Have you noticed the Gen Z stare, when they seem to be in a torpor leaving you to wonder when they’ll start speaking? The word stare comes from Old English starian “to gaze, stare”, from Proto-Germanic *staren, ultimately traceable back to Proto-Indo-European *stor-e-, a suffixed o-grade form of the root *ster- “stiff”, so it’s the idea of “stiffness” that actually underlies the word. In this more basic sense, an extended zero-grade form of this root *trp-e- came into Latin as torpere “to be stiff, be numb, be inactive, be torpid” and torpor “numbness, stupefaction, torpor, sluggishness”, from which we get the English words torpor and torpid. From the notion of “moving briskly, moving stiffly”, another extended form *sterd- came into Old English as styrtan “to start, leap up” (only attested in Old English as a present participle in the Northumbrian dialect as sturtende) giving us Modern English start, with the original notion of “move or spring suddenly” expanding to “awaken suddenly or abruptly; flinch or recoil in alarm” by around 1300, and then by the 1660s to “cause to begin acting or operating”, and it’s only by the 1820s that we see the meaning “to begin to move, leave, or depart; enter upon action” as we have it today.
The #ConnectedAtBirth #etymology of the week is STARE/TORPOR/START #wotd #stare #torpor #torpid #start #GenZStare
