Exam/Essay/Pedagogy #etymology

It’s that time of year when many university students are writing exams and handing in final essays, and this is both pedagogically and etymologically appropriate. Exam as a clipping of examination first appeared as student slang in 1848, with examination coming into English in the late 14th c. meaning “action of testing or judging; judicial inquiry” (with the sense “test of knowledge” developing in the early 17th c.), from Old French examinacion, from Latin examinatio, from examinare “to ponder, consider”, literally “to weigh”, from examen “a means of weighing or testing”. This noun in turn comes from the verb exigere “demand, require, enforce”, literally “to drive or force out”, formed from ex meaning “out” + agere meaning “to set in motion, drive, drive forward; to do, perform”. Latin exigere is also the source of the word essay, through French essai “trial, attempt, essay”, first used in English in the sense “short nonfictional literary composition” by Sir Francis Bacon in 1597, likely influenced by Montaigne’s work titled Essais. Ultimately these words can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *ag- “to drive, draw, move”, which also produced Greek agein “to lead” and its noun form agogos “leader”, which when combined with the Greek word pais “child” produced the compound paidagogos referring to the slave whose job it was to accompany a child to school in Ancient Greece, later referring to the teacher instead, and passing through Latin and Old French to give English such words as pedagogue, pedagogy, and pedagogically. But it’s not good pedagogically to “drive” students too hard on their essays and exams.