enervate

I love the wonderful English language. But sometimes it’s stupid. This is one of those times.

Much like lots of us think ‘inflammable’ means something won’t catch fire (it means it totally will catch fire*), ‘enervate’ isn’t a synonym (AKA a word that means the same) for ‘energise’. It actually means completely the opposite – as a verb (a doing word), to enervate is to sap something or someone’s strength, to weaken or exhaust them.

You can also use ‘enervate’ as an adjective, AKA a describing word. So you can be enervated by someone or something. Hopefully not this post.

‘Enervate’ comes from a Latin word, ‘enervare’. The ‘e’ at the start means ‘out of’, and ‘nervus’ means ‘sinew’ or ‘nerve’. Together, the term originally meant ‘to remove the sinews’. Why? Well, in ancient Roman and Classical contexts, sinews (or tendons) were seen as essential to physical strength and vitality. So cutting or removing them was a way to render someone literally powerless. Over time, this vivid and somewhat minging image of losing strength evolved into the metaphorical sense of being drained of energy or vitality. And that’s where we get ‘enervate’ from.

You might also have heard of the word ‘innervate’, which comes from the same Latin root. If you innervate someone or something, it means you supply it or them with nerves. Chaotic parking situations do this to me.

* Yes, the prefix in- almost always means ‘not’ in English. But not in this case – ‘inflammable’ comes from the word ‘enflame’. And that’s why inflammable means flammable, not not flammable.

retronym

A retronym is a word for something that’s been named or renamed to differentiate it from a newer or modified version. They’re usually created by adding an adjective or qualifier to the original term. If you’re currently saying ‘Huh?’ and losing the will to live, let’s have a look at some examples which should hopefully make it clear:

• ‘acoustic guitar’ is a retronym which appeared after electric guitars – before they were just called ‘guitars’

• ‘film camera’ turned up after digital cameras were invented – before they were just ‘cameras’

• ‘landline phone’ is a retronym that appeared after we all got mobiles – before they were just, well, I’m sure you get it now.

As you’ve probably realised from the above, retronyms usually appear when an advancement or change in technology or society means the original term becomes ambiguous.

‘Retronym’ is a relatively young term, and was coined by American linguist Frank Mankiewicz in a magazine article in the early 1980s. It’s made up of two parts:

• ‘retro’ – you know what retro means, and

• ‘nym’ which comes from the Greek word ‘onoma’, meaning ‘name’ or ‘word’.

So it basically means ‘a name or word that looks back’.

The word ‘retronym’ follows the same style as other linguistic terms which you may or may not remember from school – like ‘synonym’ (a word that means the same as another word, like ‘big’ and ‘large’ – ‘syn’ being a Greek word for ‘together’ or ‘with’), or antonym (the opposite of a synonym, with the ‘ant’ bit coming from ‘anti’, which is Greek for ‘opposite’ or ‘against’).