In the wake of the decision for Britain to leave the European Union, and a President trying to coerce his neighbour into building a wall, one word has been key throughout this turmoil: negotiation. The word, just like the President, has its origins in business. It comes from the Latin negotium, meaning “business”, or “employment”, or – and this one is particularly salient today – “trouble”. So it originally referred to doing business, but later expanded to mean the arrangements that are required to make business take place, which we now call negotiations. The verb, negotiate, was a back-formation; meaning that we didn’t originally have a verb, but we created it based on the pattern of other nouns ending in ‘-ation’, and their corresponding verbs.

Negotium comes from neg-, which as you might expect, means “not” (as in negative,) and otium, meaning “leisure”, “time free from activity”, and “peace and quiet” (this survives in the word otiose, meaning either idle, ineffective, or superfluous.) You can also think of an otium as “A student when there isn’t an urgent deadline approaching.” So a negotium, and therefore a negotiation, is literally non-leisure, a time full of activity: the opposite of peace and quiet. This seems fitting, as most negotiations these days are certainly the opposite of peace and quiet.