The courage to cringe.

Dear Word Detective: Whilst reading an excerpt from a (1925) treatise by R.A. Fisher, I came upon the phrase “to express our mental confidence or diffidence,” from which I gather that the opposite of “con” is “diff.” I’d never before seen “diffident” juxtaposed against “confident.” This got me to wondering about “conference” vs. “difference,” and whether any others would come to mind if I had time to ponder long enough. Can you shed light on how these prefixes came to be opposites? — Danny.

Oh yes, R.A. Fisher, the “English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist.” Thanks, Wikipedia! That’s assuming I’ve got the right guy, of course. There seems to be another R.A. Fisher, some dude in Iowa who prepares tax returns. But he has an animated dollar sign jumping up and down on his web page, so it’s a bit hard to imagine that R.A. Fisher using a word like “diffidence.”

“Diffident” is a fine word, and it is indeed the antonym, or opposite, of “confident.” In modern usage, “confident” means “certain, full of conviction” (“Henry was confident he could convince the judge to drop the charges”) or “self-assured, bold” (“Henry became noticeably less confident when the bailiff snapped on the cuffs”). “Diffident,” on the other hand, is used today to mean “timid, lacking self-confidence” or “reserved in manner, shy” (“Lyle’s diffident demeanor cost him the promotion that would have made him Henry’s assistant and, ultimately, his cellmate”).

When “diffident” first appeared in English in the late 16th century, however, it carried the somewhat different meaning, now obsolete, of “lacking trust (in)” or “distrustful” (“I am somewhat diffident of the truth of those Stories,” 1692). Similarly, “confident,” which appeared at roughly the same time, originally meant “trusting” (“You see, my Lord, how confident I am with you, to tell you what … occurreth to me upon this subject,” 1638), which later developed into the modern “assured, bold” meanings.

Both words arrived in English from Latin, although they show signs of being influenced by their equivalents in French. “Confident” is based on the Latin “confidere,” meaning “to trust or rely on,” a combination of “con” as an intensive prefix meaning “thoroughly” plus “fidere,” to trust. (“Con” or “com” as a prefix can either mean “together with” (as in “contract”) or be used as an intensive, as in “confide,” “confident,” etc. “Con” in “pro and con” is short for the Latin “contra,” against.)

“Diffident” is based on the antiquated verb “defide,” now rarely seen, meaning “to lack trust or confidence; to feel distrust” (essentially the opposite of “confide,” to put trust in). This “defide” is also based on the Latin “fidere,” to trust, but employs the prefix “dif” to negate the verb.

So “con” and “dif” make all the difference. Now there are two tricky things about Latin prefixes. One is that they can vary a bit in form according to the root word they precede. So “con” can sometimes appear as “com” or just “co.” The prefix “dif” can appear as “dis,” “des,” “di” and even “der.” The second funny thing about prefixes is that they often wander far from their original meaning. “Con” and its other forms derive from the Latin preposition “cum,” meaning “with,” and all its incarnations follow the general sense of “jointly, together” (as in “copilot” or “commingle”). “Dif” as a prefix, however, has a more complex history. Its original form was “dis,” representing a Greek root with the general sense of “in two ways” or “separated.” This led to “dis” and its relatives being used to mean “divide or set apart” (as in “discern” and “disseminate”), “remove, reverse or negate” (“displease” “disassemble”), and simply as an intensive. “Dis” in the form “dif” also gave us the word “different,” via the Latin “differre,” to set apart, from “dif” (apart) plus “ferre,” to carry.

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.