radical — an adjective used to describe something that relates to or proceeds from roots
radical — the Spanish cognate used in the same way
The etymological “root” of “radical” is Latin’s radix. Does that remind you of our vegetable, the radish? It should. The word “radish” comes straight from that Latin word for “root” because what is a radish but the “root” of a certain type of plant. I love to eat mine sliced with lemon juice and salt — yummy.
“Radical” has taken on other meanings in English, but at its “root” is that definition dealing with “roots.” I used to think that if you were having “radical surgery,” it meant you were having “extreme surgery,” but what it actually means is that you are having surgery to get at the “root” of the problem or disease.
If you “eradicate” something, you are literally pulling it up by the roots or doing away with it in a such a complete way that you might figuratively be pulling it up by the roots. You are getting to the root of the problem and getting rid of it completely. That Latin “root” of radix is inside the word “eradicate.” The Spanish cognate is “erradicar.”
In Spanish, the word for “root” is “raíz” — it’s “la raíz” for “the root.” Nouns that end in the letter Z in Spanish change that letter to a C when making the word plural; thus, you’d have “las raíces” for “the roots.”
If you’d like to know even more about this word, specifically how it came to mean “extreme” or even “cool” back in the 80’s (and even before that), here is a link to a longer article done by merriam-webster.com: Radical info.
I hope you find “Cognate Cognizance” to be totally radical, dude. Ha ha.
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Tammy Marshall
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