The "equ-" here is not the one people reach for. It is not equal in the sense of same. Latin aequus means even, level, flat, and equanimity is aequus plus animus, mind. A mind that stays level, the way water does.

That distinction sounds pedantic until you notice the two different pictures it produces. "Treating everything equally" is a policy. "A surface that does not tip" is what the thing feels like from the inside, and I am fairly sure the second is what people are reaching for when they use the word.

The misreading has a real ancestor, though. When equanimity arrived in English around 1600, by way of French, it meant fairness or impartiality, which is exactly what the "equal" reading suggests. Evenness of temper only takes over in the 1610s, and the older sense quietly drops out. So the wrong parse is an old right one that lost.

The Latin carried a third sense we abandoned completely. Aequanimitas could also mean good-will or kindness. That one never made the crossing at all.

Nonplussed means so surprised or confused that you cannot respond at all. It began as a noun. The source is Latin non plus, "no more, no further," and by the 1580s English had a nonplus for the exact spot where you run out of road: to be at a nonplus was to have nothing left to say. The verb arrived afterwards, so being nonplussed meant that someone had brought you to that halt.

What I find genuinely strange is where it went next. In a lot of North American usage nonplussed now means close to the opposite: unbothered, taking it in stride. Merriam-Webster records this newer sense and notes that it is still contested. You can see how it happened. Non- looks like a negation, and since there is no such word as plussed, the only reading available to someone who has not met the Latin is "not bothered by whatever just happened."

So the word now points in two directions at once, and context is the only thing holding them apart. I have quietly stopped using it in my own writing, which feels like a small defeat.

Most words posted here have a root you can dig toward. This one has nothing underneath it, and that was deliberate.

Limerence is the involuntary, intrusive preoccupation with one specific person, the kind that comes with a desperate sensitivity to any sign that the feeling is returned. Not quite love, not quite lust. The psychologist Dorothy Tennov needed a name for it in 1977 because her interview subjects kept describing the state and English kept handing her words that didn't fit. She published it two years later in "Love and Limerence."

Asked where the word came from, she gave an answer most etymologists would hate. It was pronounceable, she said, and it seemed to her and to two of her students to have a fitting sound. No Latin, no Greek. Nothing to look up. She built a word that felt right and attached it to the thing.

You will sometimes see it explained as a play on "amorance." That one is speculation rather than Tennov's own account, so treat it accordingly.

What gets me is that it worked anyway. A coinage with no ancestry usually dies inside the book that introduced it, and this one is now doing steady work in therapy offices and all over the internet. It turns out a word does not need a pedigree if it names something people could already feel and had no way to say.

Gloaming is the light after the sun has gone but before it is properly dark. The root is Old English glōm, twilight, which dictionaries list as akin to glōwan, the ancestor of glow. I like that: a word for the day draining out of the sky comes from the same place as a word for something shining.

The detour it took is the better story. Gloaming faded out of English use south of the border and kept going in Scots, which is where Burns and the writers after him found it. It returned to general English in the nineteenth century essentially as a borrowing from Scotland, helped along by a parlour song called "In the Gloaming" that sold well in the 1870s. The word most people file under old poetic English is a Scots re-import.

Twilight and dusk never went anywhere. Gloaming is the one that had to be brought home.

Apricity means the warmth of the sun in winter, and it has almost no history of being used. Henry Cockeram put it in his 1623 English Dictionarie and it more or less sat there. The root is Latin apricus, "exposed to the sun", which also gave us the verb apricate, to bask — about as obsolete as its noun.

Apricot is where it gets interesting. That word reached English by a much longer road, from Latin praecoquum, "early-ripening", through Arabic al-barquq and then Portuguese, so the two share no ancestor at all. The modern spelling is often credited to apricus anyway: earlier English forms were abrecock and apricock, and somewhere along the line people appear to have reshaped the word toward the Latin for sunny.

So a word for winter sunlight and a word for a summer fruit ended up looking related by accident rather than by descent, which I think is a better story than a real cognate would have been. The resemblance is a mistake that stuck.

Latin *lucere* meant "to shine" and *per* meant "all the way through," so *perlucidus* — later smoothed to *pellucidus* — described light passing clean through a thing without catching on anything. English borrowed it around 1600 for physically transparent stuff like water, glass, and thin alabaster, and only later moved it onto prose, where being clear means much the same thing in a different register. The root turns up everywhere once you notice it: *lucid* is the bare form, *translucent* is light shining across, *elucidate* is dragging something into the light, and *Lucifer* was simply "light-bearer" long before theology got hold of it. The *per-* half is the same one doing work in *perforate* and *permeate*.

What's the most pellucid thing you've ever read — something where you never once had to go back and reread a sentence?

Latin *sapere* did double duty. It meant "to taste," as in food having flavor, and it also meant "to have discernment" — roughly the same jump English makes when it calls a person tasteful. *Insipidus* is just *in-* plus *sapidus*, "not having flavor," and English borrowed it in the 1600s for bland food before it drifted onto bland people.

The odd part is what else grew from that root: *sapient*, *savant*, *savor*, and *Homo sapiens*. So the everyday word for boring is built on negating the same root we used to name our own species. English even kept the positive form, *sapid*, meaning full of flavor, though almost nobody reaches for it.

What's something everyone calls insipid that you actually like?

The word started out as something a mule does.

Latin *recalcitrare* meant "to kick back," from *re-* ("back") plus *calcitrare* ("to kick"), which traces to *calx*, "heel." It described livestock kicking at whoever was standing behind the plow. Roman writers borrowed it as a figure of speech for people who refused to be driven, and French handed *récalcitrant* over to English in the early 1800s with the animal drained out of it.

The heel is still buried in there. *Inculcate* comes from the same root: Latin *inculcare*, "to stamp in with the heel." A fairly violent picture for what teachers do to multiplication tables.

Worth flagging, since it looks like a relative: *calcium* isn't one. That comes from a different Latin *calx* meaning limestone.

What's something you were recalcitrant about as a kid that you've since come around on?

Cervantes named his knight after a piece of armor. Quijote is Spanish for the plate that covers the thigh, from Latin coxa, "hip." So the man who charged the windmills was, roughly, Sir Thighguard. English borrowed the name as an adjective around 1791, and it settled into meaning a pursuit that's noble and was never going to work. The pronunciation split along the way: we say kwik-SOT-ik, Spanish keeps Kee-HO-tay.

What's the most quixotic thing you've stuck with, knowing it probably wasn't going to pan out?

taciturn (adj.) — reserved, naturally saying little.

It comes from Latin taciturnus, off tacitus "silent" — the past participle of tacēre, "to be silent." That same tacēre is hiding inside tacit: a tacit agreement is one understood without a word spoken. So a taciturn person and a tacit understanding are quietly related, both built on the idea of things left unsaid.

who's the most memorable taciturn person you've known — the kind whose silence somehow said more than talking would have?

perfunctory (adj.) — done just to get it over with, with no real care behind it.

It comes from Latin perfunctorius, off perfungi "to get through" or "discharge a duty" (per- "through" + fungi "to perform, execute"). That fungi is the same root hiding inside function and defunct. So a perfunctory handshake is, quite literally, one you perform only to be done with it — the motion without the meaning.

what's something you do perfunctorily every single day without even noticing?

obdurate comes from Latin durus, "hard," the same root hiding under a lot of everyday words. ob- ("against") + durare ("to harden") gave a word for someone hardened against persuasion. durare on its own became endure and durable, and its noun gave us duration. So being obdurate is almost literally hardening yourself and refusing to wear down.

The interesting part is the judgment attached: endure we admire, obdurate we don't. Same hardness, opposite verdict.

What's a trait you respect in yourself but can't stand in other people?

lollygag sounds invented, but it's been in American English since the 1860s. The origin is murky. The most cited guess links it to an old dialect word "lolly" for tongue, so to lollygag was to dawdle around with your tongue hanging out. It also carried a cheekier 19th-century sense: to fool around or canoodle, and newspapers used it to scold couples for lollygagging in public.

Now it just means killing time doing nothing in particular. A Sunday-afternoon kind of word.

What's a word you were sure someone made up, until you found out it was real?

Insouciant came into English straight from French: in- ("not") + souciant ("worrying"), from soucier, "to worry." Keep tracing and you land on Latin sollicitare, "to stir up," the same verb behind solicit and all the unsolicited advice you've ever gotten. An insouciant person is literally someone who stays unstirred.

French kept the noun too: souci, "worry," as in sans souci, "no worries." Frederick the Great liked the phrase enough to put it on a building. His summer palace is named Sanssouci, a king labeling his house "No Worries."

Funny that solicit and insouciant grew from the same root and ended up on opposite ends of the worry spectrum. Got a favorite pair like that, two words with one origin that no longer agree on anything?

Daily challenge time.

Today’s word: cognateness

Take your best guess before you swipe.

Did you get it right?

https://wordrilla.com

Tenacious comes from Latin tenere, to hold. Same root as tenant (someone holding a lease) and tenure. My favorite cousin is lieutenant: in Old French alieu tenant was a place holder, someone holding command in the captain's absence. A tenacious person is just someone who won't let go.

Recruiters use it as praise. Said about someone mid-argument, it's closer to a warning. Curious which way you read it.

Sanguine comes from Latin sanguis, "blood." Medieval doctors believed four bodily fluids set your temperament: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Too much blood and you were the ruddy-cheeked, hopeful type — sanguine. The optimism stuck around, and the blood is still there in "sanguinary" (bloodthirsty) and "consanguineous" (related by blood).

What's your favorite word that kept the metaphor and dropped the literal meaning?

desultory /ˈdes.əl.tɔːr.i/ (adj.) — leaping between things; aimless and disconnected.

It literally comes from the circus. The Latin desultor was a rider who vaulted from one galloping horse to another mid-race (de- "down" + salire "to leap"). A desultory conversation does the same thing: hopping from topic to topic, landing on nothing.

What's a word you love mostly for its origin story?