In 1705 a British poet named Matthew Prior—reputed to be the high point in poetry between John Dryden Alexander Pope—wrote a poem called An English Padlock.

Be to her virtues very kind;
Be to her faults a little blind;
Let all her ways be unconfined;
And clap your padlock—on her mind.

I’ve been unable to ascertain whether this comes from a longer poem or whether it represents a loving little ditty or a piece of male chauvinism.

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I guess it doesn’t matter because what I’m trying to get at here is that Matthew Prior 300 years ago had the same feeling about the word virtue that we do today. It was something good and something you’d like to see in your mother or your girlfriend or your wife or your daughters.

But this certainly could not have been the case when the word was forming out of an Indo-European root into Latin. Etymologically being a virtuous woman wasn’t such a great thing.

English got the word virtue from French and it shows up around 1250 as an English word, consistent with other words injected into the language under the influence of the French rulers of England after the Norman Conquest.

Back in Latin before evolving into a French word, the meaning was remarkably stable and reflected this sense of “goodness.”

Today we can taste a little sense of moral strength in the word virtue and this was an even stronger sense of the word back through time.

The root of the word though was vir from Indo-European wiro meaning “man.”

So virtue actually means “manliness” and gets it sense of strength from that manly sense.

That’s why people thousands of years ago might not have liked to think of females as virtuous. It is that same word root that causes my email spam filter to work so hard on messages talking about virility.

Before I go I should also tell you that historically patience was not a virtue; at least not one of the seven virtues that seemed to counter the seven deadly sins.

Of course there were Faith, Hope, and Charity; that’s three.

Then there were Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude; that’s seven—and patience isn’t listed.

But then again, how many of these seven seem especially manly?