Feelings with names

The forty-sixth entry looks like the mildest word on the page and began as the loudest. L’étonnement is surprise, and à mon grand étonnement is no stronger than « to my great surprise ». Behind it stands the verb étonner, and behind that the Vulgar Latin extonare, to strike with thunder, built on tonare, to thunder — the root English meets in « detonate », and, by the Germanic road rather than the Latin one, in « thunder » itself. In the seventeenth century the French verb still carried the blow: to be étonné was to be stunned, shaken, knocked out of one’s wits, and a stonemason could speak of une pierre étonnée, a block cracked through by a shock. Three hundred years of ordinary use have worn that down to a raised eyebrow. English kept the force in what it borrowed from the same French verb, « astonish » and « astound », and both are heavier today than étonner is. So the safe rendering runs against the shape of the word: je suis étonné is usually « I am surprised », and « I was astounded » needs stupéfait or abasourdi.