ETYMOLOGY

Commit

English language has words that we use so commonly that we do not even realize that they are homonyms (words with same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings). “Commit” is one of them. If you cannot think of the second meaning of “commit”, you are not alone; I myself struggled the first time. For someone who considers himself committed to the cause of spreading the knowledge of etymology (hint: me), not getting a homonym is equivalent to committing a crime.

So yes, “Commit” is one verb of the English language that can either mean pledging oneself to something, carrying out something, or anything in between. Although the word “commit” and hence “commitment” came to English through French, the differences in the meanings is a different story altogether. The original word was the Latin committere which along with many others was adopted by the French and then it became commettre. Following the Norman Invasion of England in the 11th Century, French became the official language of England and that explains the large amount of Latin vocabulary in English. The basic sentence structure and grammar, however, remained the same as it was before the Norman Invasion.

So what language was spoken in Britain before 11th Century? Old English, which was a Germanic language and hence was quite similar to today’s German. We can still find the phonetic similarities in the basic vocabulary of English and German, for example the numbers and names of animals.

The word committere in Latin is the combination of the words com (meaning with or together) and mittere (meaning to throw or let go). You might also be familiar with the Latin com through the English conjunction “cum”. Although one word which is a combination of “together” and “let go” sounds like an oxymoron, it was used in the sense of uniting, connecting and combining. This seems to give us some hint about the “pledge” and “promise” sense of the word, and maybe the “carrying out” meaning evolved later, but that is totally opposite to what actually happened.

I know languages have their share of sense of humor too. In fact, the “perpetrating” meaning of committere was ancient in Latin, hence traveled from French to English as it was.

The intransitive meaning of the verb “commit” originated quite late in English; it was first recorded in 1982. Experts believe that philosophy had a vital role to play in the phenomenon, particularly in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, a notable French philosopher famous for his ideas of existentialism. In addition to the classical “existence precedes essence” view of existentialism, Sartre in his writings also encouraged accepting responsibility for the political consequences of one’s actions, and promoted the concept of a socially responsible writing, or littérature engagée in French. The second word engagée was translated to English as “commitment”. This is how it got associated with the “engagement” sense of the meaning.

In less than 40 years, we have diversified the use of the word from marital status on Facebook to a technical Human Resource Management term. And while all this was happening, people were still “committing suicides”. Like I said, languages can be funny too.