SUBSCRIBER LOGIN

Search
First Things

Loading
« Previous  |Home|  Next »         

Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 10:00 AM

The word is commonly but inaccurately spelled “forego,” but those are really two separate and unrelated verbs. The “fore” in “forego” means “first” or “before,” so that a “foregone conclusion” is a conclusion that comes before any argument or declaration, since none is necessary. That prefix “fore” is related to all kinds of words in English that have to do with priority in time or position; the ones beginning with f come from the German stock (first, forward), while those beginning with p typically come from the Latin stock, either borrowed directly or imported through French (prime, primrose = first rose of spring, prior, pristine = in its ancient original condition, not necessarily clean; prince = the first citizen, head of state).

Word of the DayBut the prefix “for” in forgo is the same as the much more common “ver” in German, and often implies something done inside out, or something done to its bitter end, as in its Latin cognate per-; something perfect has literally been done to its completion; but someone perfidus has taken his trustiness and twisted it into mendacity. In English the prefix survives in “forswear,” which means “to swear off,” as in “forswear thy foolish ways,” or “to swear falsely,” as in “the villain is forsworn.” It also survives in “forget,” which means that you don’t get it; “forspent,” which means you’ve spent it all, drat it; and “forlorn,” cf. German “verloren,”  Our word was the old past participle of the Old English verb forleosan, to lose, with the medial s turning to r by a process known as rorification, which is the process by which something turns into an r (even philologists have their jests); and in a couple of other words, including “forgo”.

1 Comment

    John Howard
    December 20th, 2012 | 11:28 am

    Interesting. Have you examined “private” yet? I contend that privacy implies one person (including the one legal person of a one-flesh marriage) and that two unmarried adults cannot act in private, because there are two of them. They can act in “secret” but not “private.”

=