Etymon #70
Opposed to talent
The word entered English in the late fourteenth century, from Latin. John Trevisa, a Cornish scholar and translator working under the patronage of Thomas de Berkeley, 5th Baron Berkeley, used it in his English translation of Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon. The work consisted of seven books and was one of the most widely copied historical publications of medieval England. Trevisa used the word to describe a spirit that follows a person through the whole of their life.
Every Roman family had one, a guardian spirit belonging to the head of the household, worshipped and appeased with festivals, offerings, and small daily rituals. Under the emperor Augustus, who ruled from 27 BC, the Roman Senate went further still, decreeing that an offering be poured in honour of his own guardian spirit at every formal dinner across the empire.
The Latin word was formed with a suffix that turned a root into an adjective, attached to a base related to that of gignere, the Latin verb meaning to beget. The root's oldest sense may have meant generative power itself, the force of creation, or more narrowly, the nature a person is born with, fixed from birth and never quite shaken off.
KIN and PREGNANT share the same distant root as this word. KIN is native to English, naming a blood relation. PREGNANT was borrowed from Latin in the early fifteenth century. Both trace back to the same root meaning to give birth.
For nearly four hundred years the word named a spirit, the guardian force assigned to a person at birth. In 1749 Henry Fielding gave it new meaning in Tom Jones, describing a force achieved ‘without the least Assistance of Learning’. By 1834 the essayist Thomas De Quincey wrote that ‘Talent and... are not merely different, they are in polar opposition to each other’.
