Unforeseen Consequences

First off, I should point out, in case it’s not already clear, that I haven’t been writing a lot lately. This is because I find myself increasingly at a loss for interesting things today, and this in turn is probably because I’m steadily becoming a less interesting person. Either that, or I realize that writing things on the internet that nobody will read is for idiots. Either way, I decided I might as well write about something that I’ve been thinking about and is at least mildly interesting to a few tens of people in the world.

The first thing I’ve been thinking about is set phrases — groups of words that frequently appear together in sequence as an idiom. The one that got me thinking was “figment of one’s imagination”. Everybody knows what that means, but have you ever stopped to think: what the hell is a “figment”? There are a lot of other words that could take its place in that set phrase and make sense: creation, product, part, resident, and so on. One theory I dreamed up was that it’s like “fig-ment” — like a fig… plant… produces figs, the figs are a figment of the fig plant. So a figment of your imagination is like a fruit that your imagination bears. Anyway, it’s a word that you never hear outside of that specific phrase and does not have an obvious specific meaning.

Turns out, “figment” is cognate with “figure”, “fiction”, “feign” and, remarkably, “dough”, and has a historical meaning most similar to “creation”. “Figment”, “fiction”, “feign” and “figure” all come from a Latin root fingere meaning “shape” or “form”. Notice how all four English words took that meaning in a slightly different direction. “Figure” took “shape” in the literal sense, while the other three took it in a more figurative way. (Also, the preceding sentence is one of the best I have ever written.) And how on earth is “dough” related to this? Through the Proto-Indo-European root *dheigh-, meaning “to mold, shape or form”. This is the root of fingere (which, lest you fall into that trap, is not at all related to English “finger”) and of “dough”.

None of this explains why “figment” got relegated to a single set phrase, while its cognates (especially “figure”) went on to great success, fame and fortune. I’m not sure I want to try to guess.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about resulted from a chat about etymology with a coworker. He mentioned seeing a great word in a scientific article: “explandicum”, meaning “thing requiring explanation”. This seemed odd to me, since it’s so clearly a Latin-derived word (you might even say it’s just a Latin loanword, not even an English word in its own right) but explan- is an English-ism; the Latin word is explicare, which is obvious from the words for “explain” in modern Romance languages (like French “expliquer”) and English words like “inexplicable”. It then turned out that he misremembered, and the word was actually “explicandum”, which makes a lot more sense; you can see the analogy with words like “dividend” (“thing which is divided”).

This got me thinking: where did the word “explain” come from and how did it end up with the same meaning as the slightly different explicare? Well, it turns out that it comes through an interesting kind of synonymy. Explicare is a compound meaning “to unfold or unravel”, having the word plicare at its root — a word which gave us the English word “ply”. You can see how the meaning “explain” could be derived from that. On the other side, we have explanare, which gave us the English “explain” and has the root planus meaning “flat”. So we have two words meaning, respectively, “to unfold” and “to flatten”, both ending up meaning “to explain”. I think it’s fascinating to see this kind of synonymy result from a figurative similarity like this. It’s also interesting to note that “plain” and “plane” are cognates (which you almost intuitively don’t expect from homophones); the only difference is the influence of Old French spelling which gave us “plain”. “Plain” in the sense of “clear” or “simple” is a sort of figurative outcropping of “plane” as in “flat surface”.