HUMOR: The Etymology Equalizer: Defender of Word Origins
Drew ponders - what does it take to "invent" a centuries' old war?
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
History will be hard-pressed to enumerate all of President Donald Trump’s accomplishments during his eight years in the highest office. Leading the list will, of course, be the historic trade agreement with China and the ending of the war between Russia and Ukraine. I do offer the qualifier that if these great accomplishments are not achieved by the time this column is published it is a near certainty that they will definitely be in place in the next 3.5 years. And if they are not it’s because Putin and Xi are stupid and not stable geniuses.
In a president so accomplished, it is possible, nay likely, that some of his “lesser” achievements might pass forgotten into history’s storage unit just like Fredericksburg’s own James Monroe who is remembered for the Monroe Doctrine and the Missouri Compromise but not as readily known for the annexation of Florida from Spain. Without Monroe, there would be no Moms for Liberty sex scandal or the song “Key Largo” by Bertie Higgins.
(Election Update from Sarasota County for School Board Election in November: Incumbent Bridget Ziegler, an anti-LGBTQ Mom for Liberty who engaged in threesomes with her husband and another woman, wants voters to know that one of her campaign platforms is to: “Require informed parental consent prior to any services or sexual education.” One can safely assume she informed her in-laws and her own parents prior to providing LGBTQ services to another woman. That had to be a fun Sunday brunch. “Yes, I’ll have the side salad and some side boob from the waitress, please. And I’m most definitely not gay.”)
One accomplishment of President Trump that is not getting enough credit is the fact that he invented the word “equalize.” Perhaps I am a bit biased in my enthusiasm for word creation, but I had to take two linguistics classes before they would let me graduate from Mary Washington (Thank you to Dr. Judith Parker), and inventing words is far more important than popping a 3 on Wordle or doing Strands without using a hint. And “equalize” is not a word that simply enters the lexicon for a couple centuries like cacography (bad handwriting) then exits when handwriting becomes obsolete c. 2000 AD. No, Equalize seems to have real staying power, and to verify its recent origins, I checked with renowned Latin scholar and Mary Washington College alum, Rob Epler, to make certain.
“The base idea of the word, as I understood it in elementary school, is to even or level which would come from the adjective ‘aequus’ and verb ‘aequare’ which mean to make level,” Epler responded. “Secondary meaning then becomes fairness, ‘aequitas’, which means equally. That ‘ae’ diphthong drops the A in English. ‘Aestimare’ gives us ‘estimate’.“
“The -ize suffix that creates verbs is from Greece, and -ing, originally denoting a habitual or repeated action, is Germanic, if that matters.”
The Germanic most certainly matters because Trump’s family is from Germany so that was consistent with his ability to at least create the suffix in “equalize.” In truth, some of Epler’s answer was confounding, since it showed a level of Latin comprehension that I failed to achieve despite three years of the dead language in high school, but one part of his answer was especially troubling. He and I went to elementary school in the same era, and in fact, I was there at the annual Martin Luther Lausch Elementary School carnival when he bounced a Ping Pong ball into a goldfish bowl and was then able to take the goldfish home with him where it soon died (probably because we were very excited and showed our enthusiasm for Rob’s new pet by jumping up and down with the fish in the bowl). We attended elementary school together in the 1970s which was decades before Trump invented the word, and yet Mr. Epler claims familiarity with the word c. 1978.
I went to the Oxford English Dictionary in our living room (mostly because I want people to be impressed that we have an OED on a book stand and nothing says “living” room quite like looking up word origins through a magnifying glass). According to the OED, the first published reference to “equalize” was over 400 years ago in 1621 when the The History of Tom Thumb was published in England. The quote is some variation of: “Sir Tom Thumb, for thy fame, none can thee equalize.” As a folk legend and with no author for attribution, I realized that this could be considered fake news, so I looked further into the magnifying glass.
In a history of Pennsylvania, published around 1826, a T.J. Wharton writes: “His great house, that equalizes (if not exceeds) any I have ever seen.” I do not know who Wharton was or whose house he was writing about, but he shares the last name of the business school Trump attended at Penn, so the quote has the necessary gravitas that Tom Thumb may have lacked.
Of course, this exercise does not need to dive into antiquity to find the foolishness of President Trump thinking he invented a word that has been around and in use for parts of five centuries. There have been three Equalizer movies starring Denzell Washington, and there were five seasons of a television show called The Equalizer on CBS. And at some point, in almost any ice hockey telecast the announcer will talk about one team trying to get the “equalizer” goal. It’s dangerously close to falling into sports cliché from overuse.
But there are indeed word creators who walk among us and are truly worthy of linguistic reverence. I have verified in my trusted OED that this word did not exist before New York Times best-selling author Christopher Moore created it a few years ago for one of his highly entertaining novels. It is used to signify extreme displeasure and appears, on the surface, a simple mashing up of words yet has a Renaissance flair to it. I offer it now and will certainly utter it next time Donald Trump invents a word that is centuries old:
F**KSTOCKINGS!
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