Apr

12

Word Of The Week: April 12, 2008

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 12, 2008 |

This week’s word of the week is: obvious. It’s an easy, straightforward word, one most of us use several times a week, meaning clear, easily understood or apprehended, apparent, even predictable. The etymology of such a simple word should be, well, obvious too, shouldn’t it? It starts with ‘ob’, a Latin adjective that generally means “towards”, or “in front of”, combined with ‘via’, the Latin word for “road” or “way”, and then it ends with what might be the second-hardest working suffix in the English language after -ing, -ous. And -ous also comes from Latin, specifically a Latin suffix, -osus, which is attached to nouns to turn them into adjectives. From the Oxford English Dictionary: “forming adjectives, with the sense of ‘abounding in, full of, characterized by, of the nature of’”. So, for example, the Latin noun officium means service, duty, or respectful action, so officiosus means courteous or dutiful. So obvious means toward the way of abounding in…erm…it means having the characteristic of being in the way. I think. There’s something obnoxious about how the etymology of this word makes me feel so oblivious. It should be more obsequious and less obdurate. Its obtuseness is obscene. Now I know, though, that Latin isn’t really dead–it’s just obsolete!


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