Resonating words

"A WORD has resonances. Say it out loud and, like a note struck on a grand piano, it rings, producing innumerable resonances and associations. If we listen carefully, we can hear them," writes John Morrish. And here are some words with a rich set of associations.

Monster comes from the Latin monstrum, derived from the verb monere, to warn. It meant something extraordinary but not necessarily bad. Chaucer, for instance, talks of ‘that marvellous monster fortune’. The original monere was a warning for something that was both unnatural and a bad omen. Monster also became the standard word for an animal or person afflicted with a congenital deformity. Frightening fictional beasts, especially big ones were also monsters, the Loch Ness monster, for instance. Democracy brought another kind of monster in its wake: the monster with moral deformities. In spite of these associations, the word is also used for anything big in size: a monster balloon or a monster sale or a monster burger.

Adult as in an adult movie or an adult video has become a euphemism for salacious or pornographic. The major exception to this rule is adult education. The word comes from the Latin adoloscere, to grow, and originally meant physical maturity. Earlier, adult could be used as a straightforward adjective, but in these days of political correctness, it has to be handled with care. Try asking for ‘adult’ books at a book-shop! Incidentally, adultery comes from a different root: the Latin adulter, meaning to another; an adulterer is someone who turns to another; all adults can now heave a sigh of adult relief!

Children are encouraged to be aggressive; a successful salesperson is an aggressive one; an aggressive student is appreciated; but the root of the word aggressive is far from positive. Aggressive comes from the Latin verb aggressare, meaning to launch an unprovoked attack. In the seventeenth century, aggression meant an unprovoked military attack and, as such, continues even today in the jargon of the military. So how did aggression become admirable? Sigmund Freud’s disciple Alfred Adler can be held responsible for this about-face. In need of some catch-word in order to be immortal, he developed the idea of Aggressionstrieb, or the aggression drive meaning self-assertion or the desire to achieve. It was in Canada that the word surfaced as a synonym for enterprising or energetic after an advertisement asked for ‘an aggressive clothing salesman’.

Tap-root

Resonances are acquired by a word when there is a change in customs or environment. For, a change in the above means a change in emphasis. Originally, a word may denote some prominent element of an object but in course of time it may come to denote the whole object or some other parts or part of it. Bhandara, originally a storehouse for utensils, came to mean simply a storehouse; before taking a brata or pledge, a person usually kept a fast. But when the era of pledges ended, a brata became just a fast.

— Deepti

This feature was published on December 18, 1999