Etymon #51
See the light
The word entered English in the early 1570s. Thomas Twyne, a Sussex physician and translator, used it in 1573 in his English translation of a Welsh scholar’s description of Britain. He applied it to the special character of the British tongue. Behind the English lay French and Latin, and behind both lay a Greek word for something privately owned.
It travelled through three languages before English. In Greek a verb meaning to make one's own was built from an adjective. From that verb came a noun naming a personal peculiarity. Latin borrowed the noun, and over the centuries its sense widened from a personal phrase to a whole language. By 1544 it had settled into French. Thirty years later it crossed into English, with some writers borrowing directly from the Latin as well.
The Greek root was an adjective meaning private. In the Athens of the fifth century BC it marked the boundary between a person’s affairs and the shared life of the city. From it the Greeks built a verb meaning to make something one’s own, and from that verb a noun for a peculiarity belonging to one person, such as a private habit of speech.
DIALECT and RHETORIC both came from Greek words for speaking. DIALECT from a Greek verb meaning to converse, the shared speech of a community. RHETORIC from the Greek word for a public speaker, the art of addressing the assembly. This word belonged to the more private sense of speech.
For more than half a century the word named the character of a whole language. John Donne, English poet and, from 1621, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London, found something smaller in it, certain forms of speech that scripture repeats. From that narrower sense came the modern one. In 2004 the French former IBM executive Jean-Paul Nerrière created Globish, a stripped-down English of 1,500 words for international business. By 2008 New Scientist was reporting his advice to native speakers, to speak in simple sentences and avoid exactly what this word names.
Five letters.
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