funesto

Forms

fūnestō (present infinitive fūnestāre, perfect active fūnestāvī, supine fūnestātum); first conjugation^[1]

Etymology

It is from Latin fūnestus (“deadly, defiled by death”) + -ō.^[2][3][4] De Vaan lists the adjective among the derivatives of fūnus (“funeral, death”).^[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

It is first found in Cicero's speeches, of altars and temples polluted with human victims,^[3][4] and in Catullus, where a curse asks that Theseus, in the same mind in which he abandoned the speaker, may bring death on himself and his family: funestet seque suosque.^[4]

Semantic evolution

Cicero uses it of the senate house polluted by violence and of an assembly defiled by the touch of the executioner,^[3][4] and once of filling the Lemnian rock with the cries of Philoctetes, “making it mournful”.^[2] After Augustus it is used more generally of disgracing or dishonouring: Juvenal has it of a family shamed by a poisoner's statue, and Paulus' Sententiae forbid a corpse to be brought into the city “so that its rites are not polluted”.^[3][4]

Servius explains it as being made impure by a death,^[4] and the glossaries give polluere and cruentare as its equivalents.^[4] Christian writers such as Rufinus and Augustine use it of pollution by sacrilege and crime.^[4]

Timeline

• 81–43 BC – Cicero uses it of altars and temples polluted with human victims.^[3][6]
• 81/79–52/50 BC – Catullus uses it of bringing death on a family.^[4][6]
• c. 67–c. 127 AD – Juvenal uses it of disgracing a family.^[3][6]
• 1st half of the 3rd century AD – Paulus uses it of rites polluted by a corpse.^[3][6]
• c. 400 AD – Servius explains it as being polluted by a death.^[4][6]

Meanings

Verb

1. To pollute or defile by murder or death; to stain with blood.^[2][3][4]
2. To make funereal or mournful.^[2]
3. To bring death upon, doom.^[4][1]
4. To dishonour, disgrace.^[3]

Related words

• fūnus
• fūnestus

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
5. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
6. ^ a b c d e Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de