Work Your Abs Part One

Many people are thinking these days of the resolutions they will institute on January 1 and break on January 2. I’m thinking I’ll begin the year working on my abs. (For you Latin scholars, a little joke: you may wonder when I’ll get off my abs.)

First, I’ll do my morning ablutions (and discover the difference between morning ablutions and morning constitution), then I’ll work on the difference between abscond and absquatulate. Then I’ll be abstemious, and maybe all this is facetious.

Yes, the abs I’m working on are words that begin with ab-. I reencountered the word ablutions while reading the Bret Harte book The Luck of Roaring Camp some time ago. The first interesting thing about the word is that I have rarely seen it used in its singular form: ablution. An ablution is a cleansing with water or other liquid (I suppose those hand gels that are ubiquitous in hospitals qualify). Ablutions are washing of hands, face, etc. The word came to English directly from Latin in the late 14^th century. The closest word is ablutionem, the nominative form of which is ablution, in case you’re wondering. It is described by etymonline.com as a noun of action, from the past participle stem of the word abluere, which means to wash off and is formed from the addition of the prefix ab- , which means off (see Latin joke above), to the word luere, which means wash.

A phrase I associate with ablutions is morning constitutional. It is more difficult to find meanings for phrases, and after well over four minutes of searching online I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory etymology for the phrase “morning constitution”. (Several sites repeated a reference to walking that also included a reference to a “bowl” movement. Since they repeated the misspelling of bowel, I assume it was a cut and paste of someone’s original mistake. Or maybe I need to do a post on the difference between bowl and bowel….) So, without a phrase etymology, let’s look at the word etymologies to see what can be found.

The word constitution came to English in the mid-14^th century in reference to laws or edicts. It came from the Old French word constitucion, which they got from the Latin word constitutionem. Constitutionem is the act of settling, or a setting condition or regulation, order or ordinance. By the 1550s the word constitution began to refer to physical health, as in the phrase “she’s got a strong constitution.” In the 1680s the adjective constitutional developed, originally pertaining to a person’s physical or mental constitution. Since there is a healthy argument over whether it is better to work out in the morning or evening it is necessary to refer to that which is beneficial to your physical constitution as your morning constitutional. (The use of the phrase to refer to excretion is recent; I have heard it only since the 1970s.)

So you may wish to do your morning ablutions after your morning constitutional. More abs next week; I'm not giving up on them on Jan. 2.