Today’s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl’s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com

Nora Gold asks about the word passionate.  Nora is another one of the authors I met at a conference before the summer.  She wrote a book of short stories called Marrow and Other Stories and at her website she has free PDF downloads of a couple of those stories.

Byron wrote

His love was passion’s essence:—as a tree
On fire by lightning, with ethereal flame
Kindled he was, and blasted.

That really does seem to be passion’s essence, to be consumed.  But although Byron was talking about being consumed by passionate love, the image of being struck by lightning and bursting into flames sounds pretty painful and actually, pain is really at the root of passion.

The American Heritage Dictionary tells me that there was an Indo-European word root pei to hurt.

This word root made its way up into Latin where pati meant “suffer.”

Classical Latin is what the Romans spoke but after the end of the Roman Empire Latin was the language of literacy all over Europe and morphed into Medieval Latin.  One of the main vehicles for Latin’s ongoing popularity was the church and this particular word root was applied in a particularly churchy way.

About 1000 years ago passion emerged specifically applying to the suffering of Christ.

It was the strength of feeling associated with what was considered to be the ultimate in suffering that infused the word passion with a meaning of “strength of feeling” about 700 years ago.

From “strength of feeling,” a meaning relating to love and sexual passion evolved about 400 years ago.

I was interested to see that the first citation for passion as applied to sexual desire was from a book with the unlikely title of Mathematical Magick, or, The Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry.

Unlikely where sexual passion is concerned anyway.

This book was written by an enlightened theologian named John Wilkins.  In it he was actually saying that the divine frees people from their lusts and passions, not writing anything remotely erotic.

John Wilkins was passionate about science though as the book title suggests.  This was a kind of popular mechanics type of approach and it’s notable that the book was written in English not Latin.

At the time there was hot debate about whether man as created by God was centre of the universe and in particular if the earth represented a planet just like those other things up in the sky.

John Wilkins wrote another book called Discourse concerning a new planet; tending to prove, that (’tis probable) our earth is one of the planets.  He was trying to show people not only that the evidence seemed to support this more humble position in the universe but also give religious arguments as to why this might be so.

He was also passionate about communication which is why he didn’t write his books in Latin.

In fact he was one of those guys who springs up from time to time through history advocating a new universal language so that everyone from everywhere can understand each other.

I guess he didn’t realize that to some measure that’s what Latin had been, or what English was going to become.