I've been dealing with symptoms of frozen shoulder lately, and so have been taking the 12-hour NSAID Aleve. Looking at the package one morning, I decided it might be the best brand name that came out of the trend that dominated marketing for a few decades: names that seemed like they're real words but aren't.
Most of the other names, clearly kludged together from Latin or Greek roots, looked like they were trying too hard. Aleve, on the other hand, has always seemed to me like a word that already existed but by chance never happened to become one.
Orientate and orient, for instance, both exist in common usage*. Alleviate exists, but alleve (with two Ls) does not. Relieve is used instead.
Oh, the oddities of English.
From there I had to look up the etymology of alleviate to see why it has always been such a long word.
According to etymonline.com, it comes from the Late Latin alleviatus, past participle of alleviare, which means "to lighten (a burden), comfort, console." The main part of the word is about being light, from the Proto-Indo-European root *legwh-, "not heavy, having little weight."
None of that was too surprising. The additional words that come from that same PIE root were what interested me the most:
- elevate (and related words)
- leaven
- legerdemain
- leprechaun
- Levant
- levee
- lever
- levity
- levy (as in raise or collect fees)
- light (as in not heavy, not as in the quality of anti-darkness)
- lighter (as in barge)
- lung
- relevant, relevance
- relief, relieve
So many divergent words that don't seem like they would be related! And I didn't even mention carnival... which… I still don't understand how that fits on the list.
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* Garner's Modern American Usage, Third Edition, rated orientated as Stage 2 (spread to a significant fraction of the language community but remains unacceptable in standard usage), but I wonder if he hasn't moved it to at least Stage 3 in the more recent edition. I await a comment from Michael Leddy.
2 comments:
Happy to oblige: it’s still Stage 2.
I’m told that one line of work for linguistics majors is developing product names. I agree that Aleve is a good one. I hope your shoulder feels better soon.
I first heard someone use the verb "orientate" more than 40 years ago, and in my experience since then, it's much more commonly used than "orient." I would say it's gotten to the point where I'm surprised when I hear the verb "orient" used, the same way I am when I hear "home in" used correctly.
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