Loyal is Legal

Loyalty: a strong feeling of support or allegiance.

From the Middle English word:

Leal: loyal, faithful, honest, and true.

The word leal means conforming to a Heavenly ideal.

Heaven: the place of the faithful.

This makes ‘loyal’ and ‘legal’ interchangeable in their original contexts.

So I had to dig deeper into ‘leal’. Which led me to ‘leg-’

*Leg- : the genitive of lex

“Wait… what does genitive even mean?”

Definition of genitive
1 : of, relating to, or being a grammatical case that typically marks a person or thing that possesses someone or something else or the source from which someone or something comes — compare possessive.

Alright, the distinction seems to be parts of speech.

“Perhaps the noun is from the verb on the notion of “a collection of rules,” but de Vaan seems to imply that the evolution is the reverse:

The verb legare and its compounds all have a meaning which involves a ‘task, assignment,’ and can therefore be interpreted as derivatives of lex ‘law.’ The [Proto-Italic] root noun *leg- ‘law’ can be interpreted as a ‘collection’ of rules. Whether the root noun existed already in PIE is uncertain for lack of precise cognates.”

-‘legal’ is to ‘loyal’ as ‘regal’ is to ‘royal’.

When I contemplated on this assertion, I found my brain bending about the meaning of loyal is: ‘permitted by law’. To me, that is just too stale to describe the dull ache that I feel when someone breaks my trust with disloyalty.

So what does that feel like? The very distinction between ‘allegiance’ and ‘loyalty’ is a feeling according to the online etymology dictionary. (Though the two words have in common the evolution from -leg/-lex.). Loyalty is enthusiastic, while allegiance is simply going through the motions, so to speak. Loyalty denotes at least an expectation of reciprocation to me, where allegiance is often from the perspective of a subordinate to a superior.

I find it interesting that we have to choose where our loyalties lie as this seems to affirm the idea of “mental diets”. It is through the process of gathering that we determine what is law to us and what we should be loyal to. Well then, what will it be?

“…I’ll have some forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.”

Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa