r/vocabulary

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.

Sanguine gets used as a dressier "optimistic", and it almost works, but the word comes with a condition attached. You are sanguine about something that could reasonably go badly. Sanguine about the layoffs, about the diagnosis, about their chances in the second half: all fine. "I'm sanguine about the weather on Saturday" is off, and off in a way people can hear even when they can't say why. Nothing is at stake, so there is nothing to be composed about.

That is what the one-word gloss loses. Optimistic points forward at a good outcome. Sanguine points at a threat and declines to panic. Hopeful and upbeat are cheerful; sanguine is unbothered. The first time I saw it used about someone's stock portfolio I assumed it was a mistake, and it wasn't, because money is exactly the kind of thing you can lose.

Two traps worth knowing. The register is formal and written, so out loud it can come off slightly pleased with itself, and "not worried" usually does the same work. And the close relatives went somewhere else entirely: sanguinary means bloodthirsty, sanguineous means relating to blood, all three off the same Latin sanguis. "A sanguinary outlook" is not a more impressive way to say a hopeful one.

Harmless, contagious, deliberate, or obvious.
One of these actually fits.

Drop your answer below. Reveal tonight.

Comment your answer before you scroll on.

From musculus. A flexing bicep was thought to look like a small mouse moving under the skin.