Admiration: The Deep and Practiced Courtesy of Appreciating from a Distance - Etymology (Part II)

The Etymology Of Admiration:

It's worthwhile digging into the deeper etymological roots of this word admire to see where it might have come from and what it might have originally wanted to be.

Admire.

The Indo-European Roots of this word are telling. The letter M is often used at the beginning of words that signify a sense of boundary and limit. From it we get the words measure and meter that both speak to limits. The word 'matter', for example, is could be understood as 'substance defined by a limit'.

If we add the letter 'i' and get 'Mi' then it becomes a bit more refined and suggests the setting of limits or a distance, to mark off, to fix, to fix in the ground. We can see this in a word Latin word for friend 'amicus' which could be understood as 'one who respects borders' in contrast with 'inimicus', 'that one who does not respect borders'. This mi root is the same root that appears in the word 'immediate' as, in Sanskrit, i and e are used at different times depending on the surrounding consonants.

If we add the letter 'r' we find the root word 'mir' and the meaning begins to shift. It speaks of going towards a fixed point, casting one’s gaze, to be attracted, to marvel.

The Latin words miror and mirari (which we find in the English word miracle) mean to wonder, to be astonished, to admire, to regard or esteem. The word miraculum implies a wonderful thing. The Latin name Miranda is the feminine of mirandus which means worthy to be admired. The word mirus means 'wonderful, astonishing, amazing' but that hails from the older Proto Indo European word smeiros which means 'to smile, laugh'. The Greek word meidan mean to smile and the Old Church Slavonic word smejo means to laugh.

Of course, mir also appears in the word English word mirror which we know as a reflective looking glass. This word comes from the Old French word mireoir which has its roots in the verb mirer "look at, observe, watch, contemplate," which came to them from the Vulgar Latin verb mirare "to look at," and, again, the variant of Latin mirari "to wonder at, admire".

And it's worth digging into mirror a bit more because the Latin word for mirror, ‘speculum’ (from which the Spanish get the word espejo and the German's get the word Spiegel) but also is clearly the root of the word respect. Curiously this root is also related to Old English scua which means "shade, shadow."

It's interesting to note that most of the words you can find for 'mirror' find their roots in verbs for 'look', with a few words for 'shadow' or other sources. "The common use of the word for the material 'glass' in the sense of 'mirror' seems to be peculiar to English." [Carl Darling Buck, "A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages," 1949]

Also worthy of note is how it appears in the word mire (v.) which relates to being involved in difficulties or from the Old Norse myrr which means 'bog, swamp'.

This is what we can understand from the root mir.

Then there's the first root of the word ad which often means ‘to’ (e.g. adhere - to stick to (adhaerere "stick to," from ad- "to" + haerere = "to stick"). Ad can also mean: in addition to, tendency, towards, cause, make, direction toward, near, or at/

Admiration seems to encourage us to go for less not more. Admiration is the antidote to our starvation. Admiration is a practice of conscious restraint when we least want to. Admiration is work.

And so Ad+mirari could be said to suggest the experience or practice of one’s feeling of wonder going in a particular direction. It might also suggest that the wonder of the world is present at the subject of our admiration, that they are one of the ways that wonder erupts into the world. Perhaps admiration is an acknowledgment of that.

To admire something seems to imply be the capacity to be struck by another, to marvel at them and see them as wonderful and one who makes us smile or laugh with their beauty and yet still respect their boundaries. To look at them but not leer. To observe them from a distance without trying to take anything in the observing. To regard them without fitting them into a particular box or having them all figured out. To behold them from a distance and to not see the distance as something to be eliminated as quickly as possible but rather something sacred to be maintained. Once the boundaries of the others have been transgressed upon we are no longer in the world of admiration. Admiration is hinged on our capacity to recognize the importance of the sovereignty of the other.

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Note: The Etymological exploration of M, Mi, and Mir come from Franco Rendich’s, Comparative Etymological Dictionary of Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. The rest came from a combination of Barnhardt’s, The OED and etymonline.com

Part I - The Moon

Part III - Distance

Part IV - Consequence