Pros and Cons

Today a bit more about how warped the English language is. We have a habit of borrowing words from other languages and making them part of our own. Over a period of hundreds of years the exact original reason for picking one word or root word over another is lost. Our tendency is to steal a word and then over time to add prefixes and or suffixes to change the meaning of the word. Sometimes it just doesn’t work though. Examples follow.

 

Pros and cons is a shortening of the Latin phrase pro et contra which literally means for and against. For the most part, when we make a list of pros and cons we are really setting up two lists, one of things that are good and the other a list of things that are bad. We often make lists such as these, compare the lists and then make some decision based on the comparison of the two lists.

 

Used in this context, pro is typically a good thing and con is typically a bad thing. A professional is someone that is good enough at a thing that they can and do in fact get paid to do that thing. So, a confessional should be someone who is so bad at that thing that there is no way they could ever get paid for doing it, right? No, a confessional is a place where people go to admit their sins. Wait! What?!?! Really? Actually, it is. Since the Latin root of the word confessional is fess, which means to speak, it makes perfect sense. Adding the prefix con, would make the word about having a “bad” talk. And what else would you call a conversation about the bad things you have done?

 

So this was kind of an odd pro/con pairing, but not the one that really bothers me. Click here to read on and see what I think may be the biggest con in history or at least in American history.

Tags: bad, good, lists, movement, word