Etymologically being humiliated is the human condition.

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I heard two people this week say that something that had happened to them was humiliating. What they meant was that their pride had been hurt; something had happened that had knocked them down a peg.

Without even opening a dictionary I knew that the uncomfortable experience of being humiliated is named from the same root as the word humility.

Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines humility as freedom from pride or arrogance. That sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?

But being made to feel free from pride is not so good; that’s why being humiliated is not a good thing.

Humility came to English from French after the Norman Conquest but of course that French had come from Latin before it so when English began importing words directly from classical languages the word humiliate was one of the words it adopted from Latin; in this case showing up first in writing in 1533.

Having intuited my way to the word humility I wondered about the difference between humility and humble; particularly when I see that the Latin humilis means “humble.”

In the etymology for humble, The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that humble comes from humilum, a Latin word meaning “low,” “small” and “insignificant.” So it’s no wonder that the words humility and humble have such similar meanings, they come from the same Latin roots.

But then I noticed in John Ayto’s Word Origins, where he says that humble literally means “close to the ground,” that humble is a derivative of humus meaning “earth” in Latin.

Then he goes on to say that this is the same earthy root that gave us the word human.

“How does that work?” I immediately wondered.

Is being “only human” what keeps us humble?

Actually it is being not godly that makes us human, etymologically at least.

Gods are of the heavens, humans are of this earth.