I enjoyed Merve Emre’s New Yorker piece “The History of Advice Columns” (archived), but first I had to get past my annoyance at its opening:
The word “advice” comes from two Latin words: the prefix ad, which implies a movement toward something, and vīsum, “vision,” a distinctly vivid or imaginative image. To ask for advice is to reach for a person whose vision exceeds yours, for reasons supernatural (oracles, mediums), professional (doctors, lawyers), or pastoral (parents, friends). It is a curious accident of language that “advice” contains within it the etymologically unrelated word “vice,” from the Latin vitium, meaning “fault” or “sin.” Yet the accident is suggestive.
Why do people feel the need to do this? The etymology of advice has nothing whatever to do with advice columns, it’s just being used as a catchy intro — which is fine as long as you get it right and don’t gussy it up the way Emre does. In the first place, there is no Latin “prefix ad” in the word; as Wiktionary says: “The unhistoric -d- was introduced in English 15c.” And vīsum is not “a distinctly vivid or imaginative image,” it’s just the past participle of videre ‘to see’ and thus means ‘something seen’ or, by extension, as the OED has it, ‘something that seems.’ Here’s the OED’s etymology (entry revised 2011):
< Anglo-Norman avise, avvis, avyse, avys, Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French avis, Anglo-Norman and Middle French aviz, also (with influence from classical Latin ad- ad- prefix) Anglo-Norman advise, Anglo-Norman and Middle French advis, adviz (French avis) opinion (c1139; slightly earlier in ce m’est avis: see below), prudence (1285), intention, plan (a1339), deliberation, reflection (c1350), counsel (mid 14th cent.), notice, announcement (late 14th cent.) < a (see a- prefix⁵) + vis (< classical Latin vīsum something that seems, use as noun of neuter past participle of vidēre to see: see vision n.).
Earliest in Old French in the phrase ce m’est avis it seems to me (c1135), developed from *ce m’est a vis, variant of ce m’est vis (late 11th cent. as ço m’est vis, with different pronoun), in turn after classical Latin vīsum est mihi it seems (good) to me.
Compare this nicely done etymological excursus in Ange Mlinko’s “Patterns of Uprooting” (NYRB, December 21, 2023 issue; archived), a review of books of poetry by Ida Vitale and Tomasz Różycki:
“Mystery,” my dictionary reminds me, also carries an obsolete English meaning of handicraft or trade. Vitale’s poems aren’t mystical effusions; they are made things. She may overstate it when she says that poetic devices “require more mental effort”; the key, rather, is openness to experience. I keep going back to her author photo, a modern sacra conversazione, with that one finger (dactyl) proffered for the bird’s (poetic) feet—encapsulating her plea for patient readers.
We discussed the two words mystery back in 2009; I find the play with finger/dactyl and the two senses of feet enjoyable and effective, and no linguistic facts were harmed in the process!
High school report: “Webster’s dictionary defines foo as…”
College paper: “The word foo derives from the Latin …”
I wish I’d remember who came up with “As John Bartlett says in his Familiar Quotations…”
I do not understand why the second component has to come from video and not from viso. The form “ce m’est avis” seems more natural to me if derived from viso, maybe with influence from a Frankish verb corresponding to S.G. anweisen.
Well, this is etymology in its original sense: the fallacy that if you know the origin of a word, you know its True Sense and Meaning.
I thought it’s just an earlier version of the same pronoun?
Apparently ço is ecce hoc and ce is ecce ille.
Ah.
Ecce hoc also explains Italian ecco, which always struck me as rather remarkable but not enough so to look it up…
Because the forms in other tenses than the perfect show that it is from video; according to Georges’ Handwörterbuch, s.v. video:
with lots of quotations; this may be an accident of sampling, but while Cicero has a lot of quotations with present stem forms like videtur etc., other (mostly later writers) quoted by Georges seem to prefer the perfect visum est.
This isn’t really obscure – I remember learning this in the first or second year of learning Latin at school
@ulr
Thanks. I think I was hung up on weisen. I also see that the development from mihi visum est to ce m’est avis went through ce m’est vis, although I am still not sure what the a is doing (maybe indicating dative? maybe something like á voir/a vedere?).
Ange Mlinko’s new book, “Foxglovewise,” is superb, and just the kind of poetry people who like to look up words will enjoy.
Me too. Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
@ Amateur Reader (Tom)
Thanks, will have to check out Mlinko’s book (I’ve read some of her others). Walter Ancarrow’s Etymologies is another recentish poetry collection on etymology that seems to reject and embrace the etymologizing of words, almost presenting itself as a found poem with commentary.