IT’S ETYMOLOGY MONDAY—And this week’s word is:

inspire

This word that fills our hearts and minds with the urge, the belief, that we can achieve or create that which we dream, has an origin deeply rooted with the spirit. It derives from the Latin inspirare—to breathe upon—and is linked to the word spiritus—the spirit, the breath of life. And it followed that pathway into Old French and through to Middle English, appearing sometime before 1340 in Richard Rolle’s hermetic writings, in which inspiration was breathed into us by a divine being that imparted the truth or idea into our minds. And even today, though we may not stop to recognise it, the act of being inspired can be transcendental, as if being touched by the breath of something we can’t explain.