SESSION
2
ORIGINS
AND RELATED WORDS
Every
word in the English language has a history-and these ten are no exception. In
this section you will learn a good deal more about the words you have been
working with; in addition, you will make excursions into many other words
allied either in meaning, form, or history to our basic ten.
1.
The ego
Egoist
and egotist are built on the same Latin root-the pronoun ego, meaning I. I is
the greatest concern in the egoist’s mind, the most overused word in the
egotist’s vocabulary. (Keep the words differentiated in your own mind by
thinking of the I in talk, and the additional t in egotist.) Ego itself has
been take over from Latin as an important English word and is commonly used to
denote one’s concept of oneself, as in, “What do you think your constant criticisms
do to my ego?” Ego has also a special meaning in psychology-but for the moment
you have enough problems without going into that.
If you
are an egocentric, you consider yourself the center of the universe-you are an
extreme form. of the egoist. And if you are an egomaniac, you carry egoism to
such an extreme that your needs, desires, and interests have become a morbid
obsession, a mania. The egoist or egotist is obnoxious, the egocentric is
intolerable, and the egomaniac is dangerous and slightly mad.
Egocentric
is both a noun (“What an egocentric her new roommate is!”) and an adjective
(“He is the most egocentric person have ever met!”).
To
derive the adjective form. of egomaniac, add –al, a common adjective suffix. Say
the adjective aloud: egomaniacal
2.
Others
In
Latin, the word for other is alter, and a number of valuable English words are
built on this root.
Altruism,
the philosophy practiced by altruists, comes from one of the variant spellings
of Latin alter, other. Altruistic actions look toward the benefit of others. If
you alternate, you skip one and take the other, so to speak, as when you play
golf on alternate Saturdays.
An
alternate in a debate, contest, or convention is the other person who will take
over if the original choice is unable to attend. And if you have no
alternative, you have no other choice.
You see
how easy it is to understand the meanings of the words once you realize that
they all come from the same source.
And
keeping in mind that alter means other, you can quickly understand words like
alter ego, altercation, and alteration.
An
alteration is of course a change-a making into something other. When you alter
your plans, you make other plans.
An
altercation is a verbal dispute. When you have an altercation with someone, you
have a violent disagreement, a “fight” with words. And why? Because you have
other ideas, plans, or opinions than those of the person on the other side of
the argument. Altercation, by the way, is stronger than quarrel or dispute-the
sentiment is more heated, the disagreement is likely to be angry or even
hot-tempered, there may be recourse, if the disputants are human, to profanity
or obscenity. You have altercations, in short, over pretty important issues,
and the word implies that you get quite excited.
Alter
ego, which combines alter, other, with ego, I, self, generally refers to
someone with whom you are so close that you both do the same things, think
alike, react similarly, and are, in temperament, almost mirror images of each
other. Any such friend is your other I, your other self, your alter ego.
