Atavistic

(pronunciation) 🔗

Ed West’s post A language of beautiful impurity 🔗 renewed my curiosity about Anglish, the effort to replace English’s words of Latin and Greek origin with Germanic words.

Ironically, among West’s praise for Anglish, the word that caught my attention was a Latinate one.

Anglo-Saxon language can also have more emotional, atavistic appeal.

Merriam-Webster defines “atavism” 🔗 as:

recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity

This strikes me as quite a broad definition. It suggests that wearing armour and riding a horse into battle would be atavistic, but so would sucking your thumb and crawling into the foetal position.