lingering words: delinquent
Reading Foucault's Discipline and Punish at the moment and was briefly struck by his use of delinquent. The OED defines it as "Failing in, or neglectful of, a duty or obligation; defaulting; faulty; more generally, guilty of a misdeed or offence"; as a noun, it means, "One who fails in duty or obligation, a defaulter; more generally, one guilty of an offence against the law, an offender". Interestingly, the word is rarely used prior to 1600 (with one exception in 1484), suggesting perhaps a emergent way of thinking about people in the early parts of the 17th century (this argument, in turn, follows Foucault's work in D&P).
The word enters English by way of the French, it seems, though that word in turn is derived from the Latin delinquere. Following the OED's links, there's a related, now obsolete, verb delinque: Not defined, the dictionary suggests only to see the quotation, from Henry Cockeram's The English dictionarie, or an interpreter of hard English words 1623 (1626): "To Leaue, delinque".
That meaning, again, coming from the Latin. All of which isn't nearly as suggesting as I was hoping, but interesting nevertheless.
The word enters English by way of the French, it seems, though that word in turn is derived from the Latin delinquere. Following the OED's links, there's a related, now obsolete, verb delinque: Not defined, the dictionary suggests only to see the quotation, from Henry Cockeram's The English dictionarie, or an interpreter of hard English words 1623 (1626): "To Leaue, delinque".
That meaning, again, coming from the Latin. All of which isn't nearly as suggesting as I was hoping, but interesting nevertheless.
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