What’s the line between brave and reckless? Between brave and foolhardy? Between brave and foolish? Between brave and careless? Between brave and depraved? At what point does a sincere “Bravo!” slope into a sarcastic “Bravo”? When does amazed “Wow!” slide over to scornful “Wow”? How many shades are there of “You have got to be kidding me” – and how many of them are one or another kind of “brave”? How do we distinguish between raw courage and mere brouhaha?
Of course the lines will be drawn differently by different people. Some people admire sports such as wingsuit flying and BASE jumping, and take the inevitable “in memoriam” rolls at the ends of videos of such sports as evidence of sheer valor; others find them to be the most senseless thrill seeking, and take the “in memoriam” rolls as proof. Some admire those who summit Everest, or K2, or Kangchenjunga, or Denali; others have little or nothing good to say about them.
And some admire such feats but deny that they are brave, because they involve risk only for personal adventure and reward, and not for the sake of others. Bravery, in such a view, is heroism – and by “hero” meaning not someone who has endured hardship when they had no other real choice, but someone who could have had continued to live an easy and acceptable life but chose to face strain or danger for the sake of another (or others).
But then what of someone whose bravery involves hurting or killing others? Often acts of bravery are done by soldiers at war. Most people would agree that killing people who are shooting at you, especially if you’re doing it to help protect other soldiers on your side (or civilians), qualifies as brave; many people would also extend it to killing soldiers who are not at the moment shooting at you or others but would if given the chance, such as a tank or machine gun nest; many would also accept an attack on enemies by sneaking into their camp and killing them while they ate or even slept; but of those who found such acts brave, how many of them would see them as brave if done by someone they see as an enemy? Does the evaluation of individual bravery vary according to whether the army they’re a member of is defender or invader? If invader, does the motivation for the invasion matter? Or is all “bravery” that involves acts of war depraved? How about on the more individual level – if I say that I should “turn the other cheek” if attacked, does that also mean that I shouldn’t leap to the defense of others but rather tell them to turn the other cheek?
These are endlessly fraught questions; there are no simple and absolute and undebatable answers, and the trend of thought has evolved over the centuries – when a word refers to something we value, its values will shift as our values do. But such is this word brave. It’s a word for someone who has drawn a line in a place we wouldn’t all draw it, and it’s a word for which we can’t all agree where to draw the line. So if it’s not clear or universally agreed what bravery is and where bravery comes from, should it be surprising that it’s not clear or universally agreed where the word brave comes from?
The immediate source is no problem: English got brave from French brave. And the evidence is straightforward that French got brave from Italian bravo – perhaps via Spanish bravo. As Littré points out, if the word were an older one that came into French directly from Latin, the typical development of form would have made it brou (haha, but the word does not exist). But then where does Italian bravo come from?
Normally it would be easy: bravus. But such a word is unattested in Latin; we suppose it must have existed in Vulgar Latin, but Classical Latin doesn’t have it. It could have come from Proto-Germanic *hrawaz, ‘raw’, but there’s not much to support that origin. It might have come from a Gaulish word *bragos, which relates to boasting and showing off, but there’s not enough evidence to support a link there either. It might have come from Latin bravium, ‘prize, reward’, from Greek βραβεῖον (brabeîon), but there’s no evidence of development of the sense from one to another, and the phonological development is unlikely too (the stress in the Latin is on the i, for one thing).
So the most likely thing is that it comes from a fusion of the Latin words pravus and barbarus. You probably recognize barbarus; it’s the source of barbarian and barbaric and comes from Greek βάρβαρος ‘foreign’, which was made from an imitation of how foreign languages sounded to the Greeks: “bar-bar-bar,” like if in English we called people from other countries “blahblahs” or “yukkayukkas.” As to pravus, it meant ‘crooked, perverse, wicked, bad’ – and it’s the root of depraved (the de- does not signify negation – how wicked!).
So somehow ‘wicked’ and ‘barbaric’ got together and made a word that passed through ‘bold’ and into ‘valorous, heroic’ (and, as Wiktionary points out, in British English euphemistically to ‘foolish, unwise’) – and, in French, also ‘honest’ or ‘well dressed’ (a sense whilom seen in English), and in Italian (and also betimes in English) to ‘good, nice, clever, skilled’… and in modern Italian it no longer means ‘valiant’. O brave new word, that has such senses in it!
Sesquiotica 