Even the word 'stress' is stressful

Despite what some in elevated positions might say, stress is not a condition confined to any particular group of people. Nor is it a disease.

In etymological terms, the word "stress" dates to the 14th century, when it was used to describe hardship or adversity.

Mapping the history of stress in language is not an easy task, but then you wouldn't expect it to be anything less than stressful.

The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that the word we use today to describe anything from mild qualms about a bad haircut to intense anxiety about nuclear war is a hybrid term, partly a shortening of the Middle English "distress" and partly an adaptation of the Old French estrece - narrowness or oppression.

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This in turn came from the Latin strictus, meaning tight or compressed.

Anyone who has felt any degree of stress will identify with the tight, compressed way one's chest behaves when stuck in a narrow, oppressive tunnel. Whether literal or metaphorical, this kind of thing is bound to cause agitation.

Emotionally speaking, stress became broadly associated with a bad head space only in the middle of the 20th century. In its first incarnation, stress was a mechanical term that referred to physical strain being put on an object.

It's not hard to see how this evolved into a term for the more abstract sort of pressure put on a suffering person, but not until the field of psychology was well established did stress begin to describe feelings of worry.

A Hungarian-Austrian-Canadian endocrinologist called Hans Selye is widely acknowledged to have introduced this meaning of stress into modern English. Only trouble is, he didn't.

The Centre for Studies on Human Stress claims on its website that Selye "began using the term stress after completing his medical training at the University of Montreal in the 1920s".

In a nutshell, they say he borrowed the term from physics after noticing that his patients, no matter what their ailment, all showed symptoms of non-specific physical strain, possibly resulting from the bodily irregularities caused by their diverse afflictions.

He called his model the General Adaptation Syndrome, and it shaped a great deal of what we now know about the body's reaction to that thing that previously was not called stress.

The stress studies centre happens to be based in Montreal, so perhaps it can be forgiven for wanting to claim one of its own as the founding father who named a global pandemic, but other sources suggest otherwise.

In a 2008 essay on the history of stress published on Healthcentral, British psychologist Jerry Kennard, without discounting any of Selye's pioneering work on the stress response, wrote that "Selye actively avoided using the term stress until 1946.

He was acutely aware of the fact that stress was much more closely associated with notions of 'nervous strain' and he was at pains to try to avoid criticism that his use was inappropriate.

In terms of accuracy, it was Walter Cannon who actually developed the term stress in his work relating to the fight-or-flight response in 1932.

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There is of course another, more positive meaning associated with stress. In linguistics it is also a synonym for "emphasise".

Since humans have the ability to create conflict over anything, even ice cream, where the stress should be placed in a particular word often causes disagreement, and which syllable a person chooses to stress can have dire consequences.

No one really cares if you say hedgeHOG instead of HEDGEhog, but the argument over whether Swan Lake is a BALlet or a balLET has been known to sever family ties and destroy friendships.

Seems there isn't any area in which stress is not stressful. Except in the anecdote I found while researching this column.

A language teacher reported how her small son, while listening to her dictate notes on lexical stress involving syllables, asked anxiously: "But mom, just how much stress can the silly billies take?"

• E-mail your observations on words and language to Sue de Groot on degroots@sundaytimes.co.za or follow her on Twitter: @deGrootS1