ANY political change ushers in a different set of words through discussions, press conferences and statements. Some words that are in circulation these days figure today. Fealty came to English from Old French, via Middle English. The French fealte is derived from fides, meaning ‘faith’; the latter is also the root of fidelity. Fealty has a slightly different shade of meaning: it refers to a feudal tenant or vassal’s sworn loyalty to a lord. Arrogate comes from the Latin arrogat, which means ‘claimed for oneself.’ It is derived from the verb arrogare, which means, literally, to (ad-) ask (rogare). In the mid-sixteenth century, arrogate came to English and means ‘take or claim for oneself without justification’.

Inveighed is a verb that means ‘speaking or writing about something with great hostility’. This word originated in the late fifteenth century and it owes its existence to the Latin invehere made up of ‘in’ meaning ‘into’ and ‘vehere’ meaning ‘carry’, giving the literal sense of carry in or introduce. Dirigiste as an adjective has recently come up as a qualifier with the noun economy. It is derived from the noun dirigisme. English ‘borrowed’it in the middle of the twentieth century from French and the root is the Latin dirigere, which means ‘to direct’. Dirigisme is mainly a derogatory term for a policy of strict control that allows for no initiative below the top level. Originally it was and does still remain a political expression but linguists can use it to refer to linguistic dirigisme, that is, standards of correctness in an evolving language.

In the late nineteenth century, the French expression esprit de corps was made a part of the English lexicon as an expression was needed to describe the team spirit evident in the students of the great public schools of Victorian England. In French, it literally means ‘the spirit of a group of people, team spirit’ and, for the language user today, it denotes the feelings of solidarity, loyalty and shared purpose that keep a group of people together, motivating each member to act in the interests of all.

This feature was published on June 19, 2004