Berate
"I berate myself whenever I smile in public, for smiling in public betrays my inner soul." I would love to meet the author of that sentence since it uses such a great word—"berate"!
"Berate" is a verb. To berate someone is to scold them harshly and is usually limited to a verbal scolding, although it would not be incorrect to refer to a physical scolding; however, it is more commonly used and expected as a verbal scolding. Interestingly, the berating going on in that initial sentence up there is the verbal sort; however, it is done silently in the head, which makes me further interested in an encounter with the sentence's author. Of course, there'd be no smiling. :--)
As for the etymology of "berate," it breaks down as "be," which is an Old English prefix that means thoroughly* and "rate," which is a Middle English infinitive that means to scold. It probably made its way to English from Old French's "ratier," which came from Vulgar Latin's "reputare," which means to impute or to blame."
Curiously, Google's Ngram Viewer shows an increase in usage of the word "berate" over the last 30 years or so, which seems to correspond to the birth of the internet. I wonder if this correlates to the fact that people berate each other so much online and then write about the phenomenon of cyber bullying in books. Published books, by the way, is where NGram Viewer derives its trend plots. It draws from a corpus of about over 500 billion words from published books between 1500 and 2019. Unfortunately, it doesn't adjust for population growth, so attributing a trend (like the one shown in the graph above) to something other than population growth can be misleading. Ngram Viewer is probably best at showing which words are popular and which ones are on their way out. "Berate" obviously is popular at the moment, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's something to smile about. :--) ∎
* The prefix "be" has many other meanings as well.
Sources:
Bard, Google AI. "Google's Ngram Viewer." Bard, Google AI, 2023-07-09, Accessed July 9, 2023.
Google Ngram Viewer. "berate." https://books.google.com/ngrams. Accessed July 9, 2023, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=7&case_insensitive=on&content=berate
Harper, Douglas. “Etymology of berate,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/berate (accessed July 9, 2023)
Wiktionary contributors. "berate." Wiktionary, https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=berate&oldid=75070550 (accessed July 9, 2023).
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