Of leaders and rulers

  The words related to government and rulers are usually formed out of two roots “-cracy” and “-archy”, almost respectively.

 

Derived from the Ancient Greek “arkhein”, and Latinized as “-archy”, it means “the first”, and thus in classic metaphorical fashion, “to rule”. The study of anything related to those who were early enough to be first is called archaeology. The sacred ritual that was supposed to be performed first while worshipping Dionysus, was called “ta hiera”. It only took a few thousand years for it to mean anything performed first in order, in “hierarch” which means the head priest; and a few thousand more, for it to mean any rank in an order, or a sense of organization, in “hierarchy”. With that aside, we move on to words which stay true to their primitivity in patriarchy (rule by a father-figure, or male), monarchy (“mono” is “one”), and even hagiarchy (“hagi” means holy”). In turn, the person in rule in those respective settings becomes a patriarch, monarch and hagiarch.

 

The Latinized form of Ancient Greek “-kratia”, is “-cracy”, which means “rule or power”. It gives us words like democracy (rule by citizens), aristocracy (rule by best citizens) and autocracy (rule by I, the citizen). Others like gerontocracy (old people), bureaucracy, idiocracy and androcracy follow.

 

Interestingly, most of the roots used with “-archy” are also acceptable with “-cracy”. It is just another example of when English stops being Greek, and Latin and French, and starts being English. However, the nuance lies in the difference between the concepts of “ruling” and “governing”. The rule by rich people is plutarchy, but a government by rich people is plutocracy (Pluto was the Roman God of riches). Go do with that what you will.

Behind the scenes

The difference between backing up and beating up is that of a vowel.⁣
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“Ant(e)-“ is a Latin root which simply means “before”. Either in space or in time. “Antique”, as earlier, is made of “ant(e)”. Thus, the word. ⁣
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Other surprising places this root is hidden maybe just behind the eyes of a deer. So, adding “ant(e)-” and “-ocul” and a noun-making suffix like “-er” (example, killer, builder, player, etc), gives you “antler”. And if you saw that word making itself before I told it to you, you anticipated it.⁣
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Most commonly though, you’ll find this little guy hidden in the bleak hours of morning. Before midday (or meridiem) perhaps, in Ante Meridian (AM). Whatever is behind the front is anterior, and whatever that happened before the war on those frontiers, is antebellum (“before war”) or even antecedent. A smaller room leading up to a larger room is an antechamber, which usually houses an antechoir, in which the third last chair would be antepenultimate. ⁣
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The “same-but-different” root “ant(i)” makes its way from Ancient Greek. This may be anticlimactic, but it is as common as they come, from antidepressants, to antisocial, to an antigen. “Ant(i) means “opposite” or “against”. ⁣
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It does reveal some real gems hiding in the plain sight though. The opposite of Arctic, is Antarctic. The person who is the opposite of the hero, is an antagonist. Those who are against the government are not anarchists, they just support “no government”. They are antarchists. That being said, if you are one, it really shouldn’t matter to you. As is with most things “etymology”. ⁣

Would you take a look a that!

You’ll see “see” in PIE as “okw-”; spelt in common roots as “ops-“, “op-“ and, as “oc-”. So near- and far-sightedness are respectively myopia, and hypermetropia (“hyper” means more or metaphorically, far). 

If you want something to be made so clear to you, that you can “see it for yourself”, you order its autopsy. If you want a cadaver examined, you then should have a necropsy (not biopsy). And if for some reason you have all of those tests done together, then it’ll do good to get together all the information, and make a synopsis.

 

Moving on, if you got beat by Nobody then you have one circular eye, and for some reason you embrace that and call yourself Cyclops (good on you). You ever have problems with it you can go to a regular eye doctor, or ophthalmologist (another word for eye), and he may well refer you to an optician for a monocle. 

With that “ocl-“ we’ve stepped a bit into Latin. A two-lensed seeing device would then be a binocular (and since there has to be two such devices to make the one device you’re thinking of, they always come as a pair). When a lot of people have those devices, they make up a neighbourhood, or as Bentham called it, a panopticon (“pan-“ means “all” in Greek).

But that’s not all, something which looks really old is antique (“que-“ is a mutation of “okw-“ in modern English). And I think that emotion is really atypical of etymology because, if not judging things by taking a single look at them, what are you even learning here.

Lights, camera!

Abrupt endings are often naught. Another slightly lesser seen Latin root for light is “lustr-”, or in true spirit of etymology in being totally unrelated to Lucifer, “lust-“. It means “to shine”. When you shed light upon something, you illustrate it. You become worthy of people shining light upon you, you are illustrious.

That is why the shining quality of a substance is called its lustre. Causing utter disappointment though, the substance that may shine your teeth, and marketed as Listerine, is actually named after an English surgeon, Joseph Lister.

Light has another root in Greek, as “photo-”, which gives us common words like photosynthesis, photography and, well, photo. Smallest particle of light is then called a photon. If something breaks down when exposed to light, like some people before their coffee in the morning, it’s called photolysis. And if you still manage to look good in those photos taken during harsh early mornings, it maybe because you radiate your own light, making the capturer’s job easier and you are photogenic.

Oddly enough, photography has never been about light. It has always been about darkness, dark chambers (which literally means a camera) and, true to the saying, sight.   

Carrying it forward

Raging against light often means treading a dark path. And if you’re still here, you’re probably already too far in to turn back.

One of the common roots of light comes from a PIE (Proto Indo-European, dubbed as “that really old language”) as “leuk-“ which means “bright”. The Ancient Greek uptook “leuk-“ as is. So “leuk-“ for Greeks became to mean simply, white. That gives us terms like leukocytes (white cells), leukaemia (from leuk and “haem” which means blood) and leukoderma.

 

In Latin, it may be spelt as “lux-” and “lumen-”. They go on to form the SI units of light (lux), and the unit of luminous intensity (lumen). From here you can shout “Lumos!” and a bunch of other words come to light. Illuminate means to “shine light upon (“il-“), and luminescence is emanation of light. If you decide to be lucent and carry this light of random information forward, you’re Lucifer (or carrier of light). If somebody asks you the reasons of your damnation, and you elucidate (or shed light upon) it well, you become a luminary. Or an evil of Biblical proportions (serves you right for being a know-it-all).

Guest Post 1: On gatherings and British Humour

It’s often natural, not to say fulfilling, to cross paths with some interesting individuals on your strolls who end up making it special. Every so often we’ll be bumping onto such people on our walk around words. The first of such is @etymologydaily. He was one of the persons who got me started off with this journey, is way more technically sound with the subject, and has gladly agreed for our very first guest post. Talking to him, he had some very strong opinions on British humour.

 

“The Latin Language had an extremely small basic vocabulary, so compounding, and metaphors play an important role. For today’s ‘special’ let’s take a look at the stem (or root) “greg- “, which means a “flock/group”. A common trick you can use to turn a Latin verb into a related English noun is by adding common prepositional prefixes to them.  For example, the root “con-” meaning “with” makes up congregation. The same can be done with the prefixes “ad- “meaning “towards” coming together to make aggregation and “se- “or “away” making segregation.

 

A similar route for adjectives would entail adding a suffix of “-ious” or “-ic” instead of “-ion”. So we have gregarious (of the herd), egregious (that’s a mutation of “ex- “ or out + “greg-“ which simply means distinguished from the herd). However, do note an interesting difference: whereas Romance languages have maintained the positive sense of the word, the negative sense in English arose in the 16th century due to sarcasm. And if you think that doesn’t say a thing or two about what the British find funny, then I raise you some Monty Python.”

Villains are whatnot

More often than not villains are simply misunderstood. Literally. Because “villain” is derived from Latin “vill-” which means a villa or a home in the countryside. Those who worked in a country home, usually peasants and farmers, were constantly rebelling against their feudal lords against merciless taxation. And after all of it, lords were glorified in lore, and the villains vilified. Villains were seen in the eyes of the lords as vile, unwashed and stupid, and since the lords reserved the art of writing for themselves, that is what survived.

Despite that, villains managed to cling on to a small piece of fertile soil for themselves. The old rustic songs these countryside peasants used to sing came to be called “villanelle”: a form of poetry with 19 lines, and a refrain repeated periodically, with only two rhymes throughout. You may know it from a poem written by Dylan for his dying father in “Do not go gentle into that good night”. But was he referring to death as the villain? Or raging against “the dying of the light” as in the loss of opportunity to achieve your just potential, so that no more are hard-working peasants turned into villains? In any case, common knowledge can be unjust. And at times even blinding and untrue.

And that’s another lesson in etymology, that to find what’s hiding in the plain sight, you need to squint (smugly).

Wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff

The sad thing about time is that there’s never enough of it to pass around. Even if you are the mad hungry Titan and literally lend your name to the concept, you will still not have enough of it. That mad hungry Titan of Time was Cronos, the king of Titans. He gives us the Ancient Greek root “chron-“ which means time. A piece of time dedicated to Chronos (some story-time perhaps?) therefore becomes a chronicle, and the study of time, or studying something from the perspective of time, becomes chronology. If you want to know the time however you won’t always ask mythical beings for help. You turn to a device that can write down the time for you to read, like a chronograph. Or a watch.

When things happen at the same time, they are called synchronous (not coincidental). Alternatively, when things seem out of place, like Khaleesi with Starbucks, a basic disregard for other humans in today’s time and place by fellow humans, and your friends taking notes with fountain pens for good handwriting, they are called anachronisms (“ana-” roughly means back or against).

An illness that lasts over a long period of time becomes chronic, while a friend over a long period of time becomes your crony. Cronos’s cronies were all declared villains, and made things convenient for Zeus to swoop in, play the hero and distract everyone else from his other misdeeds. But he forgot about one thing that would eventually make him the true villain: time (also God of War games).    

Weight a minute

As is usually is with etymology, the words you want the most to be related, simply aren’t. Continuing with our discussion on Liberty, the same is derived from Latin “liber-“, mutated into Spanish as “liver-“, which means “free”. So if you believe in people being able to choose between a broader spectrum of choices, you’re a liberal, believing in liberty (we don’t concern ourselves with politics in etymology, simply because we take our words a tad bit more seriously). If you “set someone free”, you’re a liberator, because you “delivered” them from bondage. 

From an eerily similar Latin word “liber”, which means “to weigh” we get a set of words related to weights and measurement. Libra, is an instrument used for weighing. Equilibrium literally means “equal weight”. When you “weigh” different options,  you deliberate; when you judge somebody else’s weight in the matter, you consider their “calibre” (this is slightly muddy in terms of accuracy, but there is evidence to support this claim. Also it’s very “in your face” so it’s probably true). Accordingly, when you get something ready for measurement, you calibrate it. While on weights, Romans used the unit “libra pondo” for weight. It literally means “a pondo of weight”. In non-gibberish that would be “a pound by weight”. Hence, you have pounds which is still abbreviated to “lbs” as a slight wink and nod to those who had too much time on their hands to actually go and read about it.

Is Knowledge Free?

With all said and written about writing, the natural next stop becomes books; and if you’ve been doing your Community College homework then you know that “bibl-” means “book”, a root from Ancient Greek. Thus while any book is a bible, only the book is the Bible. Thereon you have words like bibliography (a writing about the books you have used), bibliophile is someone who loves books, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a bibliophage, or someone who reads a lot (as if devouring them). Like apothecaries (“thec” being Greek for “chest or collection”), we have a bibliothecary (or bibliotheca). Nowadays, you can get tailored reading lists for mental therapeutics. This is called bibliotherapy and it may be more helpful than you may realise at first thought.

In Latin “liber-“ means a “bark” from which pages could be made. From here we get words like library, libretto (operatic text) and any written statement which becomes a libel. Somewhere along the line, these written pieces, as evidences, made getting away with stuff really hard for some admirals, and they starting taking such written statements as an attack on their reputation; that’s when they decided to make it actionable in courts. That being said, I think it is really saddening to know that liberty is not derived from the same root as library :/