Encouragement

My cousin Marjorie, an excellent writer, has encouraged me by reading this blog and commenting on it; I cannot thank her enough for this. So I’m moved to meditate on the word “encourage.”

“Courage,” like so many other words, entered the language as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066; but this word makes its appearance around 1300 as “corage” from Vulgar (popular) Latin “coraticum,” from classical Latin “cor,” or heart. You will find it in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales among many other sources. French for “heart” is “coeur,” so you can see where we got the otherwise puzzling “u” in the spelling.

“Heart” remains, as etymonline.com states, “a common metaphor for inner strength.” We still refer to boxers and other pugilists as having “heart.” We also use “heart” in English when we say the negative, as in “I didn’t have the heart to tell her that her wedding gown was hiked up behind, showing her underwear” (perhaps not the most common usage of the term).

We see the “cor” root throughout medicine, of course, as in “cardiac care” or “cardiologist.” It works physically as well as metaphorically.

“Encourage,” then, means simply to put heart into someone, or to impart inner strength.

Thank you, Marjorie, for the gift.