Hopefully this
week won’t include any words as unpleasant as last week.
Regress
Regress showed up
in the late fourteenth century from
the classical Latin regressus, which means returning,
from regredi, to go back.
As we learned last week, gradi (which is where regredi comes from in spite of
the different vowels) means to walk,
and the prefix re- means back here. To
walk back. To regress. And gradi of course comes from the Proto Indo European ghredh-, to walk, which shows up in a
lot of words. We’ll get to those later.
Transgress
Transgress, one
of those words I don’t think we use enough, showed up in the late fifteenth century from the Middle French transgresser, and before that the
classical Latin transgressus, to
cross, as in transgress. It
comes from the verb transgredi, step
across, pass, or transgress,
and although we use it more metaphorically these days, it can also be quite literal.
See, trans- means across or beyond (well, it does here, anyway) and combined with to walk, it’s to walk across. If
you walk across someone, you’re transgressing them.
Egress
Speaking of
words we don’t use enough, egress showed up in the mid sixteenth century from the classical Latin egressus, gone
out or departure, and I’m sure
you see where this is going. It’s from egredi,
to go or to go out, and the e- is
from ex-, out. To walk out. It makes
sense! Plus there’s also ingress, where
the in- is from en-, which means…in. To
walk in!
Aggression
Yep, this word
is part of it, too. Aggression showed up in the seventeenth century,
and then later on words like aggressor and aggress (yes, that’s a word) formed. It’s from the
French aggression, which is from the
classical Latin aggressionem, from aggressio, which could mean aggression or “going in at”. Like the other words, it’s from aggredi, to attack,
and the a- comes from ad-, which means to.
So the word is… to walk at.
You can’t make this
stuff up.
Sources
Walk this way...
ReplyDeleteWhat happens if you run though?
Do you ever think that English has too many words?
ReplyDeleteThese ones at least make sense!
ReplyDeleteI have been discovering more and more that there are too many things that I could never have made up and that I wish passionately were not things.
ReplyDeleteI love to transgress, but not aggressively, although I could regress in that regard. If you don't like it, the egress is that way.
ReplyDelete