A man whose appearance denotes thinness and health problems
The Latin word malicentus came into Spanish as macilento . The definition of the term offered by the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ) in its dictionary refers to someone thin and emaciated .
sickly appearance
Macilento, therefore, is an adjective . A haggard individual is very thin and does not have a healthy appearance : on the contrary, he appears pale and weak. The concept is also used to describe what is typical or characteristic of this type of subject.
For example: “The victim described the attacker as a tall and haggard man, about forty-five years old,” “The singer appeared in public again after eight months and was alarmed by his haggard appearance,” “The haggard face of the The old man was moved by the appearance of the girl, who smiled as soon as she saw him .
It is curious that a criminal looks haggard and, anyway, manages to carry out his attack; However, the fear that invades us when we suffer an assault reduces our ability to respond.
figuratively
Sometimes, haggard has a symbolic use that refers to something unhealthy, weak or fragile . We can find this meaning of the notion in various notes published in newspapers and magazines .
Suppose a journalist writes: “The deputy tried to promote a weak project that did not get support even in his own block.” In this case, the communicator seeks to convey that the project in question was not robust, making it unlikely that it could move forward.
Let's look at another case : "The investigators tried to establish a perimeter to catch the murderer, but this haggard fence did not work since, somehow, the criminal escaped again." As you can see, there was an attempt to capture a criminal that was not effective.
Since in its most direct meaning this adjective serves to describe a person who does not look strong or healthy, but rather seems too weak to overcome even the fundamental actions of daily life, such as walking, when used in a figurative sense it It subtracts a considerable amount of force from the noun it modifies. A weak plan, therefore, does not have much chance of being successfully implemented.
Etymology of "haggard"
As mentioned above, its etymological root takes us to the Latin term macilentus , which had a slight difference in its meaning with the one we assign to it today: although both are defined as "skinny", macilento can also refer to to a "loss of color ", while macilentus replaces this meaning with "degraded".
There is evidence that this word was used at least from the 3rd century BC. C., as can be seen in some texts by the comediographer Tito Maccio Plauto . Regarding its composition, we find the suffix -ulentus , which indicates abundance; In some cases, the first U is changed to an I , something very common in Latin before the L. Powdery and truculent are two other examples of this suffix.
A haggard child: thin and pale
We can also notice the adjective macer , which translates as "thin", and which in this case acts as the root. The verb macrare ("to lose weight") also emerged from it, which later came to our language as demacrar and its adjective emaciated , in addition to the word meager and enmagrecer .
Returning to the Latin adjective, its root is *mak- , which we can find in several Indo-European languages to designate "extensive and thin." As a curious fact, this Indo-European root is not interpreted in the same way in Greek, where "large size " is emphasized and not thinness. It is for this reason that we attach the adjective makrós to many neologisms to give the idea of "large", as occurs with macrobiotic, macroeconomics, macrocephalus and macrocosm .