Search us!

Search The Word Detective and our family of websites:

This is the easiest way to find a column on a particular word or phrase.

To search for a specific phrase, put it between quotation marks.

 

 

 

 

 

Comments are OPEN.

We deeply appreciate the erudition and energy of our commenters. Your comments frequently make an invaluable contribution to the story of words and phrases in everyday usage over many years.

Please note that comments are moderated, and will sometimes take a few days to appear.

 

 

shameless pleading

 

 

 

 

Deserve

Life not fair; film at 11.

Dear Word Detective: I have a pet peeve about the prevalent use of the word “deserve.” My belief about all of life is that you get what you get: good people experience bad things and vice versa. So, not wanting to blame the word itself, I did a little search on its etymology (as best I could using Google) and cannot see where the concept of “being worthy of” a certain result was an aspect of the original definition. I read that the word originates from Latin, “de” meaning “completely,” and “servire” meaning “to serve.” So, “deserve” should simply mean that something serves us (is aligned with our goals, desires, etc.) or doesn’t serve us. There doesn’t seem to be anything about whether or not we earned it, until later in the history of the word’s usage. Yeah, life sometimes serves us and sometimes it doesn’t, but that in itself holds no judgment about the virtue of the person being served. Am on the right track here or do I need to banish the word from my personal lexicon? — Trish McCormick, Bozeman, Montana.

Oh, don’t do that. It’s a useful word, and other people would keep using it anyway. I think, if I’m reading your question correctly, that I agree with your annoyance at the current fashion of using “deserve” in a way that implies that every good or bad thing that happens to someone is the payoff of a karmic Instant Rewards program run by the universe. That staple of the evening news, the declaration that an honor student “didn’t deserve” to have his bicycle stolen (or worse) is obnoxious. Who does “deserve” misfortune? And who decides? The gang at Action Nine News? The corollary supposition, the basis of many self-improvement cults, that a less attractive person must have secretly “deserved” (or attracted) ill fortune is even more repulsive. But such rhetorical crimes are beyond my power to cure.

You’re correct about the roots and origin of our modern word “deserve,” but I’m afraid that the brief etymologies of words found in conventional dictionaries (including those widely available on the internet) often omit important developments in the histories of words. That’s why a historical dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary, which tracks the evolution of words over the centuries, is so valuable. It’s when we trace the history of “deserve” that we find a sharp turn in its development.

It’s true that the root of our “deserve,” the Latin verb “deservire,” meant “to serve well and enthusiastically,” as a soldier or public servant might serve the citizens of Rome. Such a loyal and zealous servant has, in most civilized societies, the understandable expectation that his or her service will be rewarded. The fact that the service that someone renders earns them the right to expect a reward for their work led to the change in “deserve.” In Late Latin (roughly the third to sixth centuries A.D.), the Classical Latin meaning of “deservire” (“to serve well”) gradually shifted to that of “to earn or be entitled to by serving well.” It was this “earned it” meaning which became the Old French “deservir,” which eventually, in the 13th century, became the English verb “to deserve.” The initial sense of “deserve” in English was “to earn a rightful claim by doing something,” but by the 15th century it had taken on the modern meaning of simply “having earned a claim or entitlement” to something.

Incidentally, the belief that the original meaning of a word is necessarily its “true” meaning is called “the etymological fallacy.” The word “etymology,” meaning the study of the origin and development of words, comes ultimately from the Greek “etymos,” meaning “true,” plus “logos,” meaning “word.” Early lexicographers believed that determining the root of a word would reveal its “true” meaning. They were wrong. We still use the term “etymology,” but it’s long been apparent that words really do frequently change their meanings over time, those new meanings are as “true” as any other, and, as in the case of “deserve,” the roots of a word can be a bit deceptive.

1 comment to Deserve

  • nonnymouse

    I have found a “self development” group that uses the words:
    Pertubation=when you are bored to drowsiness, or become emotional due to being subjected to almost 48 hours of psychotherapy, strict control, and pseudo science babble, inflicted by unprofessional amateurs at a so called “seminar” that is supposed to transform your life in 48hrs.

    Equilibration=when you begin to cry,or as above, and the leaders of said seminar take you aside and convince you that all your memories of your childhood are “lopsided perceptions” and you got it all wrong and have to reverse your memories from the good to bad, and from the bad to good.

    Evolve= when you have been processed as above and have, according to the leader, moved to a higher spiritual plane and are now “vibrating at a higher frequency” and can not “de-evolve” ever, because you are now a “light bearer to mankind”.

    Charge=when you have a perception(corrected from the previous “lopsided ones you held)that you have a problem with someone in your life and you are then urged to choose one of the 50 or more people at the same seminar, to be the proxy for that person as you yell, cry,or whatever sort of emotional response you feel like displaying with them while they act the role of the offending party.

    Universal laws that govern humanity=(knowledge of) the leader claims to know these laws and is “educating” people so they will be enlightened and he does it out of “love” even if it means choosing a person at random from the group and subjecting them to personal villification and aggressive abuse till they give in to the leaders version of what is wrong with them.

    Quantum Mechanics & Quantum Physics=(knowledge of) the leader claims he is teaching the “universal laws that govern humanity” based on his superior knowledge of Q.M. and Q.P. but he has no formal qualifications in either science field?????

    Seems to me someone is perverting the english language and creating a lot of jargon that has a totally different meaning.

Leave a Reply

  

  

  

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Please support
The Word Detective


unclesamsmaller
by Subscribing.

 

Follow us on Twitter!

 

 

 

Makes a great gift! Click cover for more.

400+ pages of science questions answered and explained for kids -- and adults!

FROM ALTOIDS TO ZIMA, by Evan Morris