Feelings with names

Tenth on the list is o escrúpulo, and the whole of it is a stone in a shoe. Latin had scrupus, a sharp rock, and beside it the diminutive scrupulus, the small sharp stone that works its way into a sandal and will not let a walker settle. Roman writers moved it inwards: a scrupulus became the little hard thing in the mind that keeps a decision from lying flat, and that is the sense both languages inherited. Portuguese still uses it that way in the sentence on this page, assinou sem escrúpulos — he signed, and nothing in him caught on anything. English kept the word and spent it more narrowly. « Scruple » is now heard almost only in the negative, in « without scruple » and « he has no scruples », so that having one sounds faintly old-fashioned while lacking them sounds entirely current. And the stone left a second descendant with no conscience in it at all: an apothecary’s « scruple » was a unit of weight, twenty grains, small enough to be exactly what the word had meant all along.