Etymology: delegate

Yesterday was Super Tuesday in many U.S. states including my own.  I’m having lots of feelings about the results, and it’s helpful for me to channel feelings into education, so here we go.  Here in the U.S., we use a system that involves delegates, and it’s… complicated.  If you want to learn more about how that system works, here’s a helpful breakdown on CNN.   If you want to learn more about the word delegate, pay attention below.

As a verb, delegate means “to send with power to transact business as a representative.”  It was first recorded around 1520, and comes from the Latin, delegare, from de, meaning, “from” or, “away,” and legare, meaning, “to send with a contract or commission.”  It’s thought that the Latin word legare stems from the PIE root leg- meaning, “to gather, set in order, consider, choose.”  This root can be found in words like analogy, biology, apology, paralogical, logistics, legion, legislator, privilege, sacrilege, and many more words, none of which can properly explain the depths of my despair over the results of the Democratic Presidential Primary Election.

As a noun, it means “a person appointed and sent by another or others with power to transact business as a representative,” and came to use about a hundred years before the verb form.  It’s from Old French, delegat or directly from the Latin delegatus, the past participle of delegare, seen above.

The noun didn’t come to mean a person elected or appointed to represent a territory in the U.S. Congress until 1825 or so and in my opinion the whole antiquated process could do with an overhaul.