Default as a noun and default as a verb are the same word, with a familiar English stress shift: nouns often take first-syllable stress, while verbs often take second-syllable stress, as with the different pronunciations of record. A New York City listener asks how and whether defaulting on a loan is related to default settings on a computer. Both go back through French to Latin fallere, “to deceive, fail, or escape notice,” with de- connoting the idea of “away.” In finance, sports, and software, the word has to do with not taking action, although in computing the negative judgment has mostly vanished. English spelling later restored the l in default, reflecting its Latin root, after inheriting French defaut without it. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Connections Between Default Settings and a Loan Default”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Leela.
I’m so excited to be on.
I’m a long time fan.
This is such an honor.
Hi Leela.
Welcome to the program.
Yeah, we’re glad to have you.
Where are you calling from?
I’m calling from Ridgewood, Queens, New York City.
Okay, I know where that is.
I’ve been there.
Well, Leela, what would you like to talk with us about today?
So I was curious about the word default or default.
I was looking at some language about a loan that was like, you know, the term to default on a loan.
And then I was thinking about the word default like default settings on your computer.
And I wasn’t sure if these were the same word or just two pronunciations of the same word or maybe there was a different origin.
And then I was thinking about how default settings I really only hear in a tech or computer space.
So I was wondering if maybe that was a newer usage of the word.
And I was curious to hear your thoughts.
They are the same word.
They do come from the same root.
They’ve got a Latin root to a verb phalare, which means to deceive or fail or escape notice.
And then this prefix day, the D E meaning away.
So we kind of roughly loosely might gloss that as emphatically get away from one’s attention because both of these are generally about not acting.
They’re about in action, failing to do something.
That’s where we get the connection to the Latin root.
So with the loan, if you don’t pay or fulfill the agreement, you face a default judgment, right?
Or some kind of legal recourse.
And there are other places we see this happen outside of courts and finance and and computers.
For example, a sports team defaults if they fail to appear or if they fail to meet the criteria for appearing, such as not having enough players or the right kind of players.
And the computer sense comes from this because it it’s about failing to act on the settings.
So it’s still a failure.
It’s a little bit of inaction, really, more than it’s a failure.
There’s no negative judgment left in the word in the computing world because it used to be really common in software that your software would arrive, you would install it, and before you could do anything, you had to set your settings.
You had to put things in place.
Otherwise nothing would happen.
Now for the most part, the defaults are there.
You don’t have to do much and you can kinda just go with the the baseline of what they set up for you when you first installed.
You don’t have to do any customization at all.
And so this default is you don’t act, you’re inactive, you’ve failed to act.
Therefore it is the default, just like the loan.
The defaulting on a loan is failing to act, failing to meet your obligations.
Wow, that is a really fascinating explanation and totally answers my question and everything I was wondering about.
The other final thing, and Martha’s probably fully on board this one, the faults had an L added back into it because the way we inherited it from the French was without the L.
It was D E F A U T, and the French still spell it like that.
But later there was kind of a scholarly consensus to put the L back in there to better reflect its Latin roots.
Oh, that’s very interesting.
Yeah, we’ve done that quite a few times with words.
Sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly.
Yeah, and there are plenty of those verbs that and nouns that change the stress, right?
Like record and record and subject and subject and conduct and conduct.
I mean it happens a lot.
And you’ll notice that many of them do have those ancient roots that go back to some of the oldest years of English as we know it today and often have Latin roots.
Cool.
Yeah.
I guess there’s a lot more than I thought.
Oh that’s always the story with it, isn’t it?
Yeah.
Thank you.
I’m I’m a big fan of the show.
I’ve been listening for years, so this is totally a dream come true.
Take care of yourself, Leah, and thank you for calling.
We appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you both.
Have a good day.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
