
“Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.” — T.S. Eliot, 1927
Take a quick etymological journey with me, if you will.
And no, I don’t mind if you consult a dictionary or Google before we leave.
Etymology is, of course, the study of the origins of words. Not to be confused with entomology, the study of insects.
One of the reasons I know this is because I once took a class on etymology as part of my classics curriculum. At the time, I was pre-med and thought it would be helpful to understand how Greek and Latin influenced words I’d be seeing and using throughout my career.
While I ended up on the business side of medicine rather than the clinical side in the early part of my career, the course was a boon to my vocabulary. Which made a recent linguistic discovery concerning this week's topic all the more surpri…
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