. . . what can be done tomorrow. If you haven’t guessed, the etymology of the day is for the word “procrastinate,” because that seems to be a big part of my life today (unfortunately?).
Now, the reason I’m actually doing the etymology for this is, I tried to break “procrastinate” down to its morphemes and couldn’t figure out what I was seeing. Because “pro” means it’s a good thing, right? And procrastination is never a good thing; it always leads to too much stress (in my experience, anyway). When I was talking this over with a friend, he pointed out that “-nate” usually occurs in negative things (terminate, detonate, etc.). To further procrastinate (I have three days to reread the entirety of Homer’s Odyssey), I turned to the Webster’s New World College Dictionary (one of my most-loved mistresses).
I did have the correct morphological piece in “pro,” but I was pulling from the wrong vocabulary. “Procrastinate” comes from the Latin procrastinatus, from procrastinare, formed of the elements pro, meaning “forward,” and crastinus, meaning “belonging to the morrow”–cras means “tomorrow.”
Moral of the Story: There is always a way to put things off for longer.
Wordemic 