Learn English – Any other words that use “dis-” as an amplifying prefix

The etymological fallacy does not state that knowing the etymology of a word will lead you to misunderstand its present meaning, it merely states that the original meaning is not necessarily systematically equated to the present meaning which, on the face of it, seems a fair statement.

The etymological fallacy is a genetic fallacy that holds, erroneously, that the historical meaning of a word or phrase is necessarily similar to its actual present-day meaning.

That is however a reductive use of the word etymology itself.

Etymology cannot be reduced to the original meaning of a word (if there ever was such a thing – words themselves having a life of their own). Instead it has to be envisioned as the whole path that leads from former meanings to present day meanings. It is not a static snapshot taken at an arbitrary point in the past; it is, as much as one can reconstruct it, the whole history of how words and cultures interact with each other to lead from stems to words and meanings. It is a dynamic thing leading to the present.

Let's take just one example: to tally. If you look it up online in the free dictionary, you will discover a whole list of apparently unrelated meanings such as:

• To reckon or count.
• To record by making a mark.
• to score (a point or goal) in a game or contest.
• To be alike; correspond or agree.

The way these seemingly unrelated meanings are actually connected becomes glaringly obvious if you know the etymology of the word: The base meaning of a tally is "a tick marked with notches to indicate amount owed or paid" (see French une entaille).

In the old times, people would keep counts of what they owed to each other by dividing a stick in two pieces and each time a new debt was contracted a new notch (a tally) was carved into the reunited pieces. Each party would keep its own piece and, every now and then, accounts were settled with the two pieces matching. Because two different sticks can't be broken in the same way, there was no possible argument.

This is the kind of gem etymology brings to the knowledge of a given language.

To take the best-known passage alone, rather than the whole speech, and skip over duplicates, we can quickly show that this is the case:

we Old English we

shall Old English sceal

fight Old English feohtan

on Old English on a variant of Old English an

the Old English þe, from earlier Old English se

beaches Old English bæce/bece

landing Modern English noun from land, from Old English land/lond

grounds Old English grund

in Old English in

fields Old English feld

and Old English and/ond (in which it at first only had the "then","next" meaning rather than the "and also" meaning).

streets Old English stret in some dialects, stræt in others.

hills Old English hyll

never Old English næfre

surrender Old French surrendre

Now, the next question is to what extent does it tell us something about English, and to what extent something of Churchill's mastery of it?

The speech is in general not one that attempts to demonstrate Churchill's intellectual mastery of a subject (to which we turn more often to words of Latin and Greek origin), or which requires technical precision (in which we turn to the terms with most precision in a field, which tend to be Latin or Greek again), or his florid emotions (to which we turn more often to the Romance languages, which in turn owe a lot to Greek). No, he wanted to underline a strong, almost crude drive, simply expressed.

The speech called for simple words, and the simplest words in English - those that are known to everyone from a young age - are mostly Old English in origin. Old English is the core of English after all (that's why it's called Old English). Even a speech that made heavy use of Latinate words, would have much that came from Anglo-Saxon (all the articles and pronouns for a start).

Even if he was aware he was using Old English words heavily (and as the historian whose works included the four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, it's quite likely that he would have been conscious of it), his primary concern was more likely this simplicity. He was not going to make an intellectual argument in favour of continuing the war, he was going to drill in a series of similar emotive assertions that would encourage the hearts of his fellow politicians, his fighting men, those otherwise involved in the war-effort, and the general populace, alike.

And most of us would turn to mostly Anglo-Saxon words in such a case too.

He may have been considering the emphasis upon Englishness suggested by this. He would probably not have wanted to do this too blatantly. After all, the allies where not solely English (in the context of the speech, they were mainly French), and even those in British uniform included many from elsewhere in the UK and its colonies, along with some volunteers from elsewhere. I think, too much is made of this possibility.

So too, do I think too much is made of the word surrender being of Old French origin. In recent years much has been made of this, particularly in response to some in the US attempting to stereotype the French as militarily weak after the French government opposed the invasion of Iraq. Aside from ignoring just about everything about French and US military history, it's doubly irrelevant here.

For a start, the speech was made during the Battle of France. The BEF were fighting along-side an International force that was mainly French, to keep France free from the German invasion. This is not a time where Churchill would have insulted the French!

Second, we can consider the effect of this word by changing "We shall never surrender" to "We shall never give up", which would make the passage entirely Old English in origin, but the words "give up" differ from "surrender" in both nuance and euphony. In addition to being almost all Old English, the words are almost all short, being mostly monosyllabic with just two two-syllable words (one of which is part of a three-syllable noun-phase). The three-syllable surrender allows a slightly longer consideration of that assertion — even though it's a negative one — of what they would not do, coming as it does after his previous positive assertions of what they would do.

In all, I think the heavy use of Old English says more about English than it does about Churchill's use of it. This is not to deny thatChurchill was a master of the language, and his speech was a great example of that mastery. Many other eloquent speakers and writers of English would similarly have used Old English heavily if they wanted to evoke a similar response in their audience.