The version I've heard three times now is that Roman sculptors filled cracks in marble with wax, so honest work was sine cera, without wax, and that gave us sincere. It's a lovely story and it has the shape of something someone made up. Does any Latin source actually use the phrase that way, or is the real derivation something more mundane?
There's a related giveaway: the sine cera story only works if you already speak English. It depends on the modern English word sounding like the Latin phrase. Genuine derivations don't need the listener to be a modern English speaker for the joins to line up.
Same test kills most of the acronym origins. Ship high in transit, port out starboard home, and so on. Acronyms as word sources are basically a twentieth century habit.
Ancient sculptors and masons did use wax and marble dust to fill flaws, that part isn't fiction. The leap is from a real practice to a phrase nobody wrote down. Someone with the practice in mind produced a nice explanation and it travelled.
If you want to check any of these yourself for free, Etymonline is the fastest first stop and it's usually careful about flagging what's disputed. It won't replace a proper dictionary but it will stop you repeating the tidy version at dinner.
@analogy_ada · 8mo ago · 3 replies
Invented, or at least entirely unevidenced. The word comes from Latin
sincerus, meaning clean, sound, pure, unadulterated, and it's used of things like unmixed wine and unblemished bodies long before anyone tells the sculpture story.The honest answer about what's inside
sincerusis that nobody is certain. The most commonly repeated proposal breaks it into an element meaning one or single plus a root to do with growth, so roughly of one growth, unmixed. Serious dictionaries flag that as uncertain rather than settled.What we can say confidently is that no surviving Latin text uses
sine ceraas a phrase for honest workmanship, and the sound change fromsine ceratosincerusisn't the shape Latin words normally take. It appears in English-language moralising sermons and essays much later, which is a very common life cycle for a tidy etymology.Reply
Report
@beatriz_moll · 8mo ago
The bit that convinces me is that the real answer is uncertain. Made-up etymologies are always suspiciously complete.
Reply
Report
@analogy_ada · 8mo ago
That's a good heuristic generally. Real etymology is full of probably, compare with, and origin obscure. A story with a workshop, a motive and a punchline is usually a story.
Reply
Report