Words for Killing and Cutting

Lecture 25

S

imon Wiesenthal was an Austrian Jewish Holocaust survivor who
went on to become a famous Nazi hunter and author after World War
II. Wiesenthal famously said, “What connects two thousand years of
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us that throughout history, too much power in the hands of a few, left
unchecked, has led to unspeakable horrors. But it’s important for a language
to have words for such horrors so that we can name them, bring them into
the light, and hopefully prevent them from happening again. Thus, this
lecture focuses on words sharing the themes of killing, cutting, and ending.
In addition, we will explore some important roots related to these themes.

Parricide (noun)

The murder of a parent or close relative.

z The root cide comes from the Latin ending -cidium, which itself is

related to the Latin verb caedo, meaning both “to cut” and “to kill.”

English has many words containing this root, including suicide,

homicide, matricide, patricide, infanticide, regicide, and the target

word here, parricide.

z In addition to parricide, other words for killing within the family

include fratricide and sororicide. But perhaps the ultimate human

atrocity is genocide. Derived from the Greek root genos, meaning

“race or kind,” the word genocide was coined in 1944 by U.S. jurist

Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazi’s systematic killing of Jews.

The word now extends to any large-scale eradication of a particular

racial, cultural, or political group, such as the mass murders in

Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, and Sudan.

z The root cide is also used in many more innocuous ways, as in the

words insecticide, herbicide, and fungicide.