Wednesday's Word -- Prodigal

The other day, I was telling my daughters the story of the Prodigal Son from the New Testament.  Like anyone who hears that story for the first (or maybe even subsequent) time, they couldn't believe that the father would throw a party and make a big to do over the son who ran away and only decided to come back when he had spent every last coin and had resorted to living with the pigs.  

What about the son who stayed?  The answer, of course, is that the father loved both sons -- unconditionally.  The son who stayed made better choices, but the son who returned represented recovery of something dear that was lost and found.  

"What does prodigal mean?" my word-loving daughters asked.  I realized -- despite always assuming I knew what the word meant -- that I didn't actually know.  I thought it had something to do with returning or coming back.  But, being the word loving mama that I am, I did some research and discovered that I was wrong.

Prodigal

The word prodigal means wasteful.  It comes from prodigere, meaning to consume, squander, drive forth.  Broken down, the root "pro" means "before or forward."  And the root "agere" means "to drive."  A prodigal pushes forward to consume whatever can be consumed.  Isn't that tendency epidemic these days?  In fact, we have hordes of people pushing forward at such a pace that they're burning through what they never even had in the first place.  Driving forward.  Living beyond means.   

So the Prodigal Son was the wasteful, squandering son.  He could have been "prodigal" without ever choosing to return.  Returning has nothing to do with it, from a linguistic perspective.  

And in case you're wondering (and even if you're not),  prodigal has no relation to prodigy.  Though they sound the same, they come from different roots.  A prodigy is "an unusually gifted or intelligent young person; someone whose talents excite wonder and admiration."  I must say I have known some prodigious prodigals (translation:  unusually gifted or enormous squanderers).  Prodigal prodigies (translation:  spendthrift geniuses), on the other hand, are harder to come by.  Try working those phrases into some everyday conversation!