circuitous

The Latin circuitus first appears in the works of Julius Caesar and Cicero in the first century BCE. It was a military and administrative term meaning a going around, a patrol route, or the perimeter of a fortification. Caesar uses circuitu in De Bello Gallico to describe flanking maneuvers around Gallic positions. The word came from circuire, itself built from circum (around) and ire (to go), making it a literal description of any path that bends back on itself.

Medieval Latin clerics took circuitus into theological argument. By the 12th century, scholastic writers used derived forms to mean an argument that goes around its point instead of reaching it directly. This rhetorical sense is already present in Peter Abelard's Sic et Non (1121), where Abelard criticizes circuitous readings of scripture. The ecclesiastical courts also had their circuits, the scheduled rounds a bishop or judge made through a diocese.

The adjective circuitous entered English around 1660, during the period when English jurists were formalizing the circuit court system inherited from medieval ecclesiastical practice. It appeared in legal writing to describe routes that took a longer way around. From legal routes, the word expanded quickly into general prose. By the 18th century, writers in Samuel Johnson's circle used it freely to describe any approach, physical or rhetorical, that avoided the direct line.

The word kept both senses alive in modern English. A circuitous road is simply longer than the most direct route. A circuitous argument is one that seems to advance while actually avoiding the point. The Latin root circum underlies dozens of English words, but circuitous is the one that best captures the human tendency to reach a destination by going around it.