I’ve mentioned before that some people get all uptight at the use of words like irregardless.

The objection is that the ir in irregardless is unnecessary because its negative meaning is already there in the less part of irregardless. Today’s word deliver is offered up as an example that such “ignorant” word construction has a very long history.

Deliver was delivered to England’s shores with French after the year 1066 although it didn’t show up in written form until 1225—or at least that’s the earliest surviving record that we have of the word.

Being French the parent of deliver was Latin deliberare.

The very first meanings of deliver in English had to do with something being set free. That meaning is right there in the Latin too since the Latin word for “free” is liber. This of course shows up for us in liberate.

So it seems that somewhere back in the mists of time people started thinking that setting something free with the word liber wasn’t highfalutin enough and felt the need to add a de to it without actually changing the meaning.

But as the Cat in the Hat said, “that is not all, oh no, that is not all.”

I said that irregardless was in some people’s minds an ignorant word construction. Evidently so must have been deliver back in Latin because just as now there are numerous types of English spoken, history saw many different flavors of Latin as well.

The deliver we received came from what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “late popular Latin.” That’s what happened to Latin as it disseminated across the Roman world. People who had never heard a Roman senator speak felt free to use Latin and so used it with all kinds of “ignorant” twists thrown in.

Same with English.

People who listen to me hear a combination of things that are quite different from how they talk on the BBC. My accent is a product of where I grew up and my vocabulary and pronunciation too; with a few errors I learned from parents and friends thrown in; and even more errors I myself have invented on top of that.

Back in Latin the supposedly correct vocabulary, accent and pronunciation would have been called Classical Latin.

In Classical Latin deliberare had a completely different meaning than what those supposedly ignorant proto-Frenchmen assigned to it. I did not mean “to set free.” It meant what we mean by deliberate.

When you deliberate over a decision or act deliberately it isn’t because you are acting without freedom, it is because you are acting out of a balancing of the options. The liber in our English deliberate is from the Latin word for “scales” or “balance” libra.

Hence liberate and deliberate grew from different roots.