Foreign

Abstract

“In no way related to L. cura”: the OED ’s head note for care as a noun would be gratuitous if it did not counter a tradition of error persisting to the present. Identifying care as “a noun especially powerful for Milton,” Roy Flannagan thus misleads when ruling it “derived from Latin cura.”¹ Both the noun and verb forms of care nonetheless overlap substantially with their Latin counterparts: cura (“watchfulness, care, solicitude, concern,” as typically divided between “care bestowed on anything, attention, pains,” and “anxiety, worry, concern”); and curare (“to give care or attention to, take charge of, care for, take care of, look after, attend to, trouble oneself about”). To a degree impossible to pinpoint, this extensive but coincidental agreement between the two languages must have influenced English users during the lengthy period in which they often had a very nearly equal facility with Latin, especially when cure in their native tongue could freely substitute for care. But the challenge of determining in such cases where cura and its derivatives influence perceptions of care and its derivatives (or vice versa) cannot be met by denying those words’ separate roots; and treating the two sets of terms as fully “related” offers spurious guidance that buries the very issue about which it purports to enlighten.