There are all sorts of critics. There are literary critics and film critics and art critics and theatre critics and so on. (I don’t think we would talk about a baseball critic or a football critic, though I’m not sure why not.) The job of a critic may be to evaluate books or movies or whatever, to give an opinion about which books or movies are worth reading or watching.
Sometimes we distinguish between literary critics and book reviewers—literary critics are likely to be academics, while book reviewers are journalists; literary critics could well write about old books, while book reviewers write about current publications. Sometimes (for instance in Biblical scholarship) we distinguish between higher criticism and lower criticism. Lower criticism, sometimes called textual criticism, is concerned with establishing a text, that is, making sure that what we read is as close as possible to the original text; higher criticism deals with interpretation and evaluation.
The word “critic” entered English around the year 1600; Shakespeare used it in Love’s Labour Lost (3.1.186). It’s borrowed from the Latin “criticus”, which in turn is borrowed from the Greek “kriticos”, which can be a noun meaning “critic” but which is usually an adjective meaning “able to decide” or “able to judge”. The Greek verb “krino” means “to separate”, “to divide”, “to pick out” or “to choose”, “to pick the winner in a contest”, “to pass judgement”; the Greek noun “krites” means “a judge”—a judge picks out the person who is guilty. The Greek word “kritêrion” meant “a means of judging” or “a standard of judgement”, and that’s more or less what “criterion” means today.
The Greek root “krin-” also shows up with various prefixes; the exact shades of meaning of these compound words in ancient Greek can be hard to distinguish, but modern English has used these various forms to create several words with quite specific meanings. The ancient Greek “diakrino” meant “to distinguish”; in modern English a “diacritic”, such as an accent mark or a diaeresis or a cedilla, distinguishes two different pronunciations of a letter. The Greek “epikrito” meant “to give judgement upon”, “to decide”, “to determine”; the modern English “epicritic” has to do with sensations felt in the skin, particularly the accurate discrimination between small degrees of sensation.
The verb form “krinomai” (the passive or middle voice) means “to explain”, “to dispute”, or “to quarrel”. It’s not hard to see the relationship between making a judgement and explaining that judgement, or disputing a judgement, or quarreling over a judgement. The noun form “krima” means “a judgement” or “an accusation”. This is obviously similar to English “crime”—which is, however, derived from the Latin “crimen”, which I will discuss in a moment.
All these words derive from a ProtoIndoEuropean root “*krei”, which meant “to sieve” or “to sift” and thus “to separate, to discriminate, to distinguish”. (The asterisk means that this form is reconstructed. We don’t have anything written in ProtoIndoEuropean, so all PIE roots are reconstructed.) When we separate things, we often separate what we want from what we don’t want—we separate the wheat, which we want, from the chaff, which we don’t want. Separation often implies judgement. A critic, therefore, is often someone who finds fault, and if I criticize something I’m probably saying something negative about it. But “critical thinking” is supposed to discover the objective merits of an argument, both good and bad. The word “critique” usually implies a detailed examination and analysis of a text or a theory. It was borrowed from French around 1700, but it wasn’t used much in English until the 1970s, and the usage has jumped since then.
A person who is “critical” is usually making a negative judgement, either on a specific occasion or habitually. But “critical” applied to a situation usually means something like “crucial”—a specific ingredient in a recipe may be critical to its success. A critical moment is a turning point, leading either to success or failure; a critical injury is a matter of life or death. In physics, critical mass is the amount of material which will lead to a chain reaction.
The Greek “krisis” means “separation” or “distinguishing”, “the judgement of a court”, and also “the turning point of a disease”, “a sudden change for the better or worse”. In English a crisis is a moment of great danger—such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came dangerously close to nuclear war—or a time when an important decision has to be made.
An interesting word in this family is the verb “hypokrinomai” and the derived nouns “hupokrites” and “hupokrisis”. The verb can mean “to reply, make answer”—this is derived from one of the meanings of “krino”—but it can also mean “to speak dialogue in a play” or “to act a part in a play” or “to pretend”. The development of the meaning is clear—actors speak in dialogue, they respond back and forth to each other, they play parts, they pretend to be the characters in a play. The derived noun “hupokrites” means “someone who answers or interprets” or “a pretender” or “a hypocrite”, and the noun “hupokrisis” means “playing a part on stage” or “pretense” or “hypocrisy”. In Khariton’s ancient Greek novel “Kallirhoe” (probably written around 150 AD), one of the villains of the story arranges a plot against Kallirhoe, the heroine, which involves having one of his henchmen pretend to fall in love with one of Kallirhoe’s servants; he orders this henchman to be “a hypokrites of love”. This can be translated either as “be a hypocrite of love” or “play the part of a lover”.
The words “endocrine”, “autocrine”, “exocrine”, “heterocrine”, “apocrine”, and “paracrine” are medical terms having to do with bodily secretions. These words are all artificial creations of the late nineteenth century; the word “endocrine”, for example, was introduced in 1893 by the French biologist Édouard Laguesse, who took the Greek verb “krino” to mean “secrete”—I will say more about “secrete” in a moment. The endocrine glands have secretions internal to the body, such as hormones; the exocrine glands (such as tear ducts or sweat glands) have ducts that allow secretion outside the body.
In Latin the same ProtoIndoEuropean root *krei shows up in two forms, “cri-” and “cer-”. As I suggested above, English “crime” is derived from Latin “crimen”, along with a host of related words, such as “criminal”, “incriminate”, and “recriminate”. Latin “cribrum” meant sieve; there are a few English words derived from “cribrum”; a “cribble” is a sieve; “cribellum” is “a spider’s spinning organ” (which is in the form of a sieve); “cribrate”; “cribriform” or “cribrate” means “perforated (as a sieve has lots of little holes); English “garble”, which may come from late Latin “cribillare” through Arabic “garbala” to Italian “garbellare”; originally English “garble” meant “to sift out impurities” and it most often means “to mix up”. Of these the only one that I knew before I started working on this post was the second meaning of “garble”.
The Latin verb “cerno” (“to separate”, “to sift”, “to distinguish”, “to decide”) has many Latin derivatives (some with “cer-” and some with “cri-”) and many English derivatives are based on these Latin derivatives. The past participle of “cerno” is the adjective “certus” (“settled” or “resolved” or “undoubted”); this gives the English “certain” and its derivatives, as well as “ascertain”.
The Latin noun “discrimen” (“a dividing line” or “a distinction”) is related to the verb “discerno” (“to separate”, “to distinguish”), which gives English “discern”, “discriminate” (“to differentiate”, “to make an unjust distinction”), “discretion” (“the ability to distinguish right from wrong”, “the freedom to decide what to do in a situation”, “behaving in such a way as to avoid causing offense”), and “decree” (“something decided”, “the announcement of a decision”). Originally English “discrete” and “discreet” were the same word, meaning “separate”, derived from Latin “discretus”, but now “discrete” means “separate”, “distinct from others”, while “discreet” means “morally discerning”, “careful”, “prudent”. The words “excrement” and “excrete” derive from Latin “excrementum”, meaning “excrement” or “spittle”, from the verb “excerno”, to separate.
The words “secretion”, “secrete”, “secret”, and “secretary” all derive from the root “-cre-” joined to the Latin prefix “se-”, which means “apart” or “away”; the Latin verb “secerno” means “to separate”, and the participle “secretus” means “set apart” or “hidden”. A secretion is something set apart from the body, either internally, an endocrine secretion, or externally, an exocrine secretion; thus “endocrine”, “exocrine”, and “secretion” all derive from the root “*krei”.
The verb “to secrete” has two meanings. The first meaning is derived from the noun “secretion” and it means “to discharge a substance”. The second means “to hide” or “to conceal”. This is derived from the word “secret”, another derivative of Latin “secerno”. In the English of the 15th century “secret” meant “something hidden from human understanding” and then “something hidden from general knowledge”. A “secretary” was originally “a person who is entrusted with private and confidential matters”.
Here is a summary list of the words mentioned in this post: critic, critical, criticism, criterion, diacritic, epicritic, critique, crisis, hypocrite, endocrine, exocrine, crime, criminal, incriminate, recriminate, garble, certain, certitude, ascertain, discern, discriminate, discretion, indiscretion, decree, discrete, discreet, excrement, excrete, secretion, secrete, secret, secretary. (I don’t guarantee that I’ve covered every derivative.) All of these derive from the same ProtoIndoEuropean root, “*krei-” (“to sift”, “to separate”). This list is a good lesson in the development of English vocabulary. There’s no obvious connection between “crisis” and “secretary”, for example, or “decree” and “excrement”, and yet all these words go back to the same root.
The Art of Reading Slowly 