“Latin afficere meant to act on someone, and English kept the wound.”
The Latin verb afficere was built from ad-, meaning to or toward, and facere, meaning to do or make. It meant to act upon, to apply something to, often with the sense of influence or alteration. Cicero used it in the first century BCE to mean moved emotionally or struck by something. The past participle affectus gave Medieval Latin writers a noun for the emotional state itself.
Old French carried affecter into the 12th century, borrowing from ecclesiastical Latin that already used affectus for devotion and longing. English writers began using affecten in the late 1300s, first in the sense of aiming for or desiring something. John Wycliffe used it in the 1380s with the sense of emotional attachment. By the 1400s, the verb had split: to affect as influence, and to affect as pretend or assume artificially.
That split became the word's defining feature. By the 1600s, affect and effect had become a pair that confused writers then as now. Affect as a verb meant to influence; effect as a verb meant to bring about. Ben Jonson worried about the confusion in 1612. The word also spawned affectation in the 1500s, meaning a false or theatrical manner, from the same Latin root but via a different pathway.
In 20th-century psychology, affect re-entered technical use as a noun. Sigmund Freud's translators in the 1920s used affect to render the German Affekt, meaning emotional tone or feeling state. Clinical manuals today distinguish flat affect from appropriate affect as diagnostic markers. The ancient sense of being acted upon, of something done to you, never left.
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Affect is now split three ways in English: a verb meaning to influence, a verb meaning to pretend, and a noun meaning emotional tone. Few English words manage three distinct lives with so little overlap between them. The common thread is the Latin root: all three senses involve something being done to or by a person. The psychologists who reclaimed it as a noun were, whether they knew it or not, returning it to Cicero.
The verb's two senses have been at war since the 1500s. To affect someone is to move them; to affect an accent is to perform one. Both meanings remain in daily use, which means the word carries permanent ambiguity. The feeling and the pretense share a name. To affect grief is not to feel it.
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