The Latin word impellĕre came to our language as impeler . This verb is used as a synonym for impel .
This means that to impel is the act of stimulating, promoting or pushing . When impelling something, one seeks to make it acquire movement or grow, either literally or symbolically.
The notion also refers to influencing or pressuring someone or something . In this way, it is intended that an organization or an individual carry out a certain action.
For example: “With this book I intend to encourage debate about what kind of country we want for our children” , “Society never stops encouraging politicians from different parties to work together to improve the situation of all inhabitants” , “The heart is responsible for encouraging blood to reach the different sectors of the body” .
Let's suppose that a man wants to encourage his children to read. To this end, he will encourage their love of literature in many ways: giving them books, telling them stories before they go to sleep, taking them to the theatre to see children's classics, etc. In this way, he hopes that his descendants will become interested in literature and can take advantage of the benefits that reading brings.
Let's now look at how the term impel can be used in a physical sense. An athlete who is dedicated to javelin throwing , for example, must exert great force on this element in order to throw it as far as possible. This is because the purpose of this discipline is, precisely, to reach the greatest possible distance when throwing the javelin.
Needless to say, this is not a word that is used very often in everyday speech, except by those people who include it in their slang for greater convenience in conversations with their coworkers. For this reason, we are going to take a look at some of the most useful synonyms to replace it in informal communication: propel, drive, push, throw, launch, dismiss, shake, throw, force and push away . In this case, two of the most suitable antonyms could be hold and stop .
Before continuing, let us note that impeler has among its list of synonyms the word propulsar , and also impulso . This group can cause more than one confusion, since the fact that they begin with different prefixes is reason enough to assume that their meanings are also different. Let us study the pair impulso- propulsar in detail.
The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy defines the transitive verb to push as “to push a body so that it begins to move”, “ to stimulate , to incite”. This is quite similar to the meanings that we have presented at the beginning of this article for impeler . With respect to propulsar , at first it is defined as “to push forward”, so it includes it; its second meaning is somewhat stranger: “to repel, to reject”.
Regarding the prefixes, we can say that the one for impeler is in- , written with an M to respect the spelling rule before the P , which prohibits placing an N , and favors the meaning of “against, inward, intensification.” The prefix pro- , on the other hand, means “ forward , in front of, before.” As we can see, they are not identical.
The etymology of impeler shows us that in combination with this prefix there is the verb of Latin origin pellere , which can be defined as "to push, to push". The case of propulsar , on the other hand, is somewhat different: after the prefix pro- there is the verb pulsar , as a synonym for "to beat". However, this and other related terms, such as pulsation, pulse and pulsatile all derive from pellere , so the confusion that arises between these terms is not capricious.