Capt. SO and I were outside this morning for our constitutional, luckily before the precipitative April Fool's joke from Mother Nature that now has it snowing gigantic flakes that are currently collecting on the ground. We've changed up our routine, a bit, from past seasons of neighborhood walking and are now doing the "big hill" two or three times in a row, in an effort to improve our cardio-vascular health. "Doing the big hill" would never elicit a Facebook "like" from either one of us but we know our hearts love the workout. After we got to the top, on our last ascension, (Makes it sound really impressive, doesn't it?), I posed the sarcastic question to Capt. SO, "Do we feel invigorated yet?"
As soon as the word, "invigorate" was out of my mouth I said, "Wait a minute! If the pre-fix "in" means not or non, how it is that "in" vigorate means to infuse energy into a person or routine?" Because Capt. SO is not nearly as fascinated with word origins as I, he smiled as if he was tracking my conversation, but I knew he really wasn't. I silently vowed to investigate my own mystery after we ran our morning errands. Since we'd burned so many calories with our a.m. workout, we promptly went out for breakfast and ate way more calories than we had burned earlier. Upon returning home, of course I headed straight for my favorite tome, "Mirriam - Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition".
What I found was that, over the years, I had forgotten that the prefix "in" has too dichotomous meanings. One meaning is "not" or "non" and the other meaning is "into". So, while inconsistent, inconsiderate, inconsolable, inefficient, inoperative, inconclusive, insensitive, incomprehensible, inviolate, ineffective, infallible, invertebrate actually mean not consistent, not considerate, not consolable, not efficient, non-operative, not conclusive, not sensitive, not comprehensible, not capable of being violated, non-efficient, not fallible, and not having backbones, the word invigorate is one example of the not-so-common use of the prefix "in" as in "into".
Is it any wonder that people trying to learn the English language - and even those who proclaim English as their primary language - find English so very difficult to learn and master? Why shouldn't "invigorate" mean to deplete a person's energy level to that of exhaustion, rather than meaning to infuse an individual with a feeling of energy and vigor?
Yes, we are not consistent with our "ins". How's that for obfuscation?
Ancora imparo
