Words

Influence

IN-floo-enss
Power over others, from Latin influere, to flow in, originally the fluid the stars poured into human affairs.
Documented

The stellar inflow

Medieval Latin influentia: the ethereal fluid streaming from stars into human destiny, standard astrological physics for centuries. Influenza (the disease) was named for the same celestial inflow in 18th-century Italy. The fluere family: fluid, fluent, affluent, confluence, superfluous (overflowing), effluence.

Assessment: Documented: the astrological physics and the flu's naming are both recorded.
Stories

The influencer, restored

The modern irony: influence spent centuries as an invisible fluid from the sky, became metaphor, and has now been re-literalized as an invisible fluid from the cloud, measured in reach. The influencer is the astrologer's star returned with a ring light.

Assessment: Stories: the symmetry is comic but the vocabulary genuinely completed a circle.
Interesting claims

Flow as the hidden metaphor

Fluere's empire suggests the mind's default physics is liquid: money flows (currency, another flow word, from currere's water imagery), ideas stream, attention pools. Influence is simply the most honest case: a word that never stopped meaning fluid, only changed what flows.

Assessment: Interesting: the liquid-cognition claim is Lakoff-adjacent theory; the word family is dictionary fact.
Sources and further reading
  1. Medieval Latin influentia, astrological treatises
  2. Oxford English Dictionary, 'influence,' 'influenza'
  3. 18th-century Italian influenza naming records
Worth asking

If influence is a fluid, who controls the tap?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+