Jj is for Jottings 43.  Children or Feet?  Using the Right Root.

I’ve decided it’s time to air one of my pet language peeves because it crops up so frequently both in conversation and in the media.  I begin with a question: Do pedophiles love children or do they just love feet (which would be odd, but harmless)?  The answer lies in the root word and its pronunciation.

A root word is the most basic part of the word.  It’s what is left after you remove all prefixes (eg. “un” or “anti”) and suffixes (eg. “able” or “tion”).  If you remove the suffix “ly” from “lovely”, you are left with the root word “love”.  Roots are generally Greek or Latin.

Returning to pedophiles, there are two root words involved – “ped” and “phile”.  “Phil” is Greek for love, and “ped” – well, therein lies the problem.  The word was originally spelt “paedophile” (and that is how I always spell it, except for the purposes of this article), and “paed” is pronounced to rhyme with “weed”.  “Paed” means “child”.  Think “paediatrician, encyclopaedia.  (Words related to teaching, originally applied to children.  I suspect that centuries ago it was considered that all learning was done as a child and that you didn’t learn after you were all grown up.)  Somehow lazy spelling has crept in and the pronunciation followed, changing the root to “ped”, which is Latin for “foot” and rhymes with “Fred”.  Think “pedal”, “pedestrian”, “centipede”, although the pronunciation has changed in that last one.

Now I am going to use the “correct” spellings so you know how to pronounce each word:  Given that you hear “pedophiles” talked about in Australia far more often than you hear mention of “paedophiles”, I can only conclude that here in Australia we have a heck of a lot of foot fetishists!

*Footnote (couldn’t resist that one, either!): I found that “orthopedic/orthopaedic” actually has the “paed” root, which you wouldn’t think from how it is used today.  It’s another example of how word usage has changed over time – it originally meant straightening children’s deformities, “orth” being Greek for “straight”.