Stand and Scrute Understand and Scrutinize

I have found myself using the word inscrutable with greater frequency lately. It means incapable of being scrutinized, or analyzed and investigated. Scrutinize means to examine in detail with careful or critical attention. It also means to conduct a scrutiny. (Scrutiny on the Bounty, anyone?) A scrutiny is a searching examination or investigation or a surveillance or close look. So we are conducting a scrutiny of the forms of the noun scrutiny. Scrutinize is the verb form and scrutable or inscrutable the adjective form. (My spell-check does not recognize scrutable but my dictionary does. I'm going with the dictionary.)

Scrutiny came to English first, as one might imagine. It arrived in the early 1400s from the Latin word scrutinium, which meant a search or inquiry. But scrutiny did not mean examine in its original English use. Originally the word scrutiny meant a vote to choose someone to decide a question, because in Medieval Latin scrutinium meant "a mode of election by ballot."

Then, in about 1500, along came the word inscrutable. Coming from the Late Latin word inscrutabilis, it meant to not examine or ransack. Why such a difference? Scrutarini is the Latin word for examine or ransack and it is possible that the root word for both scrutarini and inscrutabilis is scruta, which is a plural word for trash or rags. Digging through trash or a pile of rags would be scrutinizing, and if you do not go to that extent to investigate something you are being inscrutable.

But scrutinize was not the word being used as a verb. In fact, until the 1590s there was no verb form. At that time the English took a French word and adopted it as a verb: scrutine. For some reason that did not take root, and by 1670 the verb scrutinize had become preeminent. Understand?

Wait. Look at that word. Un-der-stand. Past tense un-der-stood. Stand and stood have nothing to do with perceiving the meaning of something, do they? And how do you get under the stand? We understand the meaning of under and of stand, but how did they get combined to mean understand?

Under such circumstances we go to etymonline.com, which provides some background on words. Understand is the current form of the Old English word understanden that probably meant literally stand in the midst of, not stand under, because the prefix under in Old English did not only mean beneath but also among or in the midst of (like the Latin prefix inter- or the Sanskrit anter.) We still use that meaning in the expression "under the circumstances" with which I began this paragraph.

Etymonline goes on to suggest that the ultimate sense of the word use is equivalent to the Greek epistamai which is literally translated as "I stand upon" but means "I know how," or "I know." In Old Frisian the word is understonda and in Middle Danish it is understande, so the use is common to several languages.

So understand means to know or comprehend, while scrutiny and its forms is more investigative. Comprehend?