I edit legal adjacent copy and our house style says v for case names but vs. in sports and marketing, with no explanation offered. My Latin dictionary gives versus as a participle of vertere, to turn, which does not obviously get you to against. Where does the against sense come from, when did English take it, and is the citation convention older than the sporting one or the other way round?
On the abbreviation, the split is real but it is convention rather than etymology and it varies by jurisdiction. In US legal citation the standard style is v. with a full stop in case names. In English practice you will see it written v with no stop, and read aloud it is not usually said as versus at all: in criminal matters people say the Crown against so and so, and in civil matters plenty of practitioners say and. So the same two letters get spoken three different ways depending on the room you are standing in. Sports and marketing copy inherited vs. from general prose, where the longer abbreviation reads more naturally to a non lawyer.
That explains why our litigation team kept quietly correcting the stop back out and never said why.
Small correction to the idea that English borrowed it once and kept it. It is better described as several borrowings from a living professional Latin, because legal Latin stayed in active use in English courts long after Latin stopped being a general written language here. That is also why the word never went through the usual sound changes you would expect from a fifteenth century loan, and why it still looks like an undigested Latin word today: it never really stopped being one.
The thing I got wrong for years was assuming versus and adverse were related because they both mean against. Adverse is ad plus vertere, turned toward, and adversary comes through the same route, so they really do share the vertere root, which felt like a lucky guess until I checked. But controversy, conversation, universe, vertigo and version are all in that same family too, which is the point at which the root stops helping you predict meaning and you have to look each one up anyway.
One practical note for your style guide: pick per context and write down why, because your readers will notice inconsistency in a way they will never notice which convention you picked.
@backfill_bram · last mo. · 3 replies
The bridge you are missing is the spatial sense. Versus is the past participle of vertere, so literally turned, and in Latin it gets used for turned toward or facing in a direction, which is also why you see it in place descriptions. Turned to face someone is a very short step from set against someone, especially once it is being used to describe two parties in a dispute standing opposite each other. English picks it up in the mid fifteenth century and it arrives specifically in legal phraseology, one party against another, not as a general preposition. The sporting and general uses are much later borrowings out of that legal use, which is exactly the order your style guide implies without explaining.
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@hive_tool_hal · last mo.
Same shift shows up in other languages: the word for opposite or facing drifts into the word for opposing. It is a very well trodden path.
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@internal_linker · last mo.
Turned toward getting to set against is the piece that makes it click. Facing is doing all the work.
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