Monday, November 16, 2009

Origins - Living it up

Among many others, the following English words derive from Latin vivo, to live:
1.Vivacious – full of the joy of living; animated; peppy – a vivacious personality. Noun: vivacity (vi-VAS’-i-ti). You can, as you know, also add -ness to any adjective to form a noun.
2.Vivid – possessing the freshness of life; strong; sharp – a vivid imagination; a vivid colour.
3.Revive – bring back to life. In the 1960s, men’s fashions of the twenties were revived. Noun: revival.
4.Vivisection – operating on a live animal. Sect- is from a Latin verb meaning to cut. Vivisection is the process of experimenting on live animals to discover causes and cures of disease. Antivivisectionists object to the procedure, though many of our most important medical discoveries were made through vivisection.
5.Viviparous – producing live babies. Human beings and most other mammals are viviparous. Viviparous is contrasted with oviparous, producing young from eggs. Most fish, fowl, and other lower forms of life are oviparous.
The combining root in both these adjectives is Latin pareto, to give birth (parent comes from the same root). In oviparous, the first two syllables derive from Latin ovum, egg.
Ovum, egg, is the source of oval and ovoid, egg-shaped; ovulate, to release an egg from the ovary: ovum the female germ cell which, when fertilized by a sperm, develops into an embryo, then into a foetus, and finally, in about 280 days in the case of humans, is born as an infant.
The adjectival form of ovary is ovarian; of foetus, foetal.
Love, you may or may not be surprised to hear, also comes from ovum.
No, not the kind of love you’re thinking of. Latin ovum became oeuf in French, or with ‘the’ preceding the noun (the egg), l’oeuf. Zero (picture it for a moment) is shaped like an egg (O), so if your score in tennis is ‘fifteen, and your opponent’s is zero, you shout triumphantly, fifteen love!’.
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