vocabulary ch. 5 & 6 ORIGINS // english 11

venerate

The love goddess Venus was greatly respected or honored by old men. From venus, love, comes the Latin venerari, meaning “worship,” and finally becomes “venerable.” Today, we honor venus when we use the words “venerable” and “venerate.”

malapropism

Mrs. Malaprop, a character from the play The Rivals, became known for misusing words. Her name signifies something not to the purpose or unfitting and not appropriate, and from this, sprouted the word “malapropism.”

disparage

“Disparage” originally meant to “degrade socially by marrying beneath one’s rank.” The word later acquired the general meaning of degrade, undervalue, or “treat something as less than it is.”

adamant

An adamant refusal is a firm refusal, as hard and unyielding as a rock. Deriving from the Greek and Latin word, adamas, for the hardest substances or “unbreakable.” Adamas, originally meaning any extremely hard metal or mineral, varied into the Late Latin diamos that began to be used solely for diamonds, the hardest substance in nature.

conjugal

Deriving from the Indo-European root, yug meaning “join," comes the idea that we yoke ourselves to a discipline to achieve spiritual union. Conjugal comes from the prefix con, meaning “with,” and the root for “yoke,” being yug. This implied that couples are joined or yoked together to strive toward spiritual union.

despotic

In ancient Greece, despotes meant the family head that had powers far greater than the modern husband. These household heads could legally kill their wives and children if they so chose, a tyrannical exercise of authority. The Greeks also used despotes as a term for foreign rulers that had complete control over their subjects, and later, in the Byzantine Empire, “despot” became the title of emperors and high church officials. The modern negative sense of “despot” was reinforced by French revolutionaries that applied the word to Louis XVI.

gullible

A “gull,” a young, flightless bird, can be easily tricked, as well as the common water bird, the gull, it will swallow almost anything. It is believed these two types of gull helped form “gullible” to describe a person that swallows deceitful stories. Another possible source of “gullible” is the Latin word for throat, gula, suggesting the gulping down of whatever is offered.

exonerate

The Latin word used for the unloading of loads too large for an ancient ship was exonerare, with ex meaning “off” and onus meaning “burden.” Upon entering English, “exonerate” assumed the general meaning of “relief from a burden,” whether discharging goods from a ship or removing a load from one’s shoulders. Later, lawyers brought “exonerate” to mean removing suspicion from the accused, and because of the courts’ often use of this meaning, we today employ the word solely in relation to freeing someone from the burden of blame.

cliché

The clicking sound produced by a printer dropping a device into molten lead to produce type can be described by the French word, clicher, meaning to “click.” They called the metal plate containing the type impression a cliché. Because the cliché would print the same thing over and over again, being reused for some well-liked expression, “cliché” came to mean any overworked expression that has lost its vigor.

trite

Deriving from Latin tritus, meaning “rubbed away” or “worn out,” “trite” describes worn-out phrases, overused plots, and dull, commonplace ideas.