Take off with Natarajan

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how either “just deserts” or “just desserts” made any sense, or even which was correct, wonder no more. It’s “just deserts”, not “just desserts”, and the correct version has nothing to do with dry wastelands.

The misconception primarily stems from the fact that most people are unfamiliar with the word ‘desert’ (pronounced dizert), which more or less means the same thing as the word “deserve”.  Instead, when they see the word ‘desert’, most they think only of the word meaning something to the effect of ‘dry wasteland’, which is pronounced “dezert”.

It turns out that these two words that are spelled the same, but pronounced differently, have their origins in two different Latin words.  The word “desert”, as in “wasteland”, comes from the Latin word deserere, meaning “to forsake”.

The word “desert” as in “to get what’s coming to you”, comes from the Latin worddeservire, meaning “to serve well” or “to serve zealously”: “de-” (completely) + “servire” (to serve).

Deservire is also where we got the word “deserve” from.  The transition came from the fact that when one served well, the individual would expect to be rewarded at some point for their services.  Thus, sometime between the third and sixth centuries A.D., “deservire”, meaning “to serve well”, in Late Latin got shifted in meaning to now mean something to the effect of “to be entitled to because of serving well”.

This gave rise to the Old French “deservir”, which in turn gave us “deserve” in English around the 13th century.

It was also around the 13th century that “desert”, as in “to get what’s coming to you”, first popped up in English.  But, of course, outside of the idiom “just desert”, which appeared around the 16th century, is almost never used any more.

“Just deserts” now makes a lot more sense. 

source:::::: todayifoundout.com

natarajan