We’re back; in school, I mean.

And with a perfectly wet and cold Seattle winter upon us, what better time than the present to demonstrate academic audacity? This week’s word is inspired by all manner of recent events, including those of the wild-weather variety, my friend Myles Gardiner and also because I feel like being bold, daring and intrepid. In other words, audacious.

For, you see, audacity, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, comes to us from the French word audacieux, from the Old French, audace, meaning “boldness,” from the Latin audāx, meaning “bold” or “daring,” from audēre, “to dare,” from avidus, or “avid.”

So to be audacious, or full of audacity, is to posses a certain confident derring-do, sometimes to the point of recklessness, and occasionally breaking convention in the process, but all in the spirit of Virgil’s immortal phrase from the Aeneid (book 10, line 284), audentes fortuna iuvat, or, “fortune favors the bold.” A modern incarnation of this phrase, “who dares, wins,” is the motto of the British Special Air Service (and no, they don’t deliver packages).

The first appearance of our word in written English came in the 15th century, but a good early example can be found in 1531 in The Boke Named The Gouernour (the old spelling, not mine), by Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546). We’ve encountered Sir Elyot before, and with good reason, because the man wrote the first English dictionary of classical Latin, introducing the general public to Italian authors and other classic works in Latin and Greek. The lexicographer was thus responsible for introducing “new” words into English, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

In our case, the line in question is, “Audacity is an excessive and inordinate trust, to escape all dangers.” The book in which it appears was written to instruct young gentlemen in how to be proper leaders through the development of their mind and character.

Elyot uses the word in more of its rash sense, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a good example of the other, more intrepid meaning can be found in Thomas Nicholls’ translation of the Greek historian Thucydides in 1550, with a line from the latter’s history of the Peloponnesian war, “More bold and audacious in this thing, wherein we have much experience.”

Nicholls (c. 1523- 1612) was a goldsmith by trade, translating Thucydides from a French translation, from, in its own turn, a Latin version. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, this would remain the standard English translation until 1676, when the philosopher Thomas Hobbes published a new one, based directly on the Greek. Hobbes went so far as to criticize Nicholls’ efforts as being full of errors as a result of its double translation.

You could say Hobbes was audacious in his critique of his well-intentioned, if not particularly Greek-speaking, predecessor.

Now that we know a bit more about audacity, I urge you all to be audacious this week, and thus start the quarter off right. Please feel free to send me your word ideas at features@dailyuw.com, and until next time, cheers!

Reach columnist Will Mari at features@dailyuw.com.