A Route to the Root of a Routine Routine

The conundrum — a paradox of sorts — confronting tens of millions people around the world has certainly been operational here at Under Western Skies.

The first component of this paradox is that in this extraordinary time of pandemic — closures of schools, businesses, the things of everyday life — our ordinary routines have been severely interrupted.

Secondly, establishing a new routine is … anything but routine.

As a result, a lot of us — perhaps millions of us — have begun to sense a certain … sameness in the days: There are fewer trips to the grocery; few or no visits with family and friends; no casual, last-minute, “Let’s get take-out” decisions. If things that distinguished a Tuesday from a Wednesday, weekends from the work week, are no longer viable, the days collapse into one another. If this is Tuesday, why am I not attending my usual get-together with friends after work? If it’s Saturday, where’s my music lesson?

Here, we miss walking some of our favorite routes, because they’re popular with many people — especially now that recreation at gyms and other gathering places is nonexistent in Los Angeles County. I’m sorry to say that many of those walkers aren’t as assiduous about social distancing or mask wearing as we prefer, so we’re limited in our choices.

Back to the Routine

With that said, I’d like to reestablish my routine of blogging, from which I’ve been — to say the least — recently distracted.

A Few Words about Those Words

This piece, so far, has used three closely-related words that demonstrate why English can be so impenetrably difficult for non-native speakers learning it: routine (noun), routine (adjective) and route.

All three words — by a variety of routes(!) — entered English from either French or Old French route. Prior to that, French acquired it from Latin rumpere, to break. (Spanish retains romper, to break.)

At first glance, this derivation makes no objective sense. That’s not unusual in etymology. Think, though, as blogger Steve Schwartzman at “Portaits of Wildflowers” pointed out to me (gently correcting an earlier version of this paragraph), the notion of “breaking road” or — more simply — a “beaten path.” I’m grateful to Mr. Schwartzman for his contribution.

Whatever We Say It Means

As Humpty Dumpty memorably told Alice, “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean ….”

We English speakers have near carte blanche to transform nouns into adjectives, verbs, whatever we want them to do. To my knowledge, there’s no predicate sense of “to routine,” although we certainly have “route” as a verb. Aggravating, confusing for non-native speakers? Yes.

The Root of Another Problem

We also have the word “root,” the base of a plant or the fundamental aspect of something. While it sounds precisely like one common pronunciation for “route,” not only is it unrelated in meaning, but has an entirely separate origin, from Middle English rot, from Old English rōt, back to Old Norse.

The numerous English homonyms persistently fool native speakers into wrong spellings, not solely those who didn’t grow up with the language.

Back in the Groove?

Will I get my groove back? Reestablish my regular blogging? The route to a routine is rooted in uncertainty. Better routine than rootless.

© Brad Nixon 2020. Quotation from Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll; from The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner, ed.; W.W. Norton, New York, 1960-2000. Citations from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Houghton Mifflin; Boston, New York, 2000. Appreciation to Steve Schwartzman for correct information about rupta via, “broken road.” He attributes the interpretation “beaten path” to John Ayto in Word Origins, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2006.