Adverse Adjectives - As Advertised Part II

(...continued from last week.) 

Averse, on the other hand (would that be an adverse hand?) means resistant or opposed to. How is that different from adverse? In popular usage adverse refers to an outside circumstance opposing an action or opinion. (Another person might have an adverse opinion of you.) Averse refers to an inside feeling or opinion affecting something outside oneself. (You might be averse to listening to someone’s opinion or averse to taking an action.) It comes from the Latin word aversus, which means turned back or turned away. [Perhaps a Latin scholar can weigh in on the difference between the Latin prefixes ad- and a-; I am not that person.]

Both adverse and averse have the idea of opposing force, or something trying to change minds or circumstances. The web site etymonline.com (from which I get most of my etymological commentary) explains that averse refers to a mental sense while the word avert is the physical sense (averting disaster being its most common usage). No wonder, then, that both averse and adverse are related etymologically to the word advertising, whose intent is to get us to change our minds about a product. You may be averse to advertising, which means advertising has adverse conditions in getting your business and averting bankruptcy.

Advertising sometimes appeals to our prurient interests. While the word prurient means inclined toward or having lascivious or lustful thoughts (What’s the difference? Isn’t lust a thought?) it can also mean having a restlessness or longing. My wife often gets disgusted by how often “sex” is used to sell anything from hamburgers to luxury cars. Get us to lust after an item and we’re a step closer to buying it. (Don’t you love it when they use a word like lascivious to define a word like prurient. I think there’s a mean streak in those who write definitions and they take fiendish delight in sending the user from one part of the dictionary to another.) 

The second definition is anything that causes lust. So why does the word prurient look so different from venal? Prurient and averse are very different words that both come from Latin; obviously they come from very different places. Prurient came directly from the Latin word prurientum, which is the prp of pruriere, not from the root word venus. Pruriere means “to itch, long for, be wanton”, a more general meaning than the specific sexual meaning relating to venus. (I’ll pause in case you look up the word wanton.) Prurient arrived in English in the 1630s, much later than the other words we've considered this last two entries. 

While it can be used for any longing that is not socially acceptable, it is now used mostly in reference to sexual desires. If you doubt me, use prurient the next time you need a vacation and see if others look at you oddly.