| > In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? In English, the short, common words are the oldest ones, from Old English and Anglo-Saxon origin, the language of everyday people. The long, flowery and poetic usages came later, via French, Italian and Latin, the language of the French invaders from 1066. You see these two distinct forms a lot in Shakespeare. Indeed he popularised many of the borrowings. Here is one great example from Macbeth: "Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red." Back in 1606, when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, only the best educated could understand "... will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine". So Shakespeare finishes with "making the green one red", which everyone got. * multitudinous - from Latin "multitudo" * incarnadine - from French "incarnadin", via Italian and originally from Latin. * red - from Old English "read", similar root as the German "rot" and Dutch "rood". * green - from Old English "grene", similar root as the German "grun" and Dutch "groen". So short words = old, Germanic; complicated words = newer, Latin or French/Italian. |
> The long, flowery and poetic usages came later, via French, Italian and Latin, the language of the French invaders from 1066.
My wife (nonnative speaker, European, Romance language) started looking at GRE vocabulary at one point. She found most of the hard words were super easy; it was the everyday ones that proved tricky.