| | For all the rationalistic, materialistic habits of mind we've imbibed from Enlightenment influences, we still haven't eradicated mysticism, magic, and metaphysics from our language - hard as we're trying. I was thinking about words today, and how if you trace them back to their roots, you find their origins in myth, mystery, and nature. The word "disaster" , for instance, comes from the Latin "dis-", a prefix signifying something adverse, or against, and aster, meaning star. A disaster is "adverse stars." "Charm" comes from carmen, Latin for a song, poem, or tune. When you speak of someone as "charming" you're refer to a quality, an allure, essentially related to music, that most intangible of the arts. The word "lunatic" very literally means "moonstruck:" luna is Latin for moon. "Lunatic" may refer not merely to dementedness, but also to errancy and wanderlust, which are worked by the moon. "Marvel" comes from the Latin word mirabilis, which designates a wonder or a miracle. "Weird" comes from an old Germanic word (I think) meaning fate, usually with eerie and otherworldly connotations.
The words "curtain", "court", and "cohort" all derive from the same root, a combination of the prefix "co-" with hortus, meaning garden. "Cohort" originated as the designation of a place where soldiers drilled. "Court" was a fairly natural outgrowth of "cohort" (military might is important to kingship), and then curtain from that (less obviously perhaps, but still logically).
"Nice" is mysterious if only for its amazing powers of transformation. It's an adjective formed by combining the negative prefix "ne" and the Latin verb scire, to know. Its root meaning implies ignorance and incompetence. The meaning has softened over time, though not until lately has it been actually complimentary (although still not a resounding tribute).
The real mystery becomes why, with all these marvelous (miraculous) words to choose from, we whittle down our vocabularies, entangle ourselves in jargon, and reduce every experience to the comparatively colorless dichotomy of "positive" and "negative".
|
| | Posted 12/10/2006 11:25 PM - 1 view - 3 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- give stars
- votes0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
