Final and Soporific FUTPNBC

When I first moved to Chicago last millennium I was stuck in traffic on the Eisenhower freeway in the heat of August hoping my car would not overheat when the announcer on the radio shared that the news that the last of the snow that in the previous winter had been dumped in a quarry had finally melted. I was not heartened by the news. That may be how you feel about this post, another in the lengthy FUTPNBC string.

Let’s begin with aquiline. You may think aquiline is a cooling reference to water, but it actually refers to the shape of an eagle’s beak, and is used to describe a curved or a hooked nose. Aguila is the Latin word for eagle, and aquilinus describing anything eagle-like, so somewhere in the 1640s the word was adopted as aquiline in English. No relief from the heat there.

How about with the word Gadarene? Maybe, but not sure you want to go there. Gadarene is a reference to the story in Matthew 8 where a legion of demons were cast into a drift (or litter) of pigs, or a sounder of swine. When something or someone runs into water, they can be described by the adjective Gadarene.

In researching Gadarene I ran across the explanation in etymonline.com that the words porker and grunter were developed as synonyms for pig because of “…sailor’s and fishermen’s euphemistic avoidance of the word pig while at sea, a superstition perhaps based on the fate of the Gadarene swine, who drowned.”

Somewhat the opposite of Gadarene is hegira, which is a noun for a journey to a better place. Hegira comes from the story of Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 662. That is the date on which the Islamic calendar begins. The Islamic word for Muhammad’s journey is Hijra, and where we would use AD for our calendar, the Islamic calendar uses AH, Anno Hegirae, which means in the year of the Hijra. Muslims call their calendar the Hijri calendar. The English word hegira has been in use since the 1580s.

Chiasma is actually a scientific word, used to describe something that crosses, like in anatomy when the optic nerves cross at the base of the brain, or in cellular biology (dictionary.com tells us) the “point of overlap of paired chromatids at which fusion and exchange of genetic material take place during prophase of meiosis.” I thought that would clear it up for you. Actually, the Greek etymology is more help: khiasma means “two things placed crosswise.” The word chiasma actually came through medical Latin (hence its different spelling) into English in 1832.

I missed one word I should have covered in the first follow up post, but it fits better here. These may have been soporific posts to you, but it kept me off the streets. I remember my first encounter with the word soporific, if I remember correctly, was Roddy McDowall in The Subterraneans, a beatnik movie. He is complaining that life is “Soporific, soporific, it’s all so soporific.” Soporific used as a noun is something that causes sleep; as an adjective it means sleepy or drowsy, or causing sleep. It came to English in the 1680s from the French word soporifique, which the French got from the Latin word for a deep sleep, sopor.

Now it’s time for a hegira or Gadarene trip to the pool, where I may find things soporific. 

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?