Smell That?

As regular readers of this blog know, my mind works in its own unique manner. I hear a word and will hear a similar word and wonder if they’re connected by etymology. Today we’ll look at two pairings.

The first pairing, affluent and effluent, are almost identical save for the initial vowel. It is interesting how such similar words can have such differences.

Affluent comes from the two Latin words ad, meaning “to”, and fluere, meaning flow. Combining them gives the word affluere, “to flow toward”. The present participle of affluere  is affluentem, and when the Middle French saw it in the 14^th century they adopted it as affluent and kept the meaning as “flowing.” A century later the English decided it looked like a nice word and adopted it from the Middle French. It still meant flowing; how did it come to is most common current use of having an abundance of wealth, property or material goods? As its meaning shifted from simply flowing to flowing freely, it developed a sense of flowing in abundance, which then translated to not just liquid but other valuables. Now it predominantly means having an abundance of wealth. But if you want to be pedantic, you can still use it to refer to flowing liquids.

Effluent also refers to flowing liquids. But the original Latin prefix was not ad-, but ex-, which means “from” rather than “to”. Effluere’s present participle is effluentem, which made for an easy adoption into English around 1450 as effluent. By 1600 the noun form effluence had developed. If affluent refers to an abundance flowing toward, and effluent an abundance flowing away from, it’s primarily meaning in the dictionary, how did it come to be associated with sewage? It took a while. It wasn’t until 1930 we find the first use of effluent to refer to liquid industrial waste. But it makes sense. After all, runoff from rain goes into the sewer, which flows away as effluence, so anything that flows away as useless liquid can be called effluence.

The second pairing of words is redolent and indolent. These have very different meanings without any apparent connection, so why do they both end with –dolent?

Indolent means having a disposition to avoid exertion or work or movement. But it also has a nefarious medical sense of feeling no pain or sensibility. Where did the word come from? Latin. 

The prefix in- being a negative prefix that creates the opposite to what follows. And what follows is dolere, which means “suffer pain.” To get from indolere to indolence you need to pass through the present participle which is indolentem to the noun of action which is indolentia into French (which happened about 1500) as indolence, then into English about 1600 as the noun indolence, then wait 60 years until someone decided we needed an adjective form and settled on indolent.

A couple other points on indolent: 1. Jerome, when translating the New Testament from the Greek into Latin, used a form of the word indolentem to translate the Greek word apelgekos that Paul used in his letter to the Ephesians.  2. In 1710 the avoidance of pain came to also mean laziness, which could most easily be accomplished by those with sufficient resources to live on “easy street”, so it developed meanings both of laziness and living easily. One word, three used.

Redolent has two Latin word roots that are very different from indolent. The Latin prefix re- intensifies what follows, but what follows is not the word dolere, but the word olere. Olere means to give off a smell or have an odor. In fact, the Latin words odor and olere probably have the same source, with the different spelling being blamed on the Sabines, a people of central Italy who were conquered by the Romans in the 290 BC. Apparently they preferred the letter L to the letter D. Odor referred to the scent itself in Latin, while olere seems to have referred to the act of emitting the scent. (Latin scholars feel free to weigh in on the point.)

The Old French had adopted the Latin word and developed redolent to mean “emitting and odor”, and the English decided around 1400 to include it in their lexicon. It still means “having a smell of,” with an expanded meaning “reminiscent of.” As we know now, smells are some of the best conductors of memories, so it makes sense it would develop that meaning.