Words of the Month - Semiquincentennial

         Two hundred and fifty years ago there was a movement to start a new nation that would not be ruled by a tyrant.  Rather than a king who had absolute power to make whatever rules he wished, to crush dissent, to reward his buddies while accusing his critics of treason, to enrich himself at the expense of the people, to start wars on a whim, there would be a president voted for by the people.  His power would be balanced by two other branches of government, and held in check by the constitution.  Citizens would owe allegiance to the principles of the constitution instead of loyalty to that one powerful person, and certain rights were guaranteed, including the right to criticize the government and to protest injustice, and the right to due process of law.  This was to be a country that guaranteed everyone the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  (Sure, it was far from perfect, particularly since the rich white men who came up with all this were thinking only of people just like themselves.  People of color, women, workers, and others have been striving ever since to be given their share of these rights.  Still, over 250 years a lot of progress had been made.)

        The people who wrote our founding documents picked their words with care, so for our Words of the Month, let’s take a look at some of those words.

        life - This word goes right back to Old English, and is deceptively simple.  Like many of the oldest, most basic words it actually has a very broad range of uses and connotations both literal and figurative.  Nevertheless the writers of the Declaration of Independence chose this because they wanted their statement to be clear, direct, and easy to understand and agree with.

        liberty - This one - along with all the rest of today’s words! - came into English in the 14th century via French.  Its original Latin sense was of legal freedom from slavery (making it all the more infuriating that the original lines condemning slavery were removed from the draft of the Declaration), but over time it also added the sense of individual ability to act according to choice.  Applying the word to whole communities “being free from autocratic rule” came by the late 15th century.  Presumably all of these connotations were in the minds of Jefferson and Adams as they drafted the document.

        pursuit - This word was an interesting choice because its original connotations back in the 14th and 15th centuries were fairly negative: hunting something down with hostile intent, and even persecution.  (Persecute comes from Latin per + sequi “follow/hunt through,” while pursue and prosecute both come from Latin pro + sequi “follow/ hunt forward.”)  Of course it’s also important to note that the unalienable right that was claimed was not the right to happiness, but the right to pursue it without threat to life or liberty.

        happiness - This word has the most interesting etymology of all, in my opinion, which is why I’ve already written about it.  For the scoop on happiness, which includes interesting connections to both pleasure and luck, read my previous post for Words of the Month - The Root of Happiness.

        declaration - In that same wave of words from French, this had the meaning in English “proclamation, formal public statement” by about 1400.  The word was applied to documents that recorded such proclamations by the 1650s, and although this 1776 document never called itself the “declaration of independence,” references to it were the first examples of the phrase.

        government - Chaucer may be the first attested use of this word in English, meaning “the act of governing or ruling; the system by which something is governed.”  Interestingly, before Middle English, before Old French, Latin borrowed the word from Greek kybernan, meaning “to steer or pilot a ship.”  It is, therefore, a nautical metaphor.  But as an example of strange etymological bedfellows, that Greek root was borrowed into English again in 1948 by the mathematician Norbert Wiener, who used it to coin the word cybernetics, meaning “theory and study of communication and control.”  And in the 1990s cyber- was broken off (not quite at the proper lexeme boundary) to use as a prefix applied to all things related to computers and the internet.  (For a prior post on the similar process and trajectories of a number of suffixes, read Words of the Month - the Suffixinator.)

        Finally, if you’re thinking it’s quite a coincidence that so many of these words came to English from French during the 14th century, no, of course it’s not a coincidence at all.  After the Norman Conquest in 1066, England was ruled by French-speaking Normans.  Not until the early fifteenth century did the Kings of England speak English (Middle English, at that point) as their own.  Henry V (crowned in 1413) was the first to write in English.  During that time, therefore, the whole apparatus of government and law were operated in Anglo-Norman (and Latin), and all those Anglo-Norman words were also used by the English-speaking people, thus bringing the words into English.  (And for more on this you can read my post Words of the Month - Threesomes.)

        Most of this may be mere trivia, of interest to word-nerds like myself but perhaps not really important.  Nevertheless, I think all of this does illustrate that words really do have power.

[Pictures: The Manner in which the American Colonies Declared themselves independent of the King of England, engraving from 1776, but I wish I had more info about this (Image from The European Political Print Collection);

The Signers, woodcut by Michael McCurdy from The Signers by Dennis Brindell Fradin, 2003.]