If you know somebody who’s always talked about visiting, say, Alaska or Paris but never actually makes plans to go there, or somebody who tends to accumulate too much stuff in their house and is always right on the cusp of getting the clutter organized, you know somebody engages in “velleity.”
“Velleity” is more obscure than it really deserves, since it’s such a useful word and common state people find themselves in. The formal definition says it’s “the fact or quality of merely willing, wishing, or desiring, without any effort or advance towards action or realization.” After all, how many self-help and business-success books address velleity without ever once mentioning it by name? Perhaps the authors of business and self-help books engage in their own version of velleity; always thinking it’s almost time to start improving their vocabularies.
“Velleity” entered the language around 1600, based on the Latin word “velle” (to wish). “Velle” is a form of the Latin “volo” (I will), which also entered English as the root of “will”, and gave us “volunteer” and “volition” to boot. If you’re wondering why “will” doesn’t sound much like “volunteer” or “volition”, the reason is that even though “will” comes from the form “volo” and “velle” sounds more like the English “wish,” “will” comes from the Old English “willen,” and the “w” had a “v” sound back around the year 900, when this all occurred. Paradoxically, even though the English “will” sounds closer to “wish” than it does to “volunteer” or “volition” (with which it shares its Latin root), “wish” comes from a different Latin word.
“Wish” also appeared in English before 900, when it was the Old English “wyscan.” It came from the Latin word “venus,” which means “charm,” as did another Old English word, “wynn” (joy). But “wynn” never made it to Modern English as the word “joy”, because around 1100, when the big transformation from Old to Middle English was in progress, the word “joy,” based on the Old French “joie” (from the Latin “gaudium”) took its place. “Wynn” didn’t become “win” either; that comes from a different Old English word: “winnan” (to work or fight).
Old English speakers didn’t, as far as I know, have a word for “velleity” (for that matter, “velleity” is so obscure we nearly don’t have it either), but they would definitely have understood that there’s no wynn in velleity because regardless of how much you wyscan for something, it takes some winnan to get it. If only they’d thought of it a couple millennia ago, business and self-help books could have been written in Old English as well.
Maybe I’ll write a self-help book too…I’ll get started any day now.
