We all know what an infant is–a newborn baby. Pretty simple. What I didn’t realize was that it actually comes from the Latin in meaning “not” and fari meaning “to speak.” So it literally means “unable to speak.” Who knew? Historically, infant in Latin meant a babe in arms, but then in languages like French and Italian it got applied to all children, hence the French enfant, which just means “child” and the Italian fanciullo.

It’s interesting to note too that historically in English, the word could be applied to any child as well, usually up to about age 7. The word came into use in English in the 1300s, and while the age range has changed over time, the general meaning hasn’t. It’s also worth noting that the Germanic words from which we get child also used to mean “a newborn.”

You know how I often begin these posts by telling you about how my family was talking about this or that word, and I guess as to how it evolved, and I was right? Yeah…not the case this time at all. 😉

As it turns out, delight has nothing to do with light, as I was trying to guess. 😉 It’s actually from the French delitier, which is in turn from the Latin delectare, both of which mean “pleasure, charm, that which satisfies.” And that Latin probably looks pretty familiar, right? We also get words like delectable and delicious from the same root. Delight is just a variation of those, and both the noun and verb entered English way back in the 1200s…but was spelled delite for hundreds of years, until the 16th century.

Why the change to -ight? Well that is owed to the influence of words like light, flight, night etc. It’s solely an attempt to use a uniform spelling of a sound and has nothing at all to do with the meaning of the word it then looks like. Go figure!

Ever wonder how two very different meanings get attached to the same word? Cobbler is a perfect example.

Historically, a cobbler is someone who mends shoes and has been such since the late 1300s. Cobbler and cobble (the verb) seem to have evolved together in English, the verb meaning “to mend or patch together.” So how, you may wonder, did it come to mean a fruit dessert with a heavy top crust in American English?

Well, my theory was that it’s because cobbler is kinda tossed together, cobbled together, one might say… The etymology entry doesn’t bear that out, but it doesn’t have many better ideas, either, LOL. All people can say is that it came from the same root, cob, which has been applied to all sorts of words but always has a sense of “lumpy” or “bumpy” in it somewhere. Hence cobblestones and a cob of corn–all things with bumps and lumps. =) Well, that’s definitely true of the dessert too! And it also makes sense in the shoe sense, in that patches and mends tend to be a bit lumpy and bumpy too.

Are you a fan of fruit cobbler? Or perhaps corn on the cob?

Thanks to how similar travesty sounds to tragedy, I think I was always laboring under some false ideas about this one…especially because it often is a tragedy when something is also a travesty.

Travesty, however, comes from the Latin and Italian words that mean “to disguise.” It’s from trans (across, beyond) + vestire (to clothe), so literally “to dress over” in a way that would alter beyond recognition.

Travesty entered the English language in the 1660s, meaning “dressed in a way to be made ridiculous; parodied” from the French travesti, meaning “dressed in disguise.” By the 1670s, it was applied to literary parodies of more serious works. So there we go– a travesty is a mockery or parody of something, a “disguise” of the real thing.

So literary travesties are fun…but we certainly don’t want to see court rulings that are a travesty of justice!

I’ve shared before about the real meaning of passion and how its word actually means “suffering”–so the things we’re passionate about are the things we’re willing to suffer for. Well in a church conversation recently, my husband wondered aloud whether patience–which also means “enduring pain”–could be from the same root. It seemed quite likely, so I of course came home and looked it up.

And indeed, both patience and passion are from the Latin pati, which means “to endure, undergo, experience.”

Patience entered the English language around the year 1200, spelled pacience, and meant “the quality of being willing to bear adversities; calm endurance of suffering.” The adjective patient obviously has the same meaning but as a modifier…which is why the word patient as a noun still refers to someone visiting a doctor, and hence suffering. It’s also worth noting that those early uses also bore the meaning of “firm, unyielding, hard” and was applied not only to people but of things like hard-to-navigate rivers.

In the late 1300s it had come to mean “quiet or calmness while waiting.”

A while back, my husband and I were wondering how habit and habitat were related. Clearly they share a root, but what’s the common idea between them? Well, we were wondering it at bedtime, so I didn’t immediately go and look it up, but eventually I remembered to. 😉

They are indeed both from the same root, along with other “habit” words like inhabit. They all come from the Latin habere, which contains both internal and external senses of “to have, hold, wear, possess; find oneself, be situated; consider, think, reason, have in mind; manage, keep.”

That’s a lot of ways to use the same word!!

Habit first made its way into English in the 1100s via French and meant “clothing; conduct.” In the next hundred years it began to be applied more strictly to the clothing of those of a religious order…but then by the 1400s expanded again to be any clothing. Around that same time we begin to see it appearing in the sense of “customary conduct.” Also at that point, it was used as a verb, interchangeable with inhabit (which also appeared in the 14th century), but also applied to the act of dressing. And of course, in the 19th century it was used for the clothing women wore when riding a horse.

It was applied to drug use in the height of the opium era, in the 1880s.

Habitat, interestingly, didn’t come along until 1762, when it was coined from the Latin root as a specific way to talk about where animals live in scientific nomenclature. This word is actually considered “modern Latin”–which is to say, it was created by English-speaking scientists writing treatises in Latin. So they based it on an old Latin word but created a new form of it to get at their particular meaning. Isn’t that fascinating?

Pretty sure my natural habitat is a library. We’ll just call me Roseannius Bibliotheca. 😉