I'm Posting for a Reason

It is interesting how one post can lead to other posts. As with last week, part of the post from April 26 leads to today’s post. The exact phrase concluded with the words “reason and rational are words for another week.” This is the week for reason and being rational.

Why does reason have an s but rational has a t? And why do we have both reasonable and rational? Do we need both words?

Let’s begin with reason. It can have several meanings, but the most common is the one that has a meaning of a basis for a cause for some belief or action. Originally reason meant both “an intellectual faculty that adopts an action to ends” and/or a statement in an argument or explanation or justification. Within 100 years the added meaning of sanity or degree of intelligence developed. It was not until the early 1300s that today’s most common meaning developed. There are seven (or 10) meanings for reason in my dictionary, including one in Logic and one (or three) in Philosophy.

A couple of phrases that don’t make sense to us today use the word reason. For instance, the phrase “rhyme or reason” has nothing to do with what we mean by reason today. It refers to a defunct meaning from Middle English (the early 1300s) of reason to mean significance or meaning. The phrase “stands to reason” is from the 1630s, but the part that needs explanation is not reason, but stand. (See how it happens? Another week another “word for another week.” Or go to Languagehat, a website I discovered in researching this phrase.) Other phrases, like “by reason of” and “within reason” still have connection to the current primary meaning. 

Reason came into English in about 1200 from Anglo-French, where it was spelled resoun. The Old French word was raison and meant, according to etymonline.com, “course, matter, subject, language, speech, thought, opinion.” The Old French got raison from the Latin word rationem that meant “reckoning, understanding motive, cause.”

Reason as a verb (“I reasoned that it would be a verb.”) appeared in the early 1300s and originally was spelled resunmen. It meant “to question (someone)” or “to challenge” and came from the Old French word raisoner that meant to speak or discuss, argue or address. Raisoner comes from the Latin word rationare that also has to do with discourse. The meaning of thinking in a logical manner comes from the 1590s.

More next week.