, and
register are all definitely related, and Germanic
cast, broadcast,
forecast, castaway, and
downcast (all with the sense of “throw”),
might be. Congest and digest are really opposites — to
“carry together” and “carry apart”. PS
— castigate looks like it might be another
“throw” word, but it isn’t; it is instead the same
term as chastise, from the Latin “pure” root also seen in
caste and chastity.
An allergic surgeon named
George energetically
worked to organize an
organic liturgical
orgy by playing an organ on the
boulevard.
The belligerent jester made a
suggestive and exaggerated
gesture.
