Why Gubernatorial and Not Governatorial? | Understanding Language

With the midterms coming up in the United States, several people are talking about highly competitive gubernatorial elections. A gubernatorial role is that of a governor, so what is up with the guber part in the adjective form? Again, we’ll explore why English makes no sense until we look a bit closer at some word origins that will ultimately confuse us a bit more. This is a short post, no references today because there is really nothing to reference.

On the surface, it is fairly easy to see why president becomes presidential and why congress becomes congressional. But dear ol’ me, why the heck does governor become gubernatorial. The short answer is French and Latin, the same two influences that muck things up far too often, even if they are of the same cloth.

Governor comes from fourteenth-century French governeor (in modern French appearing as gouverneur/gouverneure), meaning a person who oversees an area or a specific group of people. However, in the sixteenth century, English scholars were reviving interest in Latin and trying to make English “more perfect” or “purer,” so they started to incorporate classical Latin into English even though English is Germanic not Latinate. These actions introduced many of the oddities we still have peppered throughout English today, including gubernatorial.

The simplest way to put it is that both governor and gubernatorial come from the same Latin word gubernatorem, which means ruler or ship captain. Anyone with a background in Latin can probably see that the sixteenth-century scholars, for the sake of said purity, should have changed governor to gubernator for a male, which would be fitting for Arnold Schwarzenegger I suppose, but he wasn’t born at the time. The female title would be equally as cool, gubernatrix. For our modern ears, both words sound powerful in some mechanical or superhero way, even if they have nothing to do with machines or superheroes, but neither word stuck.

It is important to note that gubernator did have a push in the mid-sixteenth century and a minor resurgence in the early seventeenth (Link). Eventually, and without a referendum, English speakers decided to keep using governor from French for the noun but adopted gubernatorial from Latin as the adjective. Any reason for this inconsistent adoption is up for grabs, but it may be related to usage frequency; nouns are more commonly used than adjectives are, and commoners were more likely to use common words rather than the words of the elite. This is supposition on my behalf, of course. Even if we don’t have solid evidence behind the variance of the two forms, we at least have some etymological background to understand that both words are related even if they sound quite different.

For a bit of extra information, in the late 1800s, it became customary for workers in the UK to call their bosses guv, which is a respectful, yet casual, title based on a phonetic shortening of guvnor, a slang term that comes from the same roots as governor.

Vivat bonus gubernator.