In a Word: Hope and Desperation

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.

Desperation is not a feeling anyone strives for, but it’s out there. As bad as it is, though, desperation once indicated something even worse.

Desperate and its other forms trace back to the Latin verb desperare. If that word reminds you of despair, that’s no coincidence: despair comes from the same root. What’s more, going back to the 15th century, desperate was essentially just an adjective form of despair.

Desperare includes the prefix de-, which when used on a verb reverses the action, as in defuse, de-escalate, and deactivate. Sperare means “to hope,” from the noun spes “hope.” The Latin desperare, then, means “to lose all hope, to despair.”

A quick internet search for “desperately clinging to hope” reveals that it’s a fairly common phrase in reporting, but to someone from the 1400s, it’s a contradiction — “having lost all hope, they’re clinging to hope.” It’s a bit like saying “loudly clinging to silence.”

Today, of course, that isn’t how we use the word. Desperate took off in its own direction, taking on the sense of “extreme, rash, without concern for additional consequences” — as in “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” The lexical holes left behind by this shift were filled with despairing and despairingly, which are more transparently linked to despair.

You might wonder if, since desperate begins with the de- prefix, sperate might also be a word. (After all, you can escalate something just as you can de-escalate it.) The answer is yes, though dictionaries mark it as “archaic.” Sperate means “hoped for,” or, of a debt, “likely to be collectible or recoverable.”

You might also have thought of the word exasperate, which looks like it could be related. If you know that the prefix exa- (as in exabyte) indicates a quintillion (that’s 18 zeroes) and think that maybe exasperate might boil down to an excess of hope, well, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Exasperate actually breaks down to ex- “out of or thoroughly”  + asper “rough.” If you’re exasperated, you’ve been thoroughly roughed up, emotionally.

Don’t get desperate; take a breath and calm your mind.