Utilize the Proper Usage of Use, or is it Use the Proper Usage of Utilize?

Last week we discovered why words ending with a j sound are spelled –dge. But as with many things in English it is not universal usage. Usage is a good example. Which reminds me of a George Carlin statement (p. 745 in his book 3x Carlin):

I object to the use of usage when it’s used in place of use. There’s nothing wrong with using use; it’s been in use a long time and I’m used to it. It isn’t that usage isn’t useful; I simply have no use for its current usage. The use of usage should be consistent with good usage: I’d prefer to say, “My use of the Internet” rather than “my usage.”….And, as I’m using space on usage, I’ll use some more on utilize.

That is what I so enjoyed about George Carlin – his interest in language. Why do we have three words like use, usage, and utilization that all mean similar things? Are they synonyms or “simonyms”?

Let’s start at the beginning of the words in English. The first word to arrive in English was the noun use, in the early 1200s. It came to English from an Old French word us. The French got it from the Latin word usus, which means custom, skill or habit. It refers to the act or state of being employed or putting into service. (Isn't it interesting how you cannot define a simple word without using more complex words? That question just used the verb form of use.)

Use became a verb within a few years (in the mid-13^th century), from the Old French word user, which came from the Vulgar Latin usare, the “frequentative form of the past participle stem of Latin uti ‘to use,’ in Old Latin oeti ‘use, employ, exercise, perform.” (Thank you, etymonline.com for such a pedantic explanation.) Prior to that time, the Old English would have used the word brucan, from which we have the verb brook. (“I will not brook any disagreement.”) More on that next month.

The next to arrive in English was probably usage. It is a noun that means the customary way of doing something. It arrived in English around 1300 from the Anglo-French and Old French word usage, which also meant custom or habit, but referred not to what can be a singular, one-time way of doing something or employing or putting something into service, but to a custom or habit. So when something has a customary way of happening, we call that a usage. There is a sense of repetition in it that is not in "use" or "utilize."

Utilize was the last to arrive in English. It also is a verb, meaning “to put to use.” But it only arrived in 1807, from the French utiliser, which the French got from the Italian utilizzare, from their word utile, which came from the Latin word utilis, which meant usable. Dictionary.com uses the phrase “turn to profitable account” in defining utilize. There is more specificity and personalization to utilize than to use. The difference being you would use utilize when the act or item is achieving a specific or positive purpose. Otherwise, common usage should be to use use. 

So they are not synonyms. As nouns, use is for one-time occurrence, usage for a habitual occurrence. As verbs use is common, while utilize is for something that is put to productive account. They're "simonyms."

Nuj a Juj and See a Baj

Last week we began looking at words formed from the Latin word for law, ius, and its cognate iurare.

Iurare may not look like it, but it is the root of many English words having to do with the courtroom. There was no letter J in old Latin, and the Latin word for law was ius. Many of these words came to English through French, who changed the I to a J, hence we have words like jury and jurist and jurisprudence, all words describing part of the legal system.

The jury is the panel chosen to decide a court case, and arrived in English in the early 1300s, from the Anglo-French juree, which was the adaptation of the Medieval Latin word iurata, a form of the previously mentioned iurare. 

Jurist arrived in the mid-1400s, although the Middle French used juriste in the prior century, having adopted it from the Medieval Latin word iurista. While iurista originally was the term for a religious cult, it eventually came to refer to the person who is well-versed in the law, like the judge and your lawyer (you hope).

Jurisprudence didn’t develop in English until the 1620s, coming from the French word jurisprudence, which they got directly from the Latin word iurisprudentia, which meant the science of law. It was formed by adding the genitive form of ius (law) to prudentia, which meant a knowledge or foreseeing, or practical judgment. But the use of the word jurisprudence to describe the philosophy of law was first attested in only 1756.

Which brings us to the word, or should I say name, Prudence. While now used more often as a Christian name, it has been a surname since about 1200. But in the mid-1300s its meaning of intelligence or discretion, of wisdom to see what is suitable or profitable, became used to refer to individual traits. It was also one of the four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy, and the first of St. Thomas Aquinas’ list of virtues. The Catholic catechism has a list of seven cardinal virtues, adding faith, hope, and charity to the four Greek ones.

So how did we get a dg as in judge or where did judicial – without the g - come from?

Judicial came into English in the late 1300s from the Latin word iudicalis, meaning “belonging to a court of justice” and was kept much like it was in Latin. Pretty simple. Not so for judge.

Judge as a verb has been used in English since about 1300. The noun form, referring to the person, came into being after the word was adopted as a surname in the early 1300s. While in Hebrew it refers to military leaders who had temporary power (read the book of Judges, a Latin transliteration of the Hebrew word shophet, which is a recounting of a series of military leaders and the enemies they encountered and defeated) the earlier verb form came from the Anglo-French word juger, which came from the Old French word jugier, which came from the Latin word iudicare, which was a compound word formed from ius, law, and dicare, to say. 

So judging is saying something related to law. Somewhere in the mid-1400s the word juge had a d added to make our judge. How it happened I don’t know, but somewhere along the line it was decided that we couldn’t end a word in English with the letter j, but instead had to approximate the j sound with a –dge construction, like in badge or fudge. 

Wouldn’t it have been easier on elementary school spellers to just go with baj, fuj, juj, and nuj? 

Sharing Roots or Not?

As I was reading Advise and Consent this week I came across the word depredation, which reminded me of the words deprecation and  degradation, and made me wonder if the two have the same root. As I looked at my list of words covered to make sure I had not already written about one or the other I was reminded of a word from a previous post that should have been mentioned in one of my posts on abs, abjure. I came across it at the end of January while reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Does it have the same root as adjure?

It turns out that all three words have different roots. Degradation is pretty straightforward, and means the act of degrading, or lowering in dignity or estimation, in character or quality. Degrade came to English earlier than degradation, in the late 1300s versus the 1530s. Degrade came from the Old French word degrader, which meant to deprive someone of their rank or office. They got it from desgradus, a Latin word that meant a step down (gradus + des-). The French word dégradation came from the Medieval Latin word degradationem, a form of degradus. So degradation can be remembered as tantamount to the old Western movie image of someone “losing their stripes” and being demoted to a lower grade of soldier.

Depredation, or the act of preying upon someone or plundering a place, came to English in the late 15^th century, also from the Middle French. Their word depredation came from the Late Latin word deprædationem, which is Latin for thoroughly plundering. (Plundering is prædari, and the prefix de- indicates totality.) There is a verb form of the word, depredate, but it is not used nearly as much as the verb form depredation.

Abjure and adjure, on the other hand, have the same root word. It is the Latin word for taking an oath, iurare.

In the case of abjure, the prefixed ab- is Latin for “away”, so abjure is taking away your oath or retracting it. It came to English in the early 1400s from the Middle French word abjurer, although it is possible it came directly from the Latin word abiurare, which means “deny on oath.”

The prefix ad-, when affixed to iurare, changes the meaning from simply an oath to the act of confirming by an oath, or to swear to in addition to stating. In Late Latin adiurare meant to put someone to or under an oath.  Adjure was first used in English in the late 1300s, or slightly before abjure. It was not until people were put under oath that they could retract the oath they had taken.

And that word iurare is the source of a number of words, which you will have to wait until next week to read about in this blog. I must be prudent and keep the blog post fairly short. But just to get you wondering, what does prudence have to do with iurare?

FUTPNBCVI (Follow Up - The Pedantic Night Before Christmas, Part VI)

Time for more Follow Up on the Pedantic Night Before Christmas.

Welter is our first word of the day. It’s a very useful word, both a noun and a verb. There are seven definitions given for welter, four for the verb and three for the noun. Three of them include a rolling, tossing, or tumbling. Two of them involve a state of commotion or turmoil, and the others are: a confused jumble (noun) and a verb form - drenching in something fluid (especially blood). The verb welter came to English in about 1300, from the Middle Dutch or Middle Low German word welteren, which meant to roll. The noun is a recent arrival, having first been used to describe a confused mass in 1851. 

While it may seem that the common designation in boxing of welterweight might have come from welter, it more likely came from welt, which was a verb used in about 1400 to mean “beat severely.” In 1832 welterweight was used to describe a heavyweight horseman, and in 1896 used for a specific weight grouping in boxing. It avoided the confusion created by an earlier (1804) use of welter to also describe the horseman or boxer. Welt came to English in the early 1400s as a shoemaker’s term, and may have been related to the Middle English word welten, which mean to roll or turn over. Welten is a distant cousin (an Old Norse cousin) of welteren. We now use welt to describe a raised ridge on the skin caused by a wound, but that usage didn’t appear for 400 years.

Our next word is inspissate, which as a verb may have been misused in PDBC, since it refers to thickening by evaporation. I do not imagine St. Nick was thickening by evaporation; by consumption of cookies and milk, yes. By evaporation, no. One of my dictionaries lists this word as an archaic one, but another doesn’t. Since I ran across it in my reading, it is rare but still being used. Even rarer is a related word, spissitude, which means thickness or density. Spissitude actually arrived in English about 1400, far before inspissate, which didn’t land on English shores until the decade the pilgrims landed in Plymouth, the 1620s. They both come from Latin, spissitudo become spissitude and inspissatus becoming inspissate; the meanings did not change from Latin to English.

Fey is a short word with much to convey. It has several definitions, depending on where you live. In much of the English-speaking world it refers to something that is supernatural, like Santa or elves or fairies. But in Scotland (chiefly) it means appearing to be put under a spell. And at other places in the United Kingdom (chiefly Britain) it means doomed or fated to die. Quite a range of definitions and geographic variety. As an adjective its supernatural meaning can not only refer to someone who believes in the supernatural, but someone who is visionary or clairvoyant. And to bring it back to the Scottish meaning, it can also refer to “being in unnaturally high spirits, as were formerly thought to precede death” (Dictionary.com).

Its etymology is difficult to discern. It could be related to the Old English word fæge, which meant “doomed to die”, and it seems certain the British usage comes from that word. But in Old Norse there is a word feigr that has many cognates in other languages and also means doomed. How it developed any sense of supernatural is not indicated. 

Perhaps one of the fey readers of this blog can discern its origin.

Torturous or Tortuous?

Last week I used a couple of words that haven’t been covered yet: penultimate and tortuous.

Tortuous is close to torturous in spelling, but has a far different meaning. Knowing which is the good word is helpful (in fact, knowing that there are two words spelled and sounding very similar is also good).

Tortuous means winding or twisting, or full of turns, like a slow moving river or a road climbing a mountain that is full of switchbacks. It came to English in the late 1300s, from an Anglo-French word with the same spelling. The Anglo-French got the word from the Latin word that means full of twists, tortuosus, which was a form of the Latin word for twisting or winding, tortus.

Torturous is the adjective form of the noun torture, and describes anything that causes pain. The noun came into English in the early 1400s, from the Old French word torture, which came directly from the Late Latin word for turning or twisting, torture. I’m not sure how the word came to be associated exclusively with pain, but somewhere between the use of the “rack” and a twisted ankle it developed that sense. The adjective developed later in the 1400s, then the verb in the 1580s.  

Something that is tortuous can also be torturous, but it is not always the case. Something that is torturous may be tortuous, as any number of wrestling moves would demonstrate, but waterboarding is an example of something torturous that is not tortuous.

The penultimate word today is penultimate. Having a spate of forms (penult as noun or adjective, penultima, penultimate), the most common use today is penultimate, an adjective describing the next to last. The penultimate syllable of the word penultimate is ti-. The first form of the word to arrive in English is the adjective form penult, which arrived in the 1530s. By the 1570s penult became a noun, then the more Latinate noun penultima arrived in the 1580s, and penultimate came to English in the 1680s. The words are all related to the Latin phrase penultima syllaba, which means next to last syllable. Penultima is formed from the feminine form of the adjective penultimus, which was formed from adding paene (meaning “almost”) to ultima (meaning “final.”)

Our last word today is one I used in the last paragraph: spate. While you may have thought I exhausted words for numbers back in October last year when I posted about words like panoply and manifold and multiplicity, I missed the word spate. A spate is a sudden outpouring, and in Britain refers primarily to water, like a flood or a heavy rain. In America it has a broader sense, referring to any large pouring out. It was originally a Scottish and northern English word (in the 1400s), and while we do not know its etymology the Dutch word spuiten, which means to flow or spout, or the Old French word espoit, which means “flood” are two likely sources. The use of the word to refer to any large quantity of an item was first used in about 1610. 

It may have been a tortuous path to get to spate, but I hope it wasn't torturous.

Misusing an Apostrophe is not a Catastrophe

The Greek dramatic device called a strophe has spawned a number of words, some of which I knew and some of which I have learned in preparing this week’s post.

In ancient Greek tragedy, when the chorus first began singing an ode it moved from right to left, before it would turn and head back left to right (the antistrophe). Strophe comes from the Greek word strephein which means “to turn.” It came into English in about 1600.

So it isn’t difficult to get from strophe, a dramatic turn, to catastrophe, another dramatic turn.

Catastrophe, which now refers to a widespread disaster, also can mean a negative reversal, or a reversal of expectations. It is formed from adding the Greek kata- (meaning “down”) to strephein, thereby forming katastrephein, which to the Greeks meant to turn down or overturn or come to an end. In fact, it originally referred to, according to etymonline.com, “especially the fatal turning point in a drama”, which sounds to me like the ending of Romeo and Juliet. The Romans adopted the word from the Greek, changing its spelling in Latin to catastrophe, from which in the 1530s the English brought it into use. Its (not it’s – see below) first use to describe a sudden disaster in English took place in 1748, although the disaster of note isn’t mentioned.

Another word we get from strephein is apostrophe. Formed by adding the Greek prefix meaning “from”, apo-,  apostrophe meant the mark to indicate a letter taken from a word when it arrived in English in the 1580s. An apostrophe is still the punctuation mark used to indicate a missing letter, but it also is used in the possessive form of a noun. The opening paragraph today uses an apostrophe to indicate the possessive form of week in describing this post. The penultimate word of the preceding paragraph illustrates the missing letter use of apostrophe: the apostrophe indicates the commonly used contraction “isn’t” for the words “is not.”

Apostrophe had a more tortuous path to English than catastrophe did. Also being formed in Greek (as apostrephein), then adopted into Latin, by the time of Late Latin it had the form apostrophus, which the Middle French adopted as apostrophe and the English took without spelling change.

An aside – in the 1530s the word apostrophe was first used in English to describe an orator’s turning aside from the crowd to speak to an individual. In formal rhetoric it retains this meaning.  

While an apostrophe is used to indicate a possessive noun, an exception is the possessive neuter pronoun its. Originally the possessive of it was it’s, but since the possessives of other personal pronouns (hers, theirs, yours) don’t use the apostrophe it only made sense that "it" followed suit. And its use without the apostrophe helps distinguish it from the contraction “it’s.”

I say “helps.” The misuse of the apostrophe with the pronoun it is a common grammatical error to this day, even though the change has been in common use (and misuse) since the early 19^th century. But it's not a catastrophe.

Them's Fighting Words!

We’ve been looking at words that came to English from the Latin root word pungere.

To get an intensive form of a word like pungere in Latin you add the prefix com-. Doing so gives you the word compungere, and in Late Latin compungere became compunctionem, which meant something that pricked the conscience and caused remorse. The Old French adopted the word as compunction, and in the mid-14^th century the English also began using the word to refer to any feeling of unease or anxiety of conscience, or any wavering in consideration of which is the correct action to take.

Pungere and punctionem (the less intensive form of compunctionem) developed in Old French into the word for the tool that makes a puncture, a poncho or poinchon. In the mid-14^th century the English adopted poinchon as puncheon and later shortened it to punch. Within 100 years it also came to refer to the action of using the puncheon to create a hole, and eventually to any quick stab or jab that we call a punch (as now with a fist.)

Poignant also comes from pungere. The Old French took the present participle of pungere, which is poindre, and created in the 13^th century the word poignant to mean sharp or pointed. By the late 14^th century the English adopted the word to refer to any painful feeling (physical or emotional).  In addition, etymonline.com tells us it involves a “linguistic trick play, a double-reverse.” Pungere is from the same root word in Latin as pugnus, which means fist, and poignant “represents a metathesis of –n-and -g- that later was reversed in French.” Isn’t wordplay fun?

Pugna, the Latin word for fist, is the source of pugnacious, which is a back-formation of pugnacity, the original word that arrived in English in about 1600. The Latin word pugnacitas means fondness for fighting (with fists), and came pretty directly into use in English as pugnacity. Within 40 years the adjective pugnacious was formed.

Have we exhausted words from pugnare? Hardly. You could take pugnus (fist) and form pugil, the Latin word for boxer or fist-fighter, from which in 1789 we got the word pugilism. Or you could take the word pugnare, add the Latin prefix for reverse, re-, and get the Latin word for fight back: repugnare, the present participle of which is repugnantem and from which in the late 14^th century English created the adjective repugnant. Repugnant describes a reaction to anything that is distasteful or offensive.

One final word before we leave this topic. Impugn is a verb that means to challenge as false or cast doubt on the veracity of someone or something. Take our word of the day, pugnare, add the prefix meaning in or into or on, in-, and you get through the magic of Latin the word impugnare, which means to attack or assault. The Old French changed that into impugner, and in the late 14^th century the English adopted it as a word to mean any attack by argument.

Them’s fighting words!