On Life 2

Last time, we spoke about some words that had the root-word ‘life’.

Vita (life) and viva (to live) are Latin roots for some other words used in English.

So, lets look at a few more on the same topic.

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Vital – essential to life; of great importance; very important

Eg: Lungs in our chest perform the vital function of keeping us alive.

Vitality - full of life and energy. Physical or mental vigour or energy.

Eg : We can see from the way the young man has been excitedly working for the last three days that he is brimming with vitality.

Revitalize – to give life again. (re- is a prefix to mean ‘give again’ and vita being ‘ life’, so it is in the same lines as revive, reenergize, redo, reaffirm.

Eg: The students were finding the classes boring. But the teacher revitalized the classes by bringing the test tubes and beakers into the classroom and showing how experiments were conducted.

Devitalize – to take away life. (de – is a prefix to mean ‘to take away.’ Or negative. Or to mean ‘undo.’ Therefore, decompose, defrost, decode are the negatives of compose, frost and code.

Eg: The war has devitalized the economy.



Vitamin – an important element for life; a nutritional element for helping life

Eg: Good eyesight requires us to have Vitamin A which is available from carrots. And strong bones need Vitamin D, that is in sunlight and codliver oil.



French Life

English also uses many French phrases, also related life as viva is 'life' in French too.

Bon vivant – (pronounced BON Vee VONH, with NH as a muted nasal sound) – means

- ‘a good live-er’

- ‘a person who lives a great life’

- ‘a person who lives luxuriously with rich food, good drinks, expensive theatre parties etc'.

Eg: Can’t you see that man’s expensive suit? And that huge limousine out of which he is getting out? With those two beautiful girls holding on to his two elbows? And the door man of the five-star hotel opening the door for him? He seems to be a bon vivant!

Joie de vivre – (pronounced something like Zhwah’ de VEEV, with Zh like ‘s’ in pleasure) – means the ‘joy of living’

Eg: People who possess joie de vivre are never depressed, or moody or bored, but will make everyone happy with their vivacity.



An Extra Bit

vital statistics : It means all the important data - such as a country’s economic growth rate, birthrate, death rate, GDP (Gross domestic Product), Population figures or literacy rate etc.

vital statistics : Now, its also informally used to mean the measurements of a women’s bust, waist and hips.

Often called in its shortform, vital-stats.

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