I'm No Aristotle, Part 2

Last week was Albuquerque, this week eastern Pennsylvania. Last week was peregrination and peripatetic, this week is extirpate and deracinative. You may not think they are related (they don’t look alike) but they both are rooted in the same idea.

Extirpate gives away a little of its meaning with the prefix ex-. (Neither extirpate nor deracinate have the corresponding  positive verbs: tirpate or racinate. See blog on prefixes posted 12/26/09 for other ex-amples.) Both extirpate and deracinate mean pull up by the roots. For extirpate it is the secondary meaning; its primary meaning is to completely destroy or exterminate.  (How can exterminate and terminate mean the same thing? I see another post coming…) The secondary definition of deracinate is to isolate someone from their culture, home, or environment.

So, while I may be deracinating this week (as I travel across country) I will not be extirpating. If we decided to move to another state (Texas and Arizona are choices 1 and 2) we would be deracinating.  We may pull up roots (in which case extirpate might qualify) but  deracinate is the better descriptor of moving to a new home in a different state. Those who have suffered from the recent tornadoes might decide to extirpate because of all the extirpation around them.

So why do two such similar words look so different? The original root words (I couldn’t help myself) are Latin. For deracinate the root is racix, for extirpate it is stirpus. Racix is the word from which we get radish, which makes sense. The Latin word stirps refers to a tree root.

Sometime in the 15^th century the word extirpating came to English directly from Latin, where the ex- prefix (meaning “out” had already been added to stirps). It began its English life meaning “removal” and by the 1520s expanded (not just panded) to mean rooting out or eradicating (can one radicate?)

Deracinate came to English in the 1590s over the channel from France, where the French were using the word déraciner, which they got from the Old French word desraciner. The Old French had taken the Late Latin word radicina and shortened it to raciner and added their prefix des-. Radicina  is the diminutive form of the aforementioned radix.

As so often happens, when researching one word I find new words (or related words) that should be included. This week’s two words in that category are itinerant and a new word to me: busker.

Itinerant is a word I’ve read and used to describe someone whose employment requires them to travel considerably, usually an adjective to “preacher” or “evangelist”. But I’d never considered its actual meaning. The dictionaries I consulted all define it as travel relating to work, in which case I could be described as itinerant. One dictionary said it refers especially to travel in a circuit. I know that when Abraham Lincoln was an itinerant judge, he traveled in a specific circuit, so I see where that definition came from.

The word itinerant, according to etymonline.com, arrived in English in the 1560s, “(attested in Anglo-Latin from late 13^th c.)” and referred initially only to circuit courts. I was surprised to find that some circuit court judges still travel a circuit in the U.S. English got the word from the Late Latin word itinerantem, which was formed from the Latin word iter (meaning journey).

Busker will have to wait until next week.