In a Word: I’ll Procrastinate Tomorrow

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.

I very nearly didn’t get this week’s In a Word column written. I could try to attribute this near lapse to my busy schedule, or to the holiday on Monday throwing my internal calendar out of balance, or to gremlins stealing my day planner, but if I’m being truly honest with myself, it was, alas, simple procrastination. Or what some from the early 19th century might have jokingly referred to as tomorrowing.

Though tomorrowing might seem like a less prestigious type of word — from Old English roots lacking the Latin pedigree of procrastination — those who used it were actually revealing that they knew and were playing with the etymology of procrastination, because “tomorrow” is built right into the word.

But don’t worry; I’ll tell you about it today.

The word cras is Latin for “tomorrow,” leading to the longer adjectival form crastinus, meaning “of tomorrow.” The pro- prefix is a common one, meaning “forward.” Put these all together, and you get the Latin procrastinare, which means “moving or putting off until tomorrow” — a verb that, I believe, lets us know that those long-dead Latin speakers of the past were just as lazy as we are today.

From procrastinare and its declensions evolved, by the 16th century, the noun procrastination (in both English and French) and the verb procrastinate. In its early English existence, procrastinate could be used a little differently than it normally is today — it could be a transitive verb.

Some quick grammar nerdery: A verb is transitive if it takes a direct object that receives the action — that is, the subject of the sentence verbs an object. A verb is intransitive if it does not take a direct object — the subject just verbs. Some verbs are always transitive, and some always intransitive, but many can be both. Take, for instance, return: In “Jesus will return,” it’s intransitive; in “Jesus will return his library books,” it’s transitive.

In the past, using a transitive procrastinate, someone might have written a statement like “’Twill not procrastinate my doom” to mean that it will not postpone his doom. (And in fact, someone did write that; it comes from a 19th-century poem called “Too Late” by William Linton.)

Or, to take a more modern example, instead of saying (intransitively) that I’m writing this column close to midnight because “I procrastinated,” I could say (transitively) that “I procrastinated this column” and still be grammatically correct — at least historically. If it sounds odd, and it probably does, that’s because the transitive sense is quite rare today.

But among all these grammar minutiae, the thing to remember is this: I finished this column by deadline, procrastination or not.