Word Stories: trepidatious

Апрель 06, 2015 10:00

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Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

I admit to being slightly trepidatious (fearful, anxious) about this month’s column. You see, according to dictionaries, there is no such word as trepidatious. Flirtation, flirtatious. Ostentation, ostentatious. Disputation, disputatious. Vexation, vexatious. But no trepidatious. Why’s that?

The Latin verb trepidare meant ‘hurry, bustle, be agitated or alarmed’. Via French, it led to the English verb trepidate (tremble with fear or agitation) and the nouns trepidation (agitation, confused hurry or alarm) and trepidity (with the same meaning), the former being recorded in the early 17th century, about 100 years before trepidity is recorded. Trepidness also makes an appearance in the early 17th century.

There was also an adjective in Latin, trepidus (scared, alarmed). There were various attempts to turn this into an adjective in English, most of which seem to have lost the battle for survival of the verbally fittest and are now labelled ‘rare’ or ‘obsolete’ in the OED. Trepidate (as an adjective) is recorded from 1605, and was followed by trepid (1650), trepidatory (1881) and trepidant (1891), all with the same meaning. Trepid is the only one of these to appear in the 100 million word British National Corpus, and that only once. The one member of the adjective family that has survived and is at all in current use (127 instances in the BNC) is intrepid (fearless, undaunted, daring, brave), which is recorded from the end of the 17th century and collocates with words such as ‘explorer’ and ‘traveller’.

So, it seems to me that, all other pretenders to the throne having had their chance and having been dispatched, the way is clear for trepidatious to take its rightful place. I intend to utilise it intrepidly at every opportunity (not that there are that many opportunities to use a word like trepidatious) and am willing to risk the embarrassment of my interlocutor looking at me with a blank expression, mumbling ‘Trepidation...yes...but trepidatious? What can it mean?’

Тема: Грамматика и Лексика Теги: Wordstory, Etymology

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