Ever wonder what rude and rudimentary have in common? They sure sound alike…but these days, rude indicates bad manners, and rudimentary means basic. Are they related?
You bet they are! Both come from the same Latin root, rudis, which means “rough, crude, unlearned.” Think of this not as necessarily bad, but as “raw”–from there, rude came into English meaning the same thing by the late 1200s, with that sense of “coarse, unfinished.” But it only took about a hundred years for people to begin applying it to each other when they did mean something negative–because if one’s manners are raw and unfinished and coarse, that usually meant one “ill-mannered, boorish, ignorant, uneducated” or “marked by incivility.”
As for rudimentary, it starts from that same root, but didn’t become a word until 1819, but from the 1500s onward we had the same meaning carried in rudimental. Here, they both mean “undeveloped or elemental.” Rudiments is also from the 1540s, with that meaning of “elements”–the raw things that haven’t had anything done to them.
Word Nerds Unite!
Read More Word of the Week Posts
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 
