Hesitate and Other Words

1. Sometimes when you run into the history/derivation of a word, you realize the history is so obvious and wonder why you had never noticed it previously. Such is the story of plumber, the guy who works on your pipes. Actually, behind the word stands plumbum, the Latin word for "lead," and so a plumber is one who, in the first instance, works in lead. Since pipes for the sanitation system originally were made of lead, it was easy to transfer the meaning of the term from a person generally working in lead to the guy who worked on your pipes. Ta-da! (did you know that ta-da is a newly-recognized English word by the OED?).

2. I ran into the following sentence in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In describing the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, he wrote, Haeret an haec sit. This sentence, describing the reaction of Thisbe before she saw the bloodied body of her lover Pyramus, may be translated: "She hesitated [doubted] whether this is [the tree]." I knew that the word haeret derived from haereo, the chief meaning of which is to stick, cling, adhere, but I wondered how you got from there to "hestitate." Here is the story. Its original meaning, as just said, is: "To be closely attached, adhere, stick, cling." It could be used to describe weapons that stick fast or are fixed in position. Our English word adhere is almost a direct transliteration of the Latin. Indeed, adhere comes to mind immediately whenever I run into haereo. The fourth principal part of the verb haereo is haesum. Words like adhesion capture it. But what I didn't know about haereo is that in the OLD (Latin), there are 10 distinct meanings of the term. Some, of course, overlap, but the range goes from stick/cling to attach oneself to a person to remain/stay put or persist in a situation. That is, if you "adhere" to something, you stay firmly rooted in it. So, the question becomes more urgent. How is hesitate derived from haereo? Well, if you "stick" on something too long, you come to a "standstill." If you are in a standstill you don't really move in any direction. You cease to flow (as liquids), you "stop dead" or "freeze." In such a situation you can see how hesitate arose. Thus, if you hesitate, you really are "stuck."

3. Sometimes brief sentences or phrases can be hard to translate from the Latin. The words Cruor emicat alte, from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, describe the way the blood exploded from his veins when he stabbed himself. Looking at the words one at a time, we have cruor (gore, murder, blood-shed); an English derivative is cruentate, which means "blood-stained" or, more popularly, cruentation, which is "a term applied to the oozing of blood which occurs sometimes when an incision is made into the dead body." Cruentous means "bloody," as in the 1648 sentence: "A most cruel and cruentous civil war."

But we are just beginning. Emicat derives from emico, and that means "to make a sudden movement forwards, outwards, upwards," or, of plants "to shoot forth, spring up." When it is used in relation to fire it can mean "to emit a sudden radiance" or "flash forth." The verb mico, micare underlies it and means pretty much the same thing as emico. But this word has come into English also as emication ("sparkling; flying off in small particles"). I like the 1646 usage: "Iron in Aqua fortis will fall into ebullition (i.e., will bubble), with noise and emication. Thus we have the picture here of blood gushing out of a wound freshly created. And, alte is an adverb formation of altus, which means "high" or "deep." I think we have a picture, then, of blood spurting towards the heavens as he gashed himself deeply.

4. Compesco, compescere is a Latin word meaning to "hold back, retrain, suppress." But there appears, at first glance, to be no easy way to remember this verb--i.e., no reason why it means "hold back" rather than anything else. Until, you look at the word origin in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. There we have compes listed as having the root con+pedis (pes--foot). Compes, then, are shackles for the feet or fetters. Now the word opens nicely for us. Its root was in something that shackled the feet but, over time, it grew to denote anything that checks the movement of, puts a curb on someone, checks or suppresses the growth of a plant or other thing. Compescere is also used in Latin to mean "to arrest the spread of (disease)." But who has heard of this word in English? Indeed, we have the word compesce, called "archaic" by the OED, which means "to restrain, repress, curb." From Carlyle in 1865: "Oldenburg..has coerced and compesced them into soldierly obedience." Thus, whenever you hear or run into the word compesce just think of shackling the feet, and the word will open nicely for you.

5. Let's close with oblino, oblinere, oblevi, oblitum a verb in Latin that has, as far as I know, only one English derivative. The verb means to "smear, daub, stain," and it appears in Ovid to describe the scene where the wild animal comes to the place where Pyramus and Thisbe planned to hold their tryst. There was a leana..spumantes oblita rictus... or, a "lioness with foaming jaws smeared with.." The Latin verb underlying oblino is lino, which simply means "to smear." The OLD tells us that the Greek alino lies behind it. But, strikingly, there is only one word in English I have found that is derived from oblino. When I looked up words beginning with "lino," and I thought that there must be a connection with smearing, I was mistaken, since linum is the Latin word for "flax." Semen lini means "linseed." The English derivative is a verb oblite, called "obsolete, rare," and which means "to smear over, daub." It has its only attestation, as many Latin-derived words do, from the 17th century. But English also has another rare verb oblite, derived from obliviscor, which means "to forget." We know the word "obsolescence" means "to fall into disuse" (from the Latin "ob"--an opposite--and "solere"--to become accustomed to something) but did you know that there is a word "oblivescence," which means "forgetting; an instance of this." Thus, something can fall into "oblivescence" as well as "obsolensce."

That's enough for another Latin journey for a day.

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