“Latin successus meant any outcome until English speakers decided they only wanted the good ones.”
Latin successus was not a compliment in itself. The word named what came after anything, the neutral fact of sequence. A soldier's successus in battle was whatever happened next, victory or rout. Only gradually did the word narrow its meaning, shedding the bad outcomes and keeping only the favorable ones.
The verb at its root was succedere, meaning to go under or up to, then to follow close behind, then to prosper. Cicero used it in the first century BCE to mean a favorable result in a legal argument. The prefix sub carried a sense of proximity. Cedere, to go or yield, supplied the motion.
English borrowed successus around 1537, and early use preserved the Latin neutrality. Thomas Cranmer could write of success in prayer meaning simply the answer, not necessarily a happy one. By the late 1500s the narrowing was underway, and writers after Shakespeare used the word almost always in its favorable sense.
The 19th century turned success into a near-religion. Samuel Smiles published Self-Help in 1859, and the book seeded the self-improvement genre that still dominates Anglo-American bookshelves. American popular culture after 1900 cemented the word's current sense: the arrival at a desired goal, especially a public or material one. The neutral Latin sequence had become an aspiration.
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Today
Success still carries the ghost of its Latin origin. Every success is a what-comes-after, defined entirely by what came before it. The person who does not name a goal cannot have a success; the word requires a destination. This is why the feeling of success is so often followed by emptiness: the sequence ends, and the neutral Latin noun reasserts itself.
That emptiness is information. It means the goal was too small, or the wrong one, or that the pleasure was in the pursuing. The arrival reveals whether the journey was worth wanting.
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