Throughly Complex

There are always some words that one has known for years, but never uses. Two that lie unused in my lexical repertoire are the superficially similar parboil and purblind. The similarity lies in the first four letters of each: have they anything in common apart from the p-rb pattern ?

Well, yes, actually, but not at all what you might expect. The first is used today to mean ‘partly boil’, and the second ‘partly blind’. But neither the par- nor the pur- originally signified ‘partly’, but the opposite - that is, ‘fully’. Nor do those two syllables have the same origin.

In the word parboil the first syllable is derived from the Latin per-, meaning through, or thorough*. In the word purblind the first syllable is the French adjective pur-, meaning pure, whole. So the significance of both prefixes has, over centuries, been reversed; they used to indicate ‘completely’; today they indicate ‘partially’.

By the way, note that ‘through’ and ‘thorough’ are just two spellings of what is essentially the same word. “Thorough brake, thorough briar” (‘through rough undergrowth and brambles’) I seem to remember from some song - but the passage doesn’t appear, I am sorry to say, in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. In the King James Bible (Psalm 51.2) we find the prayer ‘Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin”**.

*  Pertinacity (based on Latin per-  = thoroughly + tenere = to hold) signifies 'holding on through thick and thin'.

 **  Various towns or villages in Britain are today named Brough. The name is the equivalent of our term ‘borough’, and cognate with the familar place-name element ‘-bury’.  These words derive from ancient Germanic burg = a castle or defended site.

Throughly Complex