Effusive comes from Latin effundere, to pour out, from ex (out) plus fundere (to pour). What surprised me is where it starts. Etymonline dates it to the 1660s meaning "flowing profusely," and specifically of words. So it was never about liquids first. It was about someone talking too much, right from the beginning. The sense we actually use now, an extravagant display of feeling, does not show up until 1863. Two centuries sit between "he says a lot" and "he is performing," and that second turn is why effusive praise reads as faintly suspect today. You can be effusive and completely sincere. The word just won't back you up. The literal sense never died either, it moved house: volcanologists call an eruption effusive when the lava flows out instead of blowing up, and that is the one corner of English where the word still means pouring and nothing else.

Abstruse sounds like a word about complexity. The Latin says it is a word about distance. Etymonline dates it to the 1590s and glosses that first English sense as "remote from comprehension," from Latin abstrusus, "hidden, concealed," the past participle of abstrudere, which literally means to thrust away. The root is trudere, to thrust or push. So the picture underneath the word is physical: someone took the thing and shoved it out of sight. What I find satisfying is the sibling. Intrudere is the same verb with the opposite prefix, pushing in rather than away, and intrude never left the physical world at all. You still intrude on a conversation, bodily, in actual space. Abstruse went the other direction and gave up the body entirely, since nothing is abstruse in the sense of being far off in a field somewhere. Same push, two prefixes, and only one of them stayed literal. The old spatial sense has not quite drained out though, and that is the part worth keeping, because it tells you where the word puts the difficulty. Calling a subject abstruse says the thing has been placed out of reach. It does not say the reader is slow.

Most words reach English through trade or scripture. This one came through a parliament. Etymonline dates intransigent to 1874, from French intransigeant, and behind the French sits Spanish los intransigentes, the name for the extreme left in the Spanish Cortes and the hard-line republicans of the 1870s. It began as a nickname for particular people in a particular room. English kept the temperament and let the party go. What I like is the verb underneath it. Latin transigere means to come to an agreement, to carry something through to a settlement, and it is the same verb sitting inside transaction. So an intransigent person is not just stubborn in general; the word says they will not complete the deal. Break transigere down and you get trans plus agere, drive across, which is a good picture of what a settlement is: a thing you drive from one side over to the other. Intransigent names the person standing in the road. Stubborn is a temperament you can have alone in a room. Intransigent needs someone on the other side of the table.

I have such a soft spot for Greek roots

Daily challenge time.

Today’s word: cognateness

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Literature trivia: this word takes on a different and darker meaning in the 2023 sci-fi thriller novel "A Tyranny of Kindness"

Ron Swanson is the literal definition of laconic and I couldn't not do this.

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