Jason in Barre, Vermont, wonders if there’s a connection between the words casual and casualty. Both belong to a family of words involving the idea of falling, deriving from Latin cadere, to fall, and its past participle, casus. From the same roots come the words cascade, referring to things tumbling, as well as cadaver, literally someone who has fallen, and caducity, the increasing infirmity of old age. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Casual and Casualty Connection”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Jay Southgate.
Hi, Jay. Welcome to the show. What’s up?
Thank you very much.
I have been thinking about two words.
One is casual, and the other is casualty.
And how on earth are they related?
I can’t begin to imagine.
Where are you that you came up with this question?
Do you work in insurance or something?
No, but, I mean, I listen to your show.
So I work a very unintellectual job.
I think about words all the time.
I love them.
Oh, yay.
Okay.
That’s us.
That’s our people right there.
Yeah.
Well, let’s see if we can help with that.
I think the best way to think about the words casual and casualty is to recognize that they both go back to a large family of words that has to do with the notion of falling.
They both go back to the Latin word cadere, which means to fall, and the past participle of that, casus, which means fallen.
They’re related to a whole bunch of words like accident, which is something that befalls you.
Cascade is something that falls.
And even cadaver is something that has fallen.
Yeah.
And so if you think about casual, it’s sort of like how things fall, almost like dice falling out of your hand.
If something’s casual, it’s by chance, and it’s not planned out.
And casualty is an old word that has been used for a long time to refer to a falling or a loss, like in a military sense back in the 1500s.
It was used to mean a loss from a regiment or a loss of munitions, something like that.
And then it wasn’t until I think the 19th century that casualty came to be talking about a soldier, an individual soldier who has fallen.
So if you think about how they’re connected in terms of falling, I think it kind of makes sense.
Yeah, it does.
I had speculated about what it might be.
What occurred to me is that a casualty could be the result of lack of diligence on the part of the commander.
He was too casual about his job.
And, yeah, so that’s good to know.
Now I know.
Yeah, that casual meaning, kind of irregular or informal or not according to the usual strict standard, is relatively modern.
And so the groups of words that Martha was talking about go all the way back to Latin.
And many of these meanings were already kind of firmly in place before they were borrowed into a variety of languages, including French, and then eventually into English.
Cool.
Very interesting.
Jay, by the way, where are you calling from?
I’m calling from Barry, Vermont.
All right.
Thank you for your call.
We really appreciate it.
Okay.
It was nice talking with you.
Take care.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
You know, another interesting word from that family of words involving falling is caducity, C-A-D-U-C-I-T-Y, which refers to the fleeting or perishable nature of something, and it is used more and more to refer to fleeting cognitive abilities as you get older.
So it’s a medical term, caducity.
Give us a call 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.
