You can delete, you can erase, you can remove, but to really, really get rid of something, you “expunge” it. “Expunge” connotes complete and total obliteration. But oddly enough, it began as possibly the mildest version of erasure there was.
“Expunge” comes from the Latin “expungere,” which had a very specific meaning. When a Roman scribe had a manuscript that included a list, and wanted to indicate that an item in the list ought to be removed, the scribe would punch tiny holes above and below that item. That was what “expungere” means; “ex” for “out” and “pungere” for puncture. (“Pungere” is also the source of the word “puncture,” by the way.) So back a couple of millennia, to “expunge” something either literally meant “make a couple of pinholes near it,” or more semantically, “leave this item off the list the next time you copy it.”
It took until the 1600s for the more figurative meaning of “deletion” to take over, and ever since then, if you “expunge” something, it’s really and truly gone. Well, unless it gets undeleted. “Delete”, on the other hand, nowadays sounds much less extreme than “expunge,” but originally that was reversed. While “expungere” was just poking a couple of holes with a pin, “delere” (the Latin root of “delete”) meant to wipe out, remove, or completely destroy. “Delere” was put together out of “de” (away) and “linere” (to wipe). And while the Romans used “expungere” for pinpricks, “delere” could apply to whole cities — there’s a famous cry “Carthago delenda est!” that was supposedly uttered by Cato the Elder during the Punic Wars.
“Delere” made its way into English as “delete” in the 1400s, and even by that time it was more likely to mean “erase something written” than “raze that troublesome city.” One of the early English uses is from 1637: “His Majestie deletted that clause.” It wasn’t until recently, with the introduction of computers — and more specifically, modern, forgiving, graphical user interfaces — that “undelete” came along.
To “undelete” something simply means that you’ve changed your mind and whatever you deleted, well, now you want it back. Which means, if you think about it, that it must not have really been deleted at all, just stored elsewhere. This is an important concept to master if you ever want to try to “delete” something from, say, Facebook. But in another sense, the “undelete” function is a very friendly, forgiving thing that you can do with a computer. It wasn’t the first thing anyone thought of when designing computer programs; the early ones didn’t have any “undelete” capabilities. But it didn’t take very long (or many annoying mistakes with keyboard shortcuts) before “undelete” seemed like an excellent idea.
If you think about it, computer commands that enable you to escape the consequences of a mistake — “undelete”, “undo” and the like — may be the most humane things computers are capable of. “Oops,” you think, “I wish I hadn’t done that,” and with a click or a tap or a swipe your mistake is forgiven. Pardoned.
“Forgive” and “pardon” are, by the way, very close in meaning, and even though they don’t sound very similar, they come from the same Latin root: “perdonare.” “Perdonare” means to grant without condition, or give completely. The Latin word entered Old English as “forgiefan.” What happened was that the meaning of “perdonare” was unravelled, the parts translated, and then the whole was wrapped up again. The Latin “per” became “for”, which meant “completely” in Old English, and “donare” was replaced with “giefan” (to give). That produced “forgiefan,” which in modern English became “forgiven.” That apparently wasn’t sufficient, though, because separately “perdonare” made its way into English again, this time becoming “pardon”, which looks and sounds much more similar to the original Latin, but still retained the same meaning. And that’s why “forgive” and “pardon” have the same root even though they don’t look it.
Now that we’ve arrived at the interesting situation where we have two different words that came from the same place and have pretty much the same meaning, you’d think one or the other could simply be deleted in the interest of simplicity. Well, English doesn’t really work that way. Even if you tried, the language works a bit like the Internet; good luck permanently deleting or expunging anything at all!
