Words Related in Blood

As an illustration of blood kinships enjoyed by a native English word take the adjective good.  We can easily call to mind other members of its family:  goodly, goodish, goody-goody, good-hearted, good-natured, good-humored, good-tempered, goods, goodness, goodliness, gospel (good story), goodby, goodwill, goodman, goodwife, good-for-nothing, good den (good evening), the Good Book.  The connection between these words is obvious.

Next consider a group of words that have been naturalized:  scribe, prescribe, ascribe, proscribe, transcribe, circumscribe, subscriber, indescribable, scribble, script, scripture, postscript, conscript, rescript, manuscript, nondescript, inscription, superscription, description.  It is clear that these words are each other’s kith and kin in blood, and that the strain or stock common to all is scribe or (as sometimes modified) script.  What does this strain signify?  The idea of writing.  The scribes are a writing clan.  Some of them, to be sure, have strayed somewhat from the ancestral calling, for words are as wilful—­or as independent—­as men. Ascribe, for example, does not act like a member of the household of writers, whatever it may look like.  We should have to scrutinize it carefully or consult the record for it in that verbal Who’s Who, the dictionary, before we could understand how it came by its scribal affiliations honestly.  But once we begin to reflect or to probe, we find we have not mistaken its identity. Ascribe is the offspring of ad (to) and scribo (write), both Latin terms.  It originally meant writing to a person’s name or after it (that is, imputing to the person by means of written words) some quality or happening of which he was regarded as the embodiment, source, or cause.  Nowadays we may saddle the matter on him through oral rather than written speech.  That is, ascribe has largely lost the writing traits.  But all the same it is manifestly of the writing blood.

The scribes are of undivided racial stock, Latin.  Consider now the manu, or man, words which sprang from the Latin manus, meaning “hand.”  Here are some of them:  manual, manoeuver, mandate, manacle, manicure, manciple, emancipate, manage, manner, manipulate, manufacture, manumission, manuscript, amanuensis.  These too are children of the same father; they are brothers and sisters to each other.  But what shall we say of legerdemain (light, or sleight, of hand), maintain, coup de main, and the like?  They bear a resemblance to the man’s and manu’s, yet one that casual observers would not notice.  Is there kinship between the two sets of words?  There is.  But not the full fraternal or sororal relation.  The mains are children of manus by a French marriage he contracted.  With this French blood in their veins, they are only half-brothers, half-sisters of the manu’s and the man’s.