Verifying Some Things

This morning, I woke up wanting to verify something.

I learned a little bit of French during middle and high school, then promptly spent the next thirty years forgetting most of what I had learned. I’m probably exaggerating un peu here, but while I could understand a few words here and there, especially when printed, I didn’t keep up with practicing the language.

Nevertheless, plenty of words have stuck with me over the years, and one of those words is vert, the modern French word for the color green. If you’ve ever ordered haricots vert in a fancy restaurant, you’ve gotten some pretty expensive green beans.

Anyway, I wanted to verify whether or not the word verify came from the same place as vert. I started thinking about why green might mean something like true, which is what we tend to mean when we want to verify something. So, that’s what I did after brewing my coffee this morning.

Verify comes from a Latin root word verus, which means true. And while I neglected French for a while, I might be the only person out there who just spent a year learning Latin for fun, but I have no way to verify that.

Verus gave us verify. The English word, like nearly all of the Latin that has made its way into our language, was first filtered through French.

I could see what happened next: after starting with the same original Latin word, the meaning began to drift a bit. As the Roman Empire continued to spread, Vulgar Latin transformed the language into ever-more distinct subsets of Latin. Dialogues became creoles, and creoles eventually became their own languages. Shcismogenesis took care of the rest.

I was sure that verus still meant true, but it slowly began to broaden its meaning to include whether something was alive or not. This seems easy enough to understand: if it’s dead, it’s not true. It’s not a terribly big leap to understand how green could equate with living, and so verus gradually morphed into vert, and the meaning shifted to mean mainly the color green.

The only problem is that this one turns out not to be true. The root word for verus is something like *wer in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). We put the asterisk in front of the word because we don’t really know exactly how the word sounded, so it’s all kind of a guess… but it’s a very, very educated guess, because lots of similar words appear in different PIE language families, and they all started out meaning the same thing.

Verification is making sure something is true, and a verdict from a jury is a statement of what the jury truly believes.

A much more common word draws its meaning from this word, too: very.

Unfortunately for my early morning thesis, vert comes from an entirely different line of Latin words! Viridis is simply the word for green, and it doesn’t have a super deep symbolic meaning.

However, as tends to happen, I discovered more things to be curious about. Viridis does give us one very interesting word: verdant. This adjective describes something that is abundant with life—something vibrant.

Vibrant comes from an entirely different word, too: vibrare, or to shake. It really does seem like something vibrant could also be verdant and verifiable, but that actually turns out to be a somewhat rare etymological coincidence.

Vir (Latin for “man”) really seems like it should have something in common with viridis, the Latin word for green… but it doesn’t. Nevertheless, here are a few really cool quick takeaways:

• The same PIE word that gave us Latin’s vir also gave us virility and virtue, both derivations of the "man” meaning—who ever said the ancient world was egalitarian?

• A totally different PIE word we write as *wer meant “true.” This gives us very, verdict, and verify.

• A third Latin word, vibrare, gives us words like vibrate and vibrant.

• Yet another unique word called viridis gave us vert and verdant.

This verification process has been brought to you by coffee.