Words

Isolate

EYE-soh-layt
To set apart, from Latin insula, island, by way of Italian isolato: made into an island.
Documented

Made an island

Italian isolato, from isola, from Latin insula (island): to isolate is literally to island. Insulate arrived as the engineering cousin (heat treated as water to be kept off the island); insular kept the geography's judgmental edge; peninsula, almost-island, marks the family shoreline.

Assessment: Documented: the full island family is textbook.
Stories

No man is an island

Donne's 1624 meditation is the permanent counterspell: the language says isolation is island-hood, and English literature's most quoted sentence exists to deny it. The metaphor war has run four hundred years without resolution.

Assessment: Stories: Donne's line is real; the war is ongoing by definition.
Interesting claims

The sea inside the word

Insula may descend from in salo, in the swelling sea, salum being the open water. If so, every island word secretly contains the sea, and every isolated person is, by etymology, surrounded by water whether they see it or not.

Assessment: Interesting: the in-salo derivation is proposed, not proven, which the card concedes by existing.
Sources and further reading
  1. Oxford English Dictionary, 'isolate,' 'insulate'
  2. Lewis & Short, 'insula'
  3. John Donne, Meditation XVII (1624), 'No man is an island'
Worth asking

Is solitude a geography before it is a feeling?

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