Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
Millions of people this month will envelop themselves in the warmth of billions of hours’ worth of cheesy, predictable, saccharine, mind-numbing, yet faith-affirming holiday movies. One archetype bound to return again and again in many of those films is the child who is thoughtful, observant, level-headed, confident, and unselfish beyond any semblance of a real child.
That kid character will be described as precocious, a word that originally described plants, not people.
The pre- of precocious is the same as in precede and pre-classical, from the Latin adverb prae “before, ahead of.” Coquere is Latin for “to cook” — and it’s where the English word cook came from — but it also was used figuratively to mean “to ripen.” So the Latin word praecoquere could mean either “to pre-cook” or “to ripen early.”
The adjective form praecox found its way into English — with the adjective-indicating -ious tacked on the end — by the mid-1600s as precocious. It originally described plants that produced blossoms before leaves, which is not the usual order of things, but it was only a few decades before the term was being used to describe young people who seemed to develop skills before others their age did. These days, precocious is generally used to describe children who act (or attempt to) more mature than their age would dictate.
On a related note, a fruit native to the Himalayas showed precociousness, in the original sense. It was believed to be a type of peach (persicum in Latin), but it regularly blossomed before all the other peaches. In Latin, it was called persicum praecox, literally “early-ripening peach,” but outside Rome, the persicum was dropped and praecox altered to become the Arabic al-birqūq. The al just means “the.”
This was what the fruit was called by Arabic-speaking traders as it made its way across Europe. When it reached England in the mid-16th century, the fruit, in the mouths of English-speakers, became abrecock. The word continued to change, though, until it became the Modern English apricot.
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Comments
This is a fascinating word, isn’t it? I wonder if there’s a connection (somehow) with precious? I would doubt it, since most precocious children tend to be brats. Oh, that’s not a nice word either. Rats, with a ‘b’ in front of it? The origins of apricot is pretty interesting. It’s a fruit that seems to get overlooked more than others.