Recognition | Vocabulary

- [David] I see you wordsmiths. Which is good because the word I'm talking about in this video is "recognition". Re-cog-ni-tion. It's a noun. It means the act of acknowledging, being aware of or noticing something. Follow me over to The Etymology Zone, trademark, where I am going to break this word down. This word comes from Latin, "re" means back, again, or against, as in review. "Cognoscere" means to know, to be familiar with, and i-o-n is a noun forming suffix. It's what makes this word into a noun. So what we're looking at here is a word that means the act of knowing something again, right? So this is the noun form of knowing something again. You recognize a person when you've met them before, you recognize a song because you've already heard it. So let's come up with some words that use these word parts. Re-cogno, that i-o-n ending, if you want. I'll give you 10 seconds to come up with some words to knock some together. Okay, here we go. (upbeat music) Here are some that I came up with. Incognito, which means disguised, right? Incognito means literally not knowable. If I'm going incognito, maybe I'm wearing a fake nose. A fake mustache, right? Reconnaissance. This word comes from French. It basically means spying. It's a military term. You're surveying, you're getting to know a territory before you decide how or whether to commit troops there. Same etymology as recognized, but it took a different language path to get to English. And the verb to ignore, to choose to not know about something, to not pay attention to it. Same negating prefix as incognito, right? The in or the ih part here means not and the gnore, the g-n-o-r-e part means knowing. So not knowing, ignore. So you might ignore the spy who is incognito performing reconnaissance. All right, let's use recognition in some sentences. Even at a distance, Sherman recognized the familiar three-step gait of his old friend Pizzabot. Right, he could tell, he could identify it from a distance. You can also use recognition to mean that someone is being appreciated for something that they've done. In recognition of her service to the city's garden club, Christina got a ceremonial key to the city. So here it is not that someone is literally saying, "Hey, is that Christina? I know her." It's more like the city is acknowledging and appreciating her work. It's the effort that she's put in that they're officially noticing by giving her a giant unwieldy novelty key. You too can hold the giant novelty key to knowledge, wordsmiths, if you hold fast to this truth. You can learn anything. David, out.