The Grammarian – 10 commonly misused words….if only you’d learned Latin you’d know!

If only you’d been taught Latin at school…..then you  certainly wouldn’t be making so many English language errors. Here are 10 of the most commonly misused English words and their original Latin meaning to stop you from going wrong in the future.

• decimate – originates from the Latin decimus “a tenth”, so to ‘decimate’ means to lose a 1/10th of something….nothing less, nothing more!

• ultimate – from ultima (the last). Hence, your ‘ultimate travel destination’….would actually be the last place you’d go to – careful what you wish for!

• refute – from refuter (to rebut), meaning to disprove with evidence….not to allege to be false. In other words you can’t ‘try to refute’ somebody’s opinion – you can ‘try to rebut’ it though.

• nauseous – to cause ‘nausea’, not to feel sick – that would be ‘nauseating’. This word arrived around the 1400’s from Latin, but was itself borrowed from Greek – naus “ship” and nautes “sailor” – from a time when ‘nauseous’ specifically meant ‘seasickness’.

• disinterested – means unbiased…..are you sure you don’t mean ‘uninterested’?

• hone – ‘to sharpen’, not ‘to converge’; i.e. you can only ‘home in’ on something, not ‘hone in’. The Latin clue here is in the word convergere “to incline together”, rather than to sharpen (acuere from which we get “acute” – a sharp point- and “acumen” – a sharp intellect).

• enervate – means ‘to weaken’, not ‘to energise’. Enervate does not come from the same source as energize (Greek energos, “active”);  it comes from Latin nervus, “sinew.”  Therefore, enervate means ‘to cause to become out of muscle’ or, ‘to weaken or deplete of strength’.

• staunch – means ‘loyal’ or ‘sturdy’ – this derives from the Latin word for “watertight”. However, when using it is a verb, you have to say ‘stanch’; e.g. ‘to stanch the bleeding’.

• Credible – from Latin credere means ‘believable’, not credulous or gullible.

• Fortuitous – from forte “by chance” means ‘coincidental’ or ‘unplanned’, not fortunate.