Anecdotes and Antidotes – a Word History

Hello,

As you may be aware, I love getting suggestions of words to investigate from readers of the Wordfoolery blog. You can do that here, if you’d like. Mary suggested antidote recently and I thought I’d throw in anecdote too as it can be fun to see if two seemingly similar words are connected.

Let’s start with antidote. It is a remedy to counteract a poison and the word has been with us since the 1400s. It was originally antidotum and came from Old French antidot, Latin antidotum, and ultimately from Greek antidoton. Antidoton translates literally as “given against” and is created from anti (against – a prefix which is used in plenty of English words) and didonai (to give). Didonai comes from a Proto IndoEuropean root word do (to give).

Didn’t make it to the antidote in time

The story of antidote is pretty straightforward. Anecdote, as you’d hope given the meaning, has more of a story.

Anecdote has two somewhat conflicting definitions. The one I’d use is that it’s an short amusing story about real people. It can also be an unreliable account, or one regarded only as rumour.

Anecdote has been with us in English since the 1600s to describe secret or private stories. It was the 1700s before it gained the meaning of a brief amusing story. We borrowed the word, and the spelling, directly from French in the 1600s. It had arrived there from Medieval Latin as anecdota and before that from Greek anekdota (things unpublished). When you break it down you find the link to antidote.

Anekdota is formed from an (not) and ekdotos (published). Ekdotos is formed from ek (out) and didonai (to give), again from the Proto IndoEuropean root word do (to give). So yes, the dote in anecdote and antidote is the link between the two words. You can’t escape the Greeks in the world of English etymology.

I can’t leave anecdote without giving the perfect, and original, example. The word was used as a title for Procopius’ book “Anecdota” written around the year 550. Procopius was a scholar who accompanied the Roman generals during Emperor Justinian’s wars. Riding with the army he witnessed massacres, battles, and mutinies. He became the main Roman historian of the 6th century and published many books, all of them favourable to the emperor’s reign.

The “Anecdota” however was not published during his lifetime and was far from positive about the emperor. In fact it was packed with court gossip. The book was discovered centuries later in the Vatican library and published in 1623 – bringing the word into popular use and ultimately to the English dictionary.

Like modern “tell all” books, Procopius took his chance to expose the secrets of his emperor’s reign and portray the private lives of the leader, his wife, and his generals. The emperor is shown to be cruel and incompetent and in one passage he even claims he was possessed by demons. Theories abound on why Procopius took the risk of writing the book. He may have been waiting for the main characters to die, in order to avoid retaliation (as he mentions in the book), or he could have written it as insurance so that if the emperor was overthrown he could survive the change.

Procopius never published the “Ancedota“, but thanks to the Vatican Library we can read it today and use the word, without fear of reprisals from demon-filled emperors.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace