u/trilliwon

Covet came into English in the mid-1200s already meaning the bad kind of wanting. Etymonline's earliest sense is to desire something "inordinately or without regard for the rights of others," from Old French coveitier and probably, further back, Latin cupiditas, and the respectable sense, wanting eagerly to have something, only turns up about a century later. Lust went the other way. In Old English it covered desire, appetite and plain pleasure, and the sense of sinful desire grew out of Bible translations, where "lusts of the flesh" rendered the Latin concupiscentia carnis. Its relatives in the other Germanic languages tend to mean simply pleasure, so wanderlust, borrowed from German in 1902, brought something like the older word back into English. Crave drifted too, more quietly. Old English crafian meant to ask for or demand something by right, and it reached the longing sense around 1400, probably by way of asking very earnestly. Yearn and esurient have stayed closer to home: one goes back to an Old English verb for being eager, a cousin of German gern, gladly, and the other was borrowed in the 1670s from the Latin for being hungry, esurire, which is built on edere, to eat. Megrim is the odd one. It's a worn-down form of migraine, which came through French and Late Latin from Greek hēmikrania, half the skull, and along the way it also picked up the senses low spirits and a whim or fancy. Etymonline says the word now seems obsolete or archaic even in those senses, which is a pity, because I can't think of a better name for wanting something badly at four in the afternoon and not at all by dinner.

The tags on the card are what each word, or the word behind it, first meant. Exultant comes from Latin exsultare, to leap about, which is built on exsilire, to leap up (ex- plus salire), and Etymonline glosses the Latin participle exsultans as boastful or vainglorious. Elation had the same streak. It comes from efferre, to carry out or lift up, and its first English sense, in the late 1300s, was inordinate self-esteem; the plain cheerful meaning only dates from about 1750. Jubilation goes back to iubilare, to let out whoops, which Etymonline ties to an old cry of joy, iu, and lines up with our yowl. Glee was mostly a poetry word in Old English, for entertainment and music, though it could also mean mockery, and it dropped out of use from around 1500 until late in the 1700s. Joyous is built on joy, which came through French from Latin gaudia, a plural meaning expressions of pleasure. Felicity is my favorite of the six. Latin felix meant fortunate but also fruitful, and Etymonline calls the word a relic of Rome's farming origins, when whatever made you happy was whatever made the crops grow. Elation shed the pride somewhere along the way. Exultant, as far as I can tell, never quite did.

Rash was a northern word in the late 1300s for nimble, quick or vigorous, related to German rasch, "fast", and the reckless sense doesn't show up until around 1500. Audacious went the other way. Latin audax could mean brave, but Etymonline says it was more often used in a bad sense, rash or foolhardy, and English borrowed audacious in the 1540s as "confident, intrepid, daring" before picking up "shameless" in the 1590s. Behind audax is audere, to dare, which de Vaan traces to avidus, greedy, and I find that oddly fitting for the kind of nerve audacious describes. The other four have stayed compliments, as far as I can tell. Valiant comes through Old French vaillant from valoir, to be worth something, and before that Latin valere, to be strong. Stout meant "valiant, brave" around 1300 and isn't recorded meaning fat until 1804, which is why stouthearted still sounds like praise. I'd still take audacious over valiant, though. Valiant sounds like a medal, and audacious sounds like something you actually did.

I put these in order from friendliest to worst, and the roots more or less agree with the order.

Canny and cunning both come from the verb can in its old sense of knowing how, and Etymonline calls them doublets. Cunning is the English one. In the early 1300s it meant learned or skillful, and the "skillfully deceitful" sense had probably arrived by the late 1300s. Canny is a Scottish and northern formation from the 1630s that kept the good side, knowing or wise, later careful and shrewd. Etymonline also notes it was often used superciliously of Scots by their southern neighbors, so even the compliment came with an eye-roll attached.

Wily sits in the middle. It's built on wile, a trick or stratagem, which goes back to late Old English, and nobody is sure where wile came from: Etymonline offers an Old North French form of the word that gave us guile, a Scandinavian word for a trick or fraud, and a possible link to Old English wicca, wizard, and adds that the Middle English Compendium has three guesses of its own. I'd still take wily as praise. When people say a wily old fox they usually sound a little impressed.

After that the roots stop being about skill. Devious is Latin devius, off the main road, from de via, and in the 1590s English used it for exactly that, out of the common or direct way. The deceitful sense is from the 1630s. Duplicitous is younger than I expected, 1831, from duplicity and Latin duplex, twofold, so the charge is being two people at once. Mendacious comes from Latin mendax, lying, and behind that is menda, a fault or a slip in writing. Amend shares that root, so lying and correcting a mistake trace back to the same word for a flaw.

Canny and wily are about being good at something. Cunning started there too but crossed over more than six hundred years ago, and from devious on, the root itself is the accusation.

Hey all, solo dev here

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In the 1530s truculent meant "fierce, savage, barbarous". That's Etymonline's gloss for the first English uses, from Latin truculentus, which covered everything from stern to cruel. Wiktionary still lists "cruel or savage" as sense 1, and it keeps an obsolete sense for a disease: destructive, deadly.

Cambridge has moved on. Its main definition is "unpleasant and likely to argue a lot", and the American entry has "having a bad state of mind, or behaving in a threatening manner". Nobody gets hurt in either one. Even the example on the card is only a look in somebody's eyes. That's why I'd put truculent at the mild end of the three: you can be truculent for a whole afternoon without anything happening.

Pugnacious has a fist in it. Latin pugnus is a fist, pugnare is to fight (Etymonline adds "especially with fists"), and pugnax meant combative, fond of fighting. I think the fondness is what separates it. Cambridge's definition ends with "expressing an argument or opinion very forcefully", and that's why a pugnacious columnist sounds half-admired to me in a way a truculent one doesn't.

Belligerent is the far end, because it started as an actual war. It's bellum, war, plus gerere, to carry on, and as a noun it still means a country or group that is fighting one (Etymonline dates that noun to 1811). Bellum also had an Old Latin form, duellum, and that older form is where duel comes from. The one-on-one sense came later, apparently from a fancied link with duo, two. So a belligerent drunk at a bar is, going by the Latin, waging war.

Where trux, the Latin word under truculent, comes from is still open. Watkins tentatively connects it to a root meaning to cross over or overcome. De Vaan points instead to Middle Welsh drwg and Middle Irish droch-, both meaning bad. I'm hoping de Vaan is right, mostly because "bad" is a funnier ancestor than "overcome".

I've been truculent before my first coffee more times than I'd like to admit. Pugnacious I'd have to earn.

The glosses on this card mostly point at each other, and four of the six lean on the word friendly. The roots say each one compliments something different.

Affable comes from Latin affabilis, someone who could easily be spoken to (ad plus fari, to speak), and an Old English glossator rendered it wordwynsum, roughly pleasant in words. So the compliment is to your conversation. Approachable meant accessible when it arrived in the 1570s, and Etymonline glosses its figurative sense, from the 1610s, as affable, friendly. Amiable praises something else: whether people like you. It came through Old French from Late Latin amicabilis, friendly, but the French word got tangled up with amable, lovable, and English took the tangled version. The clean Latin form was borrowed a second time as amicable, so a divorce can be amicable while neither person in it feels amiable.

Genial started in the 1560s as pertaining to marriage. Latin genialis meant pleasant or festive, and before that it belonged to marriage rites, possibly through the genius, the guardian spirit, of a married couple. Personable is the only one that began with looks: pleasing in one's person, of good appearance. Cordial is built on cor, heart, and the card's warm, affectionate is the sense closest to that. Cambridge's definition is friendly but formal and polite, which is how I read it when two governments are said to have cordial relations.

Hey all, solo dev here
I made PocketTok for the TikToks you actually want to rewatch. Share a TikTok to it (or copy the link and open the app) and it's saved to a library on your phone.

• Swipe through your saves full screen
• Collections, plus search by creator or caption
• Photo slideshows keep their music
• Subtitles when the post has them
• iPhone and iPad, no account, no ads

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The card splits six good moods by whether the word moves. The left column all started as motion. Elated is from Latin elatus, lifted up, the past participle of efferre, to carry out, and English used elate literally, to raise, in the 1570s before it meant raising someone's spirits. Euphoric is Greek eu, well, plus pherein, to carry, so euphoria was literally bearing something well. It began as a doctor's word in 1727 for a patient feeling healthy and comfortable, especially while sick, and the everyday sense only took over in the 1880s. Ebullient is Latin ebullire, to boil over, from ex plus bullire, to bubble, and it meant boiling in English before it meant enthusiastic.

The right column does not move at all. Serene was first used of a day, meaning clear and calm, from Latin serenus, unclouded weather, and it was only applied to people from the 1630s. Placid comes from placidus, from placere, to please, which makes it a cousin of please itself. Tranquil is Latin tranquillus, quiet and still, and Etymonline does not take it any further back than that, so I will not either.

I trust the calm column more. Anything that starts out boiling over has to come down eventually.

There is a usage rule that says enormity is for moral outrage and enormousness is for size, so "the enormity of the task" is an error. I followed that rule for years. Then I looked up enormousness and found that it started out in 1718 meaning immeasurable wickedness, and did not settle into meaning hugeness until around 1800. For most of a century the two words were doing the same job, and the one now recommended as the neutral size word was the moral one.

Both come from Latin enormis, which is ex "out of" plus norma. Norma is a carpenter's square, the tool you check a right angle against. Enormis means off that square: not true, out of rule, misshapen. Read that way the split stops looking like a split. A crime is conduct off the square and a mountain is a size off the square, and English has kept both readings alive.

The dates support this rather than undercut it. Enormity turns up in the late 1400s meaning transgression or irregularity, takes on extreme wickedness in the 1560s, and only reaches hugeness in 1765. Etymonline calls that last sense etymological and then advises avoiding it anyway, to prevent misunderstanding. I like that entry, because it separates the two questions people usually blend together: whether a sense is legitimate, and whether it will be understood.

The carpenter's square itself has a murky history. Norma is of unknown origin, and one suggestion is that Latin took it from the Greek gnomon, the word for a set square and also for the arm of a sundial, possibly by way of Etruscan. That is a proposal rather than a settled derivation, so take it as one.

Precocious came into English in the 1640s meaning ripe before the usual time, and it was said of plants, not children. The Latin behind it is praecox, maturing early, from prae- meaning before plus coquere meaning to ripen, which literally means to cook. So the word for a gifted eight-year-old started out as a term for fruit that arrived early.

Here is the part I did not see coming. Apricot is the same Latin word. Latin had (malum) praecoquum for the early-ripening fruit, and that phrase travelled east into Byzantine Greek as berikokkia, a step Etymonline marks as probable rather than certain, then into Arabic as al-birquq, then back west through Catalan abercoc and Portuguese albricoque, reaching English in the 1550s as abrecock before being pulled toward the French spelling abricot. The a at the front is what is left of the Arabic article.

Two words, one Latin source, and the fruit got into English about ninety years ahead of the adjective by taking the long way around. Precocious only began describing people in the 1670s, which makes the clever child the metaphor and the early-ripening fruit the literal sense.

Six words in the image, and their definitions are close to interchangeable. Three of them say some version of "little enthusiasm." Picking one off a word list, you would have nothing to go on.

What the glosses leave out is who is at fault.

Lackadaisical, perfunctory and indolent all assign blame. They say the effort was available and was not spent. Call a colleague's work perfunctory and you have accused them of doing the minimum that would let them say it was done.

Listless and languid do the opposite. They describe a condition rather than a choice. A listless child is usually unwell or worn down, and nobody is being accused of anything. Languid is stranger still, because it can be admiring. A languid gesture in a novel is elegant more often than it is deficient.

Desultory sits outside both. It says nothing about the person or their willingness, only about the shape of the activity: jumping between things without a thread. A desultory conversation can be perfectly energetic. It just does not go anywhere.

The trap runs in two directions. Reach for listless when you mean lazy and you have quietly excused someone, maybe even implied they are ill. Reach for indolent when you mean tired and you have accused them of a character flaw.

Lackadaisical is the one I find hardest to place, because it sounds gentle and is not. It has a soft, slightly silly shape in the mouth, and I have seen people use it as a mild word for dreamy. It belongs on the blame side of the line.

Its history explains the mismatch. Etymonline traces it back through a chain with no laziness in it anywhere. Lackadaisical (1768) comes from the interjection lackadaisy (1748), a ludicrous alteration of lack-a-day (1690s), itself a contraction of the exclamation "alack the day" (1590s). Alack goes back to "ah, lack," and according to Skeat that lack is the Middle English noun for loss, failure, shame. That last step is attributed rather than settled, so treat it as Skeat's reading and not a fact.

The original 1768 sense was not lazy at all. It was "sentimentally woebegone," given to sighing "alack the day." The word was coined to mock people who performed their sorrow. Blame was in it from the start. It was just blame for affectation rather than blame for sloth, and Etymonline suggests the drift toward the careless modern sense may have been helped along by the pull of "lax."

That is probably why it still does not read as neutral. It never was.

One thing I am unsure of: whether the blame-versus-condition split holds under pressure, or only describes the default reading. "A listless performance" sounds faintly accusing to me, which would put listless on the other side of the line as soon as it modifies work instead of a person. I would like to know if it reads that way to anyone else.

Irate and irascible come from the same Latin noun, ira, but they do not describe the same thing. Irate is a state: you are angry now. Irascible is a disposition: you are the sort of person who gets there quickly.

That difference is not just convention. It is sitting in the spelling. English took irascible from Middle French, which took it from Late Latin irascibilis, built on the verb irasci. Irasci is not simply ira turned into "to be angry". Etymonline glosses it "grow angry", and the -sc- is the part doing that work. Latin used -sc- to build inchoatives, verbs about entering a state rather than occupying one. The same element sits in adolescent, from adolescere, "to grow up". An adolescent is not grown. They are on the way.

So irascible is, morphologically, "able to become angry". The readiness is the meaning, which is why it describes a temperament while irate describes an afternoon.

This is one of the few etymologies I think actually earns its keep at the level of usage. Most origin stories are trivia you file away. This one tells you which word to reach for: someone shouting at you right now is irate, and someone who will be shouting again next Tuesday about something entirely different is irascible.

Where ira itself came from is less settled. Etymonline traces it to a reconstructed PIE root *eis-, associated with passion, which is an inference from descendants rather than anything written down.

Flippant appears around 1600 meaning talkative, nimble in talk. That was praise for fluency, not a complaint about manners. The disapproving sense we use now, unbecoming levity, is not recorded until the 1670s.

The shape of the word is the part I find odd. It looks like flip with a Latin-style -ant stuck on the end, and there is a verb flip sitting right there, 1590s, imitative, originally to toss something with the thumb. But Etymonline hedges the ending: it may be modelled on other adjectives in -ant, or it may be a leftover of the Middle English present participle -inde. Nobody is claiming to know which.

What surprised me is the direction of travel between flippant and flip as an adjective. Telling someone not to get flip with you sounds like the plain original that flippant was built out of. That adjective is only recorded from 1847, close to 250 years after flippant. The long word came first, and the short one was cut back out of it.

Flippancy, for whatever reason, waited until 1746 to show up.

deride, verb: to laugh at someone in contempt.

The useful part is the prefix. It is de- plus Latin ridere, to laugh, and the de- means down. So deriding is not simply laughing at someone, it is laughing downward at them. English has no shortage of words for finding something funny and very few that build the power relation into the morphology. This one does it in two letters.

It arrived in the 1520s through French derider, from Latin deridere. Ridiculous came about twenty years later from the same verb by way of ridiculus, and the two have aged very differently. Ridiculous originally meant worthy of contemptuous laughter, then softened through the 1700s into merely comical, amusingly absurd. Nobody saying "that hat is ridiculous" today means the hat deserves scorn. Deride never softened. It still means exactly what it meant in 1520.

The part that surprised me is where the trail stops. I expected ridere to reach back into Proto-Indo-European the way most basic verbs do, but Etymonline says flatly that it "has no good PIE etymology". So the chain runs deride to derider to deridere to ridere, and then it simply ends. For a verb this ordinary, that is a stranger fact than any of the borrowings around it.

One more from the same root: risible, through Late Latin risibilis. It survives mostly in "a risible claim", where it is still doing the contemptuous work that ridiculous put down.

An army that capitulates has agreed to something. An army that collapses has not. Capitulate is not a dressier word for giving up; it specifies that there were terms.

That is not a stylistic preference, it is what the word used to mean. Etymonline has capitulate in English from the 1590s in the sense "to draw up a writing in chapters or articles," from Medieval Latin capitulare, to draw up in heads or chapters, from capitulum, a chapter, literally a little head, a diminutive of caput. Same root as chapter and recapitulate. What you capitulated was a document. Because the documents drawn up that way were so often terms of surrender, the word absorbed the occasion, and by the 1680s it meant to yield to an enemy on stipulated terms. The paperwork never left.

The other five on the card each started somewhere physical.

Succumb is sub plus -cumbere, to take a reclining position, related to cubare, to lie down, which also gives us cubicle. To succumb is to lie down underneath the thing. Caxton has it in the late 1400s in a sense that has since died out, the modern one arrives around 1600, and "succumbed to an illness" is an 1834 euphemism.

Relent surprised me most. In the late 1300s it meant to melt, to dissolve, to soften in substance, from Latin lentus, slow or viscous. The temper sense arrives in the 1520s on the old image of a hard heart melting. Which makes relentless, from the 1590s, a word for something that will not liquefy.

Acquiesce is ad plus quiescere, to become quiet, from quies, rest. It entered English in the 1610s meaning to remain at rest and did not pick up its agreeing sense until the 1650s. The history matches how the word actually behaves: to acquiesce is not to agree, it is to stop objecting.

Concede is cedere, to go, to give way, the same verb under recede, secede and precede. You are not endorsing the other position, you are stepping back from your own. The election sense is American, dated to 1824.

Yield is the outlier, the only Germanic word in the set. Old English gieldan meant to pay, to render, to sacrifice to. German kept that thread in gelten, to be worth, and Etymonline notes those continental "be worth, be valid" senses are not represented in the English word at all. English took the paying idea and kept only the part about what you hand over when you lose.

So: lie down, melt, go quiet, step back, pay up. And then capitulate, which is the one that files the paperwork.

English may have borrowed this word twice and handed the two copies opposite jobs. Etymonline lists brisk as 1550s Scottish bruisk, of uncertain origin, and notes it is perhaps an alteration of French brusque. If that is right, a brisk walk and a brusque reply started in the same place, and only one of them ended up as a compliment.

The rest of the chain runs back further than I expected. Etymonline has brusque in English from the 1650s, from French brusque, "lively, fierce," which French picked up from Italian in the 1500s. The Italian adjective is brusco, and its first job is taste rather than temperament: sharp, tart, rough, the word for wine and unripe fruit that bite back.

Where brusco itself came from is where the certainty runs out. The proposal Etymonline records is a reconstructed Vulgar Latin bruscum, "butcher's broom," a shrub whose stiff leaves end in spines, from Late Latin brucus, "heather," from Gaulish *bruko-. Breton brug and Old Irish froech, both meaning heath, are the surviving cousins that make the Gaulish end of it credible. The step from the plant to the adjective carries a "perhaps" in the entry and I would leave that hedge exactly where it is, because a shrub-to-manner jump is an easy story to tell and a hard one to prove.

The order is the part worth keeping. Prickly plant, then sharp taste, then sharp person. Giving offence is the newest trick this word learned.

Onerous means burdensome, but it is choosier than burdensome. It attaches to things that are laid on you: taxes, duties, terms, conditions, an obligation you did not ask for. An onerous climb sounds slightly off to me, and I think that is why. Nobody imposed the mountain.

The etymology explains the preference. Etymonline has onerous in English from the late 1300s, borrowed from Old French onereus and directly from Latin onerosus, "burdensome, heavy, oppressive," which is built on onus, genitive oneris, "a burden." Latin onus was the ordinary word for a load, and figuratively for a tax or an expense. So the imposed-cost flavour is not a modern narrowing. It was in the Latin noun already, which is why the example on the card, onerous taxes on imports, is the word in its native habitat.

Here is the part I did not expect. Onus itself is much younger in English than its own adjective. Etymonline dates onus to the 1640s, borrowed straight from Latin, roughly 250 years after onerous. The noun that looks like the root is, in English, the newcomer, and the legal phrase most people know it from, onus probandi, the burden of proving, is later still, from 1722. If onus feels like a lawyer's word and onerous feels like a normal one, that is the order they arrived in.

The other relative hides in plain sight. Exonerate is ex- plus onerare, "to load," so it literally means to take the load off. Etymonline has that literal sense, to unload or disburden, in English from the 1520s and now obsolete, with the sense we use, to clear someone of a charge, from the 1570s. To exonerate someone is to lift the onus. I read the word for years as a vaguely Latin synonym for acquit without once hearing onerous inside it.

Behind onus, Etymonline reconstructs a Proto-Indo-European root *en-es- "burden," and gives Sanskrit anah, "cart, wagon," as a cognate. The burden and the thing that carries it share a root at the far end. That is as far back as the line goes.

Where the near-synonyms split, as I read them:

Arduous is about the effort demanded. Latin arduus means "steep, high," so it describes the climb, not who made you climb it.

Laborious is about the work itself, long and repetitive and tiring, with no sense of who assigned it.

Oppressive is about weight pressing down, and it describes heat or a regime as easily as a duty.

Burdensome overlaps with onerous most, but it is neutral about where the burden came from.

Onerous is the one that suggests someone put it there. Every use I can find has another party's hand in it, a government, a landlord, a contract, though I am reading my own sources and would like to be shown a counterexample.

Accountants have made it precise. Under IAS 37, the international accounting standard on provisions, an "onerous contract" is one where the unavoidable cost of meeting the obligations is more than the benefit you expect to get from it. That is the whole history of the word folded into one definition: a load you agreed to carry that now costs more than it brings back.

Frugal reached English in the 1590s from French frugal, from Latin frugalis, and that came from frugi, an oddball adjective the Romans never declined. Frugi was originally the dative of frux, "fruit, produce," so it meant something like "for the fruit," in the sense of "to good purpose." A frugi person was useful, honest, worth having around. Etymonline traces the Latin drift as useful, then profitable, then economical, which is the sense English took. So the thrift came last and the fruit came first. Behind frux sits the Proto-Indo-European root *bhrug- "to enjoy," and that is where the family gets strange. Latin frui "to use, enjoy" gave fructus, which through Old French gave fruit, and gave fruition, which for more than four centuries in English meant only "enjoyment" and picked up the bearing-fruit sense in the 1880s over the objections of dictionary editors. The cousin I like most is the Germanic one. Old English brucan meant "to use, to enjoy, to eat," and over the centuries it shrank into brook, the verb that now survives only in the negative, as in "she will brook no interference." Enjoyment on one branch, grudging tolerance on the other, and a careful household budget in the middle. I think the family history explains the word's tone. Frugal has never sat quite where stingy sits, at least to my ear; it kept a little of frugi's old approval, the sense that someone is spending to good purpose.