§42. Interesting words

If you are not surfeited with these words, see if you can identify the meaning of caprine, hircine, corvine, cervine, leporine, piscine, murine, vespine, anserine, delphine, musteline, pavonine, hirundine, and psittacine. (You can blame previous students in Greek and Roman Studies 250, who volunteered many of these.) There are still more to be found!^[5]

English derivatives from Latin -arius or –arium can be quite surprising. Could anyone possibly recognize ewer (a pitcher) as a doublet for aquarium? The Latin root must have been carelessly pronounced in Gaul (cf. aqua > eau); in Italian, acqua is virtually unchanged, E aquarium is acquario, and acquaio refers to the kitchen sink! Once you’ve learned the etymology of ewer, you may be able to solve the mystery of sewer: it’s from ex-aquarium, a place to take water out. These heavily disguised derivatives are the great joys of word-sleuthing. There is nothing disguised about seminary (< seminarium), but its semantic evolution is remarkable—from “seed-bed” to school for would-be priests. A columbary is a dove-cote or pigeon-house (< columba); the original Latin word columbarium could also have this meaning, but more commonly suggested a sepulchre with niches (“pigeonholes”) for funerary urns, a meaning it still carries today. If you are gregarious (< L gregarius), you want to belong to the flock (grex, greg-is). If you are egregious (< L e-gregius), you stand “out from the flock”—not a good thing, apparently, since we talk only about an “egregious blunder,” an “egregious fool,” and an “egregious ass.” (Does an ass have a flock to stand out from?)

A person who has had a “coronary” (< L coronarius) has suffered a thrombosis in one of the coronary or “crown-like” arteries that join the aorta to the heart (from the Latin 1st declension noun corona, “crown”). Therefore English crown and corona are DOUBLETS, as are coronary and coroner—originally an officer of the crown. (But don’t describe crown and coroner as doublets of each other; their source-words, corona and coronarius, are related but not identical.)

Just as L onerosus (“full of burdens” < onus, oner-is) evolved into E onerous, so ponderosus (“full of weight” < pondus, ponder-is) evolved into E ponderous. We all know about “ponderous pachyderms.” The original Latin adjective survives in the feminine (ponderosa) to describe a species of pine—and to name Ben Cartwright’s ranch, so familiar to insomniacs reduced to watching late-night television reruns.

Ardent feminists will be amused to note the similarity between L vir (“man”) and virus (“poison”)—totally unrelated nouns, as any male linguist will tell you. English has virile (< L virilis), “manly,” and viral (a recent analogous coinage), “pertaining to a virus.” As we saw in §40, virulent (< virulentus) means “full of poison.” Strangely enough, classical Latin had another adjectival form, virosus, which could mean either “longing after men” or “full of slime.” Maybe this ambiguous little item should be revived.

The English adjectives facetious and jocose have virtually identical semantic meanings. How do they differ in modern connotation and usage? The two words conveniently illustrate the twin fates of Latin -osus derivatives in English.