I noticed after moving from Brooklyn to Atlanta last year that a lot of people around these parts use “I appreciate you” as a synonym for “thank you.” I don’t recall hearing this very often in New York. There was “appreciate it,” but not so much “appreciate you,” so I initially thought this quaint “I appreciate you” affirmation was a southern thing, part of the region’s genteel hospitality, but then a Boston-born, LA-based friend sent me a text asserting “‘preciate chu.”

Dubious abbreviation aside, it made me wonder more about the word “appreciate,” which brings us to this week’s edition of a segment I alternatively call “Word Play” and “Fun with Words,” but which should perhaps be called “Etymological Adventures…”

Anyway, the indispensable Online Etymology Dictionary reports that the English word “appreciate” is traced back to the 1650s, and comes from Late Latin’s appretiatus, which meant “to set a price to,” and was derived from then marriage of then lexemes “ad,” meaning “to,” and “pretium,” meaning price. To appreciate a person therefore came to mean “to raise their value, which is a lovely sentiment indeed, though one that also assumes they had little value in the first place. Hmmm. Maybe it’s not so cute after all…