The Empire Strikes Back

Every so often I encounter a word that reminds me of another and drives me to consider “what’s the difference between the words?” I am a fan of the various hues and shades of meaning in the English language, and strive to use exactly the right word in conversation and writing. (Even in the last sentence, I changed to the word “strive” from “work” because strive more accurately describes my intent while work would describe my actions.)

So, what’s the difference between equitable and equably, between imperious and imperial, and between review and revue?

Equitable means having the character of fairness or justice, while equable means unchanging or unvarying. What a difference “it” makes. How did we come to have two words so similar mean such different things?

Equitable comes from the French word équitable, which is a form of équité from which we get the word equity, the noun form of the adjective equitable. Equitable came to English in the 1640s and has a very definite legal sense of fairness.

Equable is actually either a back-formation from equability or came to English from the Latin word æquabilis, which means equal or consistent. It also is an adjective, arriving in the 1670s, long after the noun form (equability) came into use in the 1530s.

So when do you use equitable and when do you use equable? Equable has come to define that which over time is equitable, while equitable usually defines an instance where the situation is fair to all concerned.

What about imperious and imperial?

Like equable and equitable, imperious and imperial are both adjectives. Where imperial is defined as that which is like or pertaining to an empire, imperious is defined as domineering or even dictatorial. Imperial came into English in the late 1300s from the Old French imperial. The Old French got the word from the Latin word imperialis, which describes that which is related to the empire. While the noun form, empire, came into English in the early 1300s, the Old French word from which it came was empire, from the Latin word imperium.

Why the initial e in empire rather than the i as in imperial? I could not find anyone with a suitable explanation, but in researching realized that the word empirical also begins with an e. But empirical, which means derived or guided or proven by experience or experiment, comes from the Latin word empiricus, which was used for a physician whose experience guided their treatment. The Latin came from the Greek word empeirikos, which means experienced. But empiric came to English in about 1600, while empirical came about 40 years later, or after centuries of empire being used.

You have several choices as to why the initial e rather than an i – either blame it on Greek or on the Old French pronunciation of an initial i, which to the English ear may have sounded like an e.  

So, what about review and revue? A revue is a form of theatrical entertainment, usually a series of unrelated parts, while a review might be the critique of the performance but also would be any process of going over a subject, or a general survey of something.  Review came to English earlier, in the mid-1400s, from the Middle French word reveue, and was originally used to define an inspection of military forces. It wasn’t until the 1560s that it meant the process of going over again, and it was not until about 1600 that it meant a view or survey of the past. The meaning of a critique was the last to arrive, in the 1640s.

What did they review? More likely writing rather than performances, because the word revue did not come into use until 1872, where it originally described a performance that presented a review of current events. The French word revue is the source of the English word.

So in review, you can be imperious and equable in your empirical reporting on a revue, and may even be equitable, but you would not be imperial unless you happen to be an Emperor.