True Debaters

When I was in college, I once got the opportunity to participate in a public speaking contest. It's been so long ago I just forget, but I believe they used the term "festival" to describe the event, but it was a competition in various categories of public speaking. As I recall, a number of people in the "debate" category were also studying law, and certainly being able to hold one's own in a debate lends itself well to becoming a good attorney, and debaters were paired in teams for the competition. Just to make this clear, I was not on the college debate team. I was entered in the competition in the individual category of "oratory," but our debate team coach liked my speech and approached me about being on the team the next year. Up until that time, I hadn't known there was such a thing as a college debate team, but the competition held great interest for me, and some of the debaters were just excellent. They had been given a number of topics (I just forget how many) to gather information about, and they had to be prepared for any of these topics during the competition. And, they had to be able to argue for or against whatever topic was selected. They kept information on index cards and they pulled the cards from a small file box as they needed them during the debate. If I remember correctly, they had to cite their sources in their arguments. I tried never to miss these competitions.

With this being political season and so called  "debates" going on all over the country for various offices, I couldn't help but chuckle when I recalled how the college debaters had to be able to argue either side of an issue, because some of our politicians actually seem to be in a debate with themselves on some of their positions, rather than with their opponent. A perfect example is Mitt Romney on health care. He helped engineer the law in Massachusetts when he was governor there, but now he says he's against the national law. Of course, he still wants to get credit for the law in Massachusetts. Hm, I'd like to see his index cards.

WORD HISTORY:
Debate-This word has two parts; the "de" prefix goes back to Indo European "dwis," which meant "divide into two parts;" thus, "separate, apart from." This then gave its Latin offspring "dis," with the same meaning, also used to intensify an action, and often changed to "des," or the shorter, "de," in prefixes in later Latin-based languages. The second part of the word, "bate," goes back to Indo European "bhau," which meant "to shove/push, to beat." This gave Latin "battuere," which meant "to beat/hit, to fight." Whether the two parts were combined in Latin is unclear, but Old French, a Latin-based language, had "debatre," which meant "to beat down," with the "de" intensifying the "beat" meaning; thus, "to fight," and from this developed the further figurative sense, "verbal argument ("fight") over an issue." English borrowed the word in the 1300s. The noun comes from the verb.