Mind The (Information) Gap

- Dan Booth

Etymology is one of those $5 ‘-ology’ words you hear tossed about in college English classes; this one means, “the study of the origins of words” (not to be confused with entomology, which is the study of insects). As a writer, I find knowing the origins of a word can be helpful in determining the shades of meaning the word lends to its context.

So it was interesting to discover that etymologists have traced the origin of the word ‘travel’ back to its Latin roots, where it apparently started out as the word tripaliare, which means “to torture.” Subsequently, the word was handed down through the centuries to the Old French where it became travail, which we still use in English to mean “painfully difficult or burdensome work.”