Those new year resolutions...

This post started out as a slightly whimsical (who, me?) and not particularly etymological reflection on the way resolution means at once the beginning and the end of a story. At this time of year we all cast ourselves as the hero in an epic battle with Our Demons, and make a firm resolution to beat them. The outcome, though, is uncertain - battle has been joined, but few of us know what the resolution to this internal drama will be. Through an association, perhaps, with the United Nations, and some of the sadder episodes of the last 60 years, resolution has also picked up, paradoxically, a faint edge of futility - an absolutely firm decision that Something Ought To Be Done.

The whole family of words - resolve, resolute, resolution - come from resoluere, a Latin word meaning to dissolve or to loosen, and closely related to soluere, a word also meaning to dissolve or wash away, which gives us the English word solve. Both acquired their meaning of "find the answer to", "discover" through a metaphor still common in English of "unpicking" or "teasing out" the answer to a "knotty" problem - more evidence of the way language repeatedly ossifies the same metaphor.

Many of the earliest occurrences of the words with the meanings of determine, determined or determination, says Chambers Etymological Dictionary, are from Shakespeare's plays, although it's reasonably unlikely he is wholly responsible, as the word resolution, meaning "formal decision of a government body" pops up in 1604. (It's possible, admittedly, that Shakespeare's influence was such that if he used a word one way, everyone else would be using it that way a few years later, but it's also possible that usage was being influenced by developments in French; anyone who wants to buy me a French historical dictionary is very welcome.)

Dig deeper, and both resoluere and soluere, it turns out, come ultimately from an Indo-European root *lu-, which gives words in various languages for washing (eg ???? in Greek) and loosening (eg ??? in Greek), as well as losing and atoning (eg Latin luere, which means either "wash, atone" or "loosen"- Lewis and Short think the two are not connected). The root, after many millennia and many intervening borrowings, gives us such disparate English words as absolute, forlorn, dissolute, and analysis, and of course, loose and lose.

Personally, I like the circularity of it all: first, the word originally has lots of associations of looseness and then comes to mean fixity of purpose. But then aren't our new year's resolutions often attempts to free ourselves of the things holding us back, and sometimes bids to atone for our past wrongdoing?

[From the culture vulture blog]