One of my favourite things is learning new words. I recently learnt the word imprecate, which means “to swear” or “to use foul language”. Well, that’s sort of what it means – in fact, both Dictionary.com and OED don’t have this definition, but Merriam-Webster does. That’s because “swearing” is a secondary meaning, and it’s real definition is more fancy, meaning “to invoke or call down (evil or calamity) upon a person” (OED). Think your text-book fantasy villain calling down evil upon the hero, and you’ve got imprecation going on.

So what’s interesting about this? Well, if “invoking evil upon someone” isn’t interesting enough, what I like about this word is (of course) its etymology. It comes from the Latin inprecari, made up of in- as in “within” or “into” and precari, meaning to “pray/invoke/call upon”. Doesn’t sound like a common root, but precari is actually the basis of “pray” and “prayer” today. In other words, etymologically, there’s very little difference between a prayer and a swear.

Precari found its way into other words, too. Any computer programmer should know the word deprecate, meaning to render something obsolete, as in “In the latest version of HTML, <strong> tags are deprecated.” (I don’t know if that’s true, please don’t shoot me if it isn’t.) So how did praying and programming get hooked up? Well, deprecate used to mean “to pray against something”, from de- “away” and precari, and then it came to mean “to belittle or express disapproval of”. It has the sense of strongly encouraging someone against doing a certain thing. Here’s an old-timey (1631) example:

“The judgements which Salomon..earnestly deprecateth and prayeth against” (OED).

This is how we got the word self-deprecating, meaning to belittle yourself or make yourself out to be less than you are (which is not a good thing to do, by the way. You’re awesome.)

But it’s a little unclear how we got from “praying” to “declaring obsolete”, as in the programming definition. The concept of deprecation is well-established, but – and this is really weird – out of the OED, Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster, none of them even list the programming definition, either as a verb or a noun, let alone have information on how long the programming term has been in use. It’s listed in Wikipedia and Wiktionary, as well as whatis.com, and you can find the word in use in programming circles, but why several reputable dictionaries don’t include this meaning is a mystery to me. Wikipedia says that:

“In current usage, for one to state that a feature is deprecated is merely a recommendation against using it”

So this would suggest that the sense of “expressing disapproval” or “attempting to ward off” developed into the sense of, trying to encourage other people (programmers) to stay away from something (a programming feature.) But this statement doesn’t have a source that I can see, so we’ll have to take it as guesswork, rather than a definitive etymology. In any case, it’s interesting to see how far you can get on a prayer alone.