Latin Reference — Vol. IV.b: The Word-Hoard
An interstitial volume, and the lightest on the shelf: almost no grammar, all etymology. English keeps a rich vocabulary of enchantment, and nearly every word of it has Latin underneath — usually a Latin word that was doing sober everyday work and moonlighting as magic on the side. This volume collects the hoard. It sits after Vol. IV because most of it hangs off verbs met there: canere, monēre, and their kin.
(The title tips its hat to Old English wordhord — the poet's phrase for a stock of language, "unlocked" before speaking. A flag planted for a parked season.)
Song as spell
The deepest fact in this volume: Latin drew no boundary between poem and spell. One word covered both.
| Latin | Literal sense | Descendants |
|---|---|---|
| carmen | song, poem, incantation, legal formula, prophecy | charm (via Old French charme) |
| incantāre | to sing onto or against someone | enchant, incantation |
| excantāre | to sing away, charm out of place | (no survivor — but see Vol. VI.a: the Twelve Tables outlaw it) |
| cantāre | to sing away at (Vol. VII's frequentative) | chant, cantor — and charm's whole family |
Carmen is the load-bearing word. A law was a carmen. A prophecy was a carmen. Virgil's epic and a witch's muttering shared one noun. When English took charm from it, the magical sense simply won the inheritance dispute.
The watching sky
Roman public religion ran on reading signs — chiefly birds. The vocabulary of that lost science is still in constitutional use.
| Latin | Literal sense | Descendants |
|---|---|---|
| avis + specere | bird + to watch → auspicium | auspices, auspicious |
| augurium | the augur's reading | augury; inaugurāre → inauguration |
| ōmen | a sign, especially spoken | ominous; abōminārī — to push an omen away, "not that!" → abominable |
| mōnstrum | a divine warning (from monēre, Vol. IV) | monster, demonstrate, remonstrate |
| portentum / prōdigium | a stretched-forth sign / a freak of nature | portent, prodigy |
Sit with two of those — reveal
Inauguration: no magistrate could take office at Rome until the birds approved; inaugurāre meant to install someone after taking the auspices. Every modern head of state is sworn in with a fossil of bird-divination in the ceremony's name.
Abominable: ab- + ōmen — to turn an omen away, avert it, want no part of it. An abominable thing was originally an ill-omened one. (The later spelling abhominable — as if "away from humanity" — is a medieval folk etymology; Shakespeare's contemporaries fell for it wholesale.)
Aside — sinister. In Roman augury the observer faced south, putting the lucky east on his left — so sinister was, in the oldest Roman usage, the favourable side. Greek practice faced north, making the left unlucky, and Greek habit won the word war. Dexter (right) kept its good name throughout: dexterity, ambidextrous — literally "right-handed on both sides". The left hand lost a two-thousand-year branding battle it had started by winning.
Sacred and accursed
| Latin | Literal sense | Descendants |
|---|---|---|
| sacer | set apart for a god — hence both holy and accursed | sacred, consecrate; exsecrārī → execrate |
| religiō | the binding scruple (ancients disagreed: relegere, to go over again, or religāre, to bind fast) | religion |
| superstitiō | a "standing over" — excessive, trembling dread | superstition |
| nūmen | the nod of a god — divine will in a gesture | numinous |
| fātum | "the thing spoken" (from fārī, to speak) | fate — and late Latin fāta, the Fates, → Old French fée → fairy |
| fānum | shrine | fanatic (shrine-frenzied); profane — prō fānō, outside the shrine, on the wrong side of the threshold |
Sacer deserves a pause: the same adjective marked a thing given to the gods and a person handed over to them for destruction — the outlaw homō sacer, killable by anyone. Holiness and curse as one category, separated only by which direction the giving runs. Vol. VI's tablets live exactly on that seam: dōnō — I give the thief to the goddess.
The practitioners
| Latin | Literal sense | Descendants |
|---|---|---|
| magus | Persian priest, via Greek | magic, mage, the Magi of the Nativity |
| venēnum | originally a love-potion (kin to Venus); then any potion; then poison | venom |
| veneficium / maleficium | potion-craft / evil-doing | venefic, malefic, and the witch of the Latin Bible: malefica |
| sors, sortis | a lot — the drawn token of chance | sorcerer (a sortiārius, lot-caster), sortilege |
| haruspex | gut-gazer: the entrail-reader | (extinct, mercifully) |
| dīvīnus | belonging to the god; one who channels it | divine (the verb), divination |
| occultus | hidden (ob + celāre, to conceal) | occult |
| amulētum | Pliny's word for a worn charm; origin unknown — a mystery object with a mystery name | amulet |
The drift of venēnum is a morality tale in one noun: Venus's potion → any drug → poison. Every love-philtre is a dosage question.
Aside — glamour is grammar. Latin grammatica — book-learning — travelled north and, in Scots, split in two: grammar the school subject, and gramarye → glamour, occult learning, a spell of illusion cast over the eyes. To "cast a glamour" over someone was to bewitch their sight. Only in the 19th century did the word soften into mere allure. So the modern fashion sense of glamour is a faded enchantment — and the underlying idea, that literacy itself is numinous, is precisely what Vol. VI's pseudo-writing tablets show at Bath: people who couldn't write, imitating writing, because the marks held power regardless. The word-hoard agrees with the archaeology.
The drill
Cover the right-hand columns and work each table cold: Latin → literal sense → descendant. Then reverse it — start from the English word and dig down (ominous → ? fascinating → wait, that one's held back for Vol. VI.a's territory; sinister → ?). Ten minutes on a train covers the hoard. The pass condition: abominable, inauguration and fairy each traceable back to source without peeking.