Vice is a noun meaning bad behavior, but it’s also an adjective referring to an official who is second in command. Karen, a seventh- and eighth-grade history teacher in Waco, Texas, says her students wonder why. These two senses of vice come from two separate Latin words: vice, meaning in place of, and vitium, meaning fault or blemish. The two English descendants of these words ended up being spelled exactly the same way, even though they mean completely different things. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Bad Vice and Vice President”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Karen Graham from Waco, Texas.
Hey, Karen. Welcome to the show.
Hi, Karen.
Well, I am a 7th grade English and history teacher, and my class and I had a question because we had a word come up in two different contexts and it had two really different meanings, and that word is vice.
In my classes, we often end up talking about characters and stories or historical figures in terms of like virtue and vice, their good and bad moral characteristics, like was this character courageous or cowardly or was this ruler just or unjust?
But then in history class one day, we were talking about different forms of government like democracy or monarchy, and somebody mentioned something about presidents and vice presidents.
And one of my students raised his hand and asked kind of jokingly, why is the vice president called that? Is it because he’s a bad person? Not as good as the president is? And then I really didn’t have a good answer for that because I was not sure where those two totally different meanings of the word came from.
Well, the thing that’s going on here is that these are actually two different words spelled the very same way. Okay. And the vice, like vice president, comes from a Latin word that’s spelled exactly the same way that means in place of. So you have vice president, who’s the guy who’s guy or woman in place of the president.
And you have words like viceroy, which is a deputy of the king, you know, the French word for king there. And the other vice is one that comes from a Latin word, vitium, V-I-T-I-U-M, or witium, as you might say in Latin class, that means fault or blemish or damage, moral fault, wickedness, something like that.
And that eventually evolved into a similarly spelled word, V-I-C-E.
And the cool thing about that, too, is that you can give your students a couple of vocabulary words that come from that same root, one of which is vitiate, V-I-T-I-A-T-E, like a mind vitiated by prejudice means a mind that’s been damaged or spoiled by prejudice.
And one more S-A-T word is vituperative.
Oh, yes, I’ve heard that one before.
Yeah, which comes from that same root and has to do with, you know, being damaging.
Wow. Like vituperative remarks are full of anger and hate. Huh.
Wow. We actually teach Latin at my school. I’m not one of the Latin teachers, so my students will be really interested to know that they both have Latin roots, but they are unrelated.
Oh, yay. That’s wonderful.
Yeah, different Latin roots. Yeah, they come from two different Latin words, and they just, the spellings just happen to be the same in English.
It’s not the only pair of words like that, either.
All right. Well, thank you very much. That’s very helpful.
Thank you, Karen.
Yeah, thanks for asking. And good luck with school. Thank you for being a teacher.
You’re welcome. Good to have you all. Bye-bye. Keep up the good work. Bye-bye.
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