Language of Confusion: -Tude, Part I

I thought that the suffix -Tude would be an interesting thing to look at this week. Then I realized just how many words end in it and I was like, damn it. Damn it all. People just shove it at the end of words all the time because it’s a word forming element that appears in abstract nouns. It’s from the French -ude and classical Latin -udo, and here’s a bunch of words that end with it.

Attitude

Attitude showed up relatively recently in word terms, sometime in the mid seventeenth century, where it meant a position of a figure in a statue or painting, although it could mean a “mode of regarding” when it was short for the phrase attitude of mind. Apparently from there it morphed to the “posture of the body supposed to imply some mental state” and then in the nineteenth century behavior reflecting an opinion. It wasn’t until 1962 that it took on the arrogant, insolent connotation as a form of slang. Anyway, the word itself comes from the French attitude and Italian attitudine, disposition or posture. Before that it was the Late Latin aptitudinem, which, well, it looks like aptitude for a reason.

Aptitude

Which leads us to our next word. Aptitude showed up in the early fifteenth century from the Late Latin aptitudo, fitness, which is related to the abovementioned aptitudinem. That in turn is from the classical Latin aptus, suited or fitting. How...apt.

Gratitude

Gratitude showed up in the mid fifteenth century from the Middle French gratitude or Medieval Latin gratitudinem, thankfulness, which can be found in the classical Latin gratus, grateful. But looking at grateful and gratitude lets you really see how different the suffix can make a word. Grateful is something you are, while gratitude is something you have!

Platitude

We have an exact year for this word: 1812, where it showed up meaning dullness. Really! It’s from the French platitude, which literally translates to flatness and comes from the Old French plat, which means flat. And is the origin word for plateau. Plat- is actually a Proto Indo European root word meaning to spread and actually shows up in a lot of words (pretty much anything with flat, plat, or plane in it, as well as more that we’re not getting into today). As for why platitude is another word for cliché, well, you know how dull those sayings are.

That’s it for this week. But don’t worry. There are many more -tude words to look into!

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Omniglot

Dictionary.com

University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

University of Texas at San Antonio’s page on Proto Indo European language

Dictionary of Medieval Latin

University of Ottawa, Canada

Orbis Latinus

Language of Confusion: -Grate

Guess what? This is my thousandth post. Can you believe it? How appropriate that it’s an etymology post. Number 1000 should be something I can’t shut up about.

I’ve always thought the word grate was weird. It’s something used for cooking. And yet we have grateful and ingrate. What’s up with that?

Grate is both a noun (a grate at the end of a hole) and a verb (like grating cheese while cooking), and they have weirdly divergent origins. They both showed up in the late fourteenth century and both come from an Old French word, grate for the noun and grater for the verb. When grate first showed up as a noun, it actually meant a grill for cooking and then a little later the metal covering thing. It comes from the Medieval Latin grata, a lattice, which in turn comes from the classical Latin cratis, which has pretty much the same meaning. And by pretty much I mean exactly. The you’re-not-going-to-believe-it part of this is that cratis is the origin word for hurdle. Wow. Anyway, the verb kind of has a mysterious origin. Like I said, it’s grater in Old French, and that’s from kratton in Frankish and krattojan in Proto Germanic. Before that? ??? No one knows. It’s thought that it imitative in origin. In other words, people thought that scraping something off sounded like “grate”. There you have it. The two forms of grate aren’t related.

Grateful showed up in the mid sixteenth century meaning “pleasing to the mind” as well as full of gratitude. Way back then there used to be a word grate that had nothing to do with the words in the previous paragraph and instead was an adjective that meant pleasant. That word came from the classical Latin gratus, agreeable, the origin word for grace. Gratitude comes from the same family (unsurprisingly). It showed up in the mid fifteenth century meaning goodwill, coming from the Middle French gratitude and Medieval Latin gratitudem, which is from gratus, too. Ingrate comes from the same place, although it showed up much later, in the late seventeenth century. It comes from the classical Latin ingratus, thankless, and is a mix of the prefix in- (meaning not in this case) and gratus. So at least something in all this makes sense.

Words that sound like they might be related but aren’t: integrate, migrate, denigrate and conflagration.

TL;DR: If a word has grate in it, it probably isn’t related to another word with grate in it. And maybe I’ll do all those grate words next week.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Omniglot

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Dictionary of Medieval Latin

University of Ottawa, Canada