Mind Your Language

A 14-year-old man, as I learn I should call a Wykehamist, Benjamin Nicholls, has written to me about a suggestion by his 12-year-old sister. She thought that, as the word intelligent means ‘clever’, there should be a word telligent, meaning ‘stupid’.

The sister was aware that the prefix in- signifies negation or privation. She is right in that. Indeed it is related to the Greek a- or an- and the common Teutonic un-, which is where English gets un- from. (In speech the other day I found myself contrasting the pious with people like Samuel Pepys, whom I called unpious, and in the next sentence impious.) Latin, as Mr Nicholls points out, with the example of inimicus, makes free use of this negative prefix, as with utilis, inutilis; nocens, innocens (hence English innocent). Sometimes the prefix is modified by the succeeding consonant to become il-, im-, ir-, or just i- (as in ignarus, ‘ignorant’).

In a light-hearted attempt to cobble up an etymology for a Latin word-form tellego* (the star indicating a form that has not been cited from any source) as the contrary of intellego (later, intelligo), Mr Nicholls even had recourse to the fictional character Telegonus, although he has only one l, and was, as far as I am aware, Greek. He might, perhaps, have tried to derive telligens from the gens, ‘people’, of the tellus, ‘earth’. Sounds stupid enough.

I know that tellus forms the genitive as telluris, but a Latin text from an English source, written in 816 and quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, similarly misuses tellus: ‘Tamen serventur libros primordiales cum aliis telligraffis’. From this ill-formed Latin word, of which other pre-Conquest examples from Britain are known, an English word, telligraph, was derived, meaning ‘a charter of lands in which the bounds are described’.