dilig/ence

Per Etymonline, from Old French diligence “attention, care”, from Latin dīligentia “attentiveness, carefulness”, from dīligō “to esteem, love”, originally “to pick out, select”, from dis- “apart” + legō “to choose, take”, from PIE *leǵ-.

How did the sense of dīligō change? I suppose that if you esteem something, by holding it in high value, you are setting it apart from others of the same kind. Wiktionary takes dīligō to be influenced by dis- “utterly” + Proto-Italic *legō “to care for”, from PIE *h₂leg-. Literally, then, it’s both “to set apart” and “to utterly care for”.

The sense of diligence then evolved from “attentiveness, carefulness” to “steady effort”. Similarly, we get Spanish diligencia “diligence, hard work”, as a learned borrowing from Latin dīligentia. Then, borrowed into Tagalog as dilihensiya “resourcefulness”. The UP Diksyonaryong Filipino defines this as

Literally, this is

In this sense, it’s a lot like Tagalog diskarte “workaround, street smarts”. The word dilihensiya connotes doing something creative, unorthodox, practical, shabby, grungy. In the extreme, dilihensiya is desperate, hence its colloquial sense “extortion, theft”. I can see how these meanings evolved from a euphemistic sense of “hard work”.

My parents tried to raise me with a work ethic. Growing up, they’d tell me kapag gusto, may paraan “when there’s a will, there’s a way” so many times. This didn’t entirely stick, as I think I’m roughly median in industriousness: if I need to get work done, I’ll do so; but if I don’t need to get work done, I won’t. It’s making do with the energy I have, which is its own kind of diskarte if you squint.

This is fine most of the time, but it does mean that without a full-time job, I don’t feel like I’m being useful. Even when I did have a full-time job, I felt a bit inconsistent. My work had periods of frantic productivity and slow progress, and while the area under the curve was fine, I wouldn’t call what I did “steady effort”.

Today, I was thinking about this amusing surface analysis of diligence: from Tagalog dilig “sprinkling of water on” + -ence “process of, state of”. The -ence affix appears in words like convergence “process of converging” or absence “state of being absent”.

I tried tracing the etymology of dilig, but I couldn’t find any good sources. There aren’t any cognates in other Philippine languages. I’ve found Ilocano sibug and Bontoc sibúg. There’s Cebuano bisbis, which is cognate to Tagalog basbás “blessing (by sprinkling)”, a different root. It’s not in my copy of the UP Diksyonaryong Filipino. The earliest attestation I could find is from the 1754 Vocabulario de la lengua Tagala, which gives:

Roughly:

So despite not having cognates in other Philippine languages, it’s a pretty old word. I could also believe that dilig is cognate to Tagalog wilig “water sprinkled when ironing”. Indeed, the ACD has the root *-liR “flow”, which relates to both words.

Anyway. While dilig can be used to describe a light rain or a baptism, it’s most often used to refer to watering plants. We’d then get diligence to mean something like “the process of watering plants”.

This sense of diligence delights me: to water is an expression of attention and care, and it’s the steady effort of watering that makes a plant grow. And while watering plants should be done consistently, it shouldn’t be done regularly. If it rained, you wouldn’t water the plants an extra time; if the soil dries up quickly, you might water more often. The diligence is fluid, adapting to external conditions.

(If anyone has a lead on the dilig etymology, I’d appreciate it.)