Reasonable or Rational?

Last week we looked at the word reason but ran out of space before we could get to other forms, or to get to the question why reasonable has an s and rational has a t. 

Reasonable is the adjective form of the noun reason. It developed in about 1300 (it is reasonable to wonder what they used for an adjective for 100 years) but came from the Old French word raisonable which they got from the Latin word rationabilis. Etymonline quotes Erich Fromm, who in 1968 wrote in “The Heart of Man”, “What the majority of people consider to be ‘reasonable’ is that about which there is agreement, if not among all, at least among a substantial number of people; ‘reasonable’ for most people has nothing to do with reason but with consensus.” I disagree slightly, because there is still a certain amount of reasoning to it.

Reasonable meaning “moderate in price” came into use by the 1660s. When I use reasonable in this sense, what I mean is that the price stands to reason.

Rational is also an adjective, and came into English in the late 1300s. It may have come from the Old French word racionel, directly from the Latin word rationalis, or a combination of both. It originally meant “pertaining to reason” but by the mid-1400s also meant “endowed with reason.” It has a closer meaning to the noun reason than reasonable.

Reasonable would be similar in meaning to "making sense" while rational is similar in meaning to "having sense." Sanity is involved in rational, but not necessarily in reasonable. One can be insane and still reasonable.  

One interesting thing about these words is that their Latin words are all forms of the Latin word ratio, from which we get our English word ratio. In Latin ratio means “reckoning, numbering, calculation; or business affair and procedure.” When ratio came into use in English in the 1630s it meant reason or rationale, but by the 1650s it developed the meaning of a relationship between two numbers, its most common English meaning today.

But the Latin meaning brings us to another related word, rationale. When it appeared in the 1650s it referred to an exposition of principles, a meaning it retains today. But its primary meaning today is “the fundamental reason or reasons serving to account for something,” a meaning it developed in the 1680s. It came to English from the Late Latin word rationale, which is (as I’m sure you reasoned out) the noun use of the neuter of the Latin word rationalis. The final e makes a big difference in meaning. One must be rational to have a rationale.

From reviewing the etymologies it seems obvious that in adopting words from Latin the Old French would change the “ti” that sounds like “sh” in current English into an “s”. I was not able to find confirmation for this being the reason behind this change, but it is reasonable to assume it to be the case if you use the rationale that I am rational.

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.

Literally Illustrate, Please

In my April 26 post I used the parenthetical comment “figuratively, not literally.” It has become part of common use to misuse the word “literally” as emphasis rather, as in “I literally died.” Used in such a phrase the word literally cannot be accurate, but is used as an intensive adjective. But it is better as an intensive than the even lazier and increasingly pervasive use of the expletive “fucking.”* You can be “literally mortified” but not “literally die.” In the hilarious television series Will and Grace one of the funniest expressions Jack McFarland uses (you have to see Sean Hayes to get the humor) is the correct but hyperbolic expression “I would die! I would just die!”

The word that is accurate instead of “literally” is “figuratively” but it has no force if used in a phrase “I would figuratively die.” But let’s look at the difference so everyone understands. We’ll look more at die and death in a couple of weeks.

Literal means in the strict meaning of the word or words: true, factual, or actual. Figurative means not literal, and can mean using a figure of speech or represented by a figure or likeness. It can also mean metaphorical. Metaphorical refers to a specific figure of speech: using a metaphor. It may be true that all metaphorical expressions are figurative, but not all figurative expressions are metaphorical.

A metaphor and a simile are similar. A simile is a comparison using the word “as” or “like,” as in “you eat like an animal.” A metaphor is a direct comparison without use of “like” or “as”: “you are an animal.”

Where did all these words literally come from?

Literal was originally used of scripture, and the opposite was not figurative but mystical or allegorical (you’ll have to wait until next week for the post on those words). It came into use in English in the 1300s from the Old French word literal which came from the Late Latin word literalis (or litteralis). The Latin word for letter is litera. It did not gain its current meaning of exact in essence until the 1590s. Its misuse is long-standing. Etymonline.com provides the following:

Erroneously used in reference to metaphors, hyperbole, etc., even by writers like Dryden and Pope, to indicate “what follows must be taken in the strongest admissible sense” (1680s), which is opposite to the word’s real meaning and a long step down the path to the modern misuse of it.

We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression ‘not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking’, we do not hesitate to insert the very word we ought to be at pains to repudiate; …such false coin makes honest traffic in words impossible. [Fowler, 1924]

Figurative is also from the 1300s and also comes from the Old French, from figurative. The Old French also got it from Late Latin, from figurativus, which means “of speech.”

Metaphor came later, in the late 1400s, but followed the same path: through Old French (metafore) from Latin (metaphora). But Latin got it from the Greek word metaphora that means transfer. Meta means over or across and pherein means carry or bear. So metaphora literally means to carry over or bear across.

While we’re engaged in etymology: simile also arrived in the late 1300s but directly from the Latin word simile, meaning a like thing or a comparison or parallel. Simile is the neuter form of similis, from which we get the word similar. (I find it interesting that similar arrived in English much later – in the 1560s – but was originally similary and didn’t drop the “y” until the 1610s.)

Etymonline.com has a nice quote from Samuel Johnson with which to end this post: “A simile, to be perfect, must both illustrate and ennoble the subject.”

*I wondered about using asterisks in place of three letters in the word fuck in the first paragraph; it fools no one so you might as well write it out. It’s the same thing for “the n word” in place of nigger. If you think of the word it is indicative of the way your mind works. Using an asterisk or some other construction like “the n word” or “frigging” means you know it’s not right to say it but it came to mind anyway and you can’t come up with a more appropriate word.

Follow Up on Last Week's Post

Last week I mentioned the word virus, thinking it would be a good start for a follow up post. And so it is. But in researching virus I realized for the first time that there are two adjectives related to virus that seem like they would have the same meaning: viral and virulent. Let’s begin with virus, the first word to arrive in English.

It comes from the Latin word for things as disparate as poison or plant sap or any slimy liquid. It probably comes from a Proto-Indo-European root weis, meaning to melt away or for a bad-smelling fluid, especially one that could be poisonous. In Sanskrit poison is visam, in Avestan vish-. Avestan is an eastern Iranian language, the language or Zoroastrianism. 

Very quickly after the introduction of virus into English came the adjective form, virulent. Originally describing fluids, within 200 years it developed the addition meaning of violent or spiteful (or both). But its meaning was still relating to poisonous or at least very noxious. It had nothing to do with viruses. And so matters remained for over 500 years. 

In the late 1900s a Russian scientist named Dmitri Ivanovsky studied what became known as the tobacco mosaic virus, and then began the study of viruses. Viruses came to be defined as a biological agent that causes cell reproduction in its hosts. (But that doesn't make them violent or spiteful.)

According to etymonline.com the adjective viral was first used in 1948. My dictionary puts the date as between 1935 and 1940, Merriam Webster says 1937. None cite the reference. 

The internet-related meaning (e.g., “Larry’s blog has gone viral”) is from 1999, “originally in reference to marketing and based on the similarity of the effect to the spread of a computer virus,” according to etymonline.com. 

Another word I used at the very end of the blog was desalinization. Let’s start this analysis with the base word: salt. Salt is an Old English word with cognates in many other languages, including Latin, where the word is sal. Add the prefix de- indicating “remove” and you have the verb desalt. Desalt was the word of choice for a long time.

But alongside salt came the adjective saline, meaning “made of salt”, that has been around in English since about 1500, its form probably influenced by the Latin word for salt container – salinum.

By 1650 the noun salinity was formed to indicate gradation of saltiness. Then in 1705 the back-formation of the adjective saline into salination took place. (Probably the result of efforts by The Salination Army.)

But it wasn’t until 1943 that someone decided to try and take the salt out of something, and rather than use the old unfamiliar word desalt they decided upon desalination. Then in the early 1960s someone decided to create a verb from desalination and came up with desalinize (or desalinise in Britain). Eventually someone took desalinize and back-formed yet another noun from it: desalinization. Desalinization can be found in Random House dictionary and the American Heritage Science Dictionary. 

When it opens in 2016 (at a estimated cost of over $1 billion) the plant in Carlsbad, California that is designed to take the salt out of salt water will not be a desalinization plant; it will be a desalination plant. Score one for reverse back-formation.

From now on I’m going with desalt. As in "pass desalt, please."