Inaffectionate and inage and enage

If inaffable means "not affable" or "discourteous," one would think that inaffectionate would mean lacking affection or not affectionate. You could then attribute relational breakups to "inaffectionate spouses." Only thing is, inaffectionate means "unprejudiced" or "unbiased." From 1558: "I appele the conscience of the ineffectionate & godly redare [reader] diligentlie to considder..." Though the OED calls it "obsolete" and "rare" (why the double indication of current inutility?), I think it needs to be recaptured. One of the major reasons for its rediscovery is that it gives us an insight into the history of affectionate that is largely overlooked.

Affectionate is both a noun and a verb, even though the latter has also seemingly fallen out of use. As a verb, it means "to have affection for, regard with affection." From 1593: "If men's love be simplie good, women cannot but affectionate them." That isn't bad advice to give to young men on the make with the world and with women in 2005. But the noun affectionate is, of course, very common among us. However, of the seven or eight definitions in the OED, we only focus on the last in our current usage: affectionate as "expressing or indicating love or affection; tender." A quick YAHOO search of "affectionate mother" or "affectionate brother" yielded more than 30,000 appearances of those phrase on the Internet--to express the idea of "tenderness" or "expressing love."

But there are a series of other English usages of the term affectionate, possibly so because the Latin word underlying the English affection has such a broad signification. An affectionem is a "disposition, inclination, fondness." Therefore when Jonathan Edwards wrote his Treatise on the Religious Affections in the 1740s, he wasn't thinking primarily of tenderness or love, but of the various ways that the will is inclined to spiritual things. Thus the word affectionate could, among other things, mean: (1) mentally affected or inclined or (2) passionate, wilful, headstrong. The latter is indicated in the 1542 quotation: "Affeccionate appetites, perturbyng and corruptyng, the tranquilitiee of the mynde." But for our purposes it is the definition of affectionate as "unduly affected, biased, prejudiced" that is apropos. From 1530: "Upright, indifferent bytwene party and party, and not affectionate." Or, Foxe, in his popular Book of Martyrs could speak of "judges not indifferent but very much affectionate against me." In our day, where we have sexual harassment on the brain, workers often say they want to avoid an overly-affectionate supervisor, meaning one who doesn't have a good understsanding of "boundaries"; however, it seems to me that they really want to avoid an affectionate boss in the latter sense. "She loved it when she finally was treated in an inaffectionate manner." I think we need to blow up the "tent" of language and recover this meaning of in/affectionate.

Inage/Enage

The OED again lists this word as obsolete, so I will humor it with that reference and then plunge ahead to see if it is still useful today. It means/meant "To make old; to give the appearange of age to." An enaged person is not an enraged person, much less an engaged individual but a person grown old. Oops. The final word that the OED gives us for the definition of this obsolete word takes us on a mini-journey, so let's go there. Enaged can mean, in addition to "grown old," "inveterate." But we know the word inveterate only in the fourth and final OED definition: "settled or confirmed in habit, condition, or practice; habitual, hardened, obstinate." We talk about an inveterate foe or an inveterate disposition. But the root meaning of inveterate, derived from inveteratus, is "that has existed or continued for a long time; of old standing; aged." One could speak of the inveterate mountains or the inveterate firs that dominate the Oregon Coast Range.

Back to enage/enaged. Thus, enage carries the connotation of making something old. "He worried that the rigors of life and asperities of want would prematurely enage his friends." While it might be true that disdain would enage the brow, it is also true that "never frost, nor snow, nor slipp'rie ice/ The Fields enag'd." They blossom with youth and fresh odors in the Spring.

Let this suffice for our first try this morning.

[Next]

1206