Just a Moment

Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking! Just a moment.

One great scene in the movie Office Space shows a person whose job it is to answer the phone and then put people on hold. We hear Nina ask several people who are trying to get paid by this company to wait just a moment.

This scene reinforces the central message in the movie: that corporate America will suck your soul straight out of your body, with nothing left behind but an endless repeating automaton. It’s also what comes to mind any time anyone ever asks for just a moment.

What even is a moment, though?

If we travel back in time, Middle English grabbed the word moment from Old French, where it was used to describe both a brief instant in time (as Nina uses it) and something that carries impact. The French, in turn, had stolen moment from the Latin momentum, which also carried those two meanings.

Have you already noticed that moment and movement seem very similar? That’s not a coincidence—one way to think of a moment is that it’s a slice of movement through time. Measuring time would usually require something to be moving, like a water clock that told you how much time had passed based on how much water had flowed down, or a pendulum that moved back and forth at a steady rate.

Not to get too far into the weeds, but the universe works this way too. Space and time are a part of the same fabric, and movement (or change) is always required for time to pass.

Momentum isn’t the daddy of all the movement-based words, though. That honor goes to the Latin word movēre, which meant simply to move. Besides momentum, movēre led to the Latin motio—the act of moving. This gives us the modern English word motion.

You can see how movēre led to move and movement, and eventually movie. Moves are changes in position, indicating that some time had passed. A move (or some movement) had taken place.

Movēre also gave birth to the whole family of motion-based words we have in English today. The Latin word motio represented the movement side of the movēre coin. One path this word took has led to emotion, which describes some kind of outward movement from the inner psyche.

Similarly, a motive is something internal that makes you move or act. You can motivate someone to take action or move, too, and we derive the word motor from something that causes movement.

Something remote has been moved far away, and if you’ve recently been promoted, you have moved forward at work. And, when Madonna was causing a commotion, she was causing a lot of loud things to move together.

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