Venial, venal will drive me to drink

So here I am calling Karl last night thinking it would be nice to see how his cataract surgery went. It was a kind gesture. He had been haunted with worst possible scenerios from the beginning. Another friend Nardia had lost his sight post surgery because of a rather bad infection. My surgury had been perfect and my take on the whole procedure was that it was nothing short of a miracle. Fortunately he had no complications and we drifted off into other topics.

Over the years languages and their use have been one of our favorite pastimes and we had whiled away uncounted hours playing around with words. Karl loves to have his english knowledge tested which is always flattering because he assumes I know the correct meaning of all these words. In fact, for someone who counts English as his 5th language, Karl has the bigger vocabulary. The main reason is that he's persnicketty about words that he learns. He doesn't just sort of know the meaning he knows the shades of meaning and proper usage. I had gotten a word from dictionary.com and wanted to test him. Venal was the word. His response was "wine?" which took all the fun out of leading him into my planned comparision of venal with venial. It was fun. And after all these years I've finally got the differance. Venal comes from venum which is latin for sale, so that venal means for sale or corruptable. Venial comes from venia which is latin for forgiven. Venia as a root seems more like the root for vengenence than forgiveness so the way I remember is to see venal-venial as a pair and to cue off the association of venal with vendere (itl) and vendre (fr). Two words that I won't be forgetting in this life.