React (pronounced ree-akt)
(1) To act in response to an agent or influence.
(2) To act reciprocally upon each other, as two things.
(3) To act in opposition, as against some force.
(4) To respond to a stimulus in a particular manner.
(5) In physics, to exert an equal force in the opposite
direction to an acting force; to act in a reverse direction or manner,
especially so as to return to a prior condition.
(6) In chemistry, to act upon each other; to exercise a
reciprocal or a reverse effect, as two or more chemical agents; to act in
opposition.
(7) In chemistry, to cause or undergo a chemical
reaction.
(8) In the hyphenated form re-act, to act or again perform.
(9) To return an impulse or impression; in Internet use,
to post a reaction (now often in the form of an emoji), indicating how one
feels about a posted message.
1635–1645: From the early Modern English react (to exert, as a thing acted upon, an opposite action upon the agent). The construct was re- + act, thought to have been modeled on the Medieval Latin reagere, the construct being re- + agere (to drive, to do). Act was from the Middle English acte, from the Old French acte, from the Latin ācta (register of events), the plural of āctum (decree, law), from agere (to do, to act), ultimately from the primitive Indo-European héǵeti and related to the German Akte (file); it partially displaced deed, from the Old English dǣd (act, deed) which endured and (especially in law), flourished in parallel. The re- prefix was from the Middle English re-, from the circa 1200 Old French re-, from the Latin re- & red- (back; anew; again; against), from the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (again), a metathetic alteration of wert- (to turn). It displaced the native English ed- & eft-. A hyphen is not normally included in words formed using this prefix, except when the absence of a hyphen would (1) make the meaning unclear, (2) when the word with which the prefix is combined begins with a capital letter, (3) when the word with which the is combined with begins with another “re”, (4) when the word with which the prefix is combined with begins with “e”, (5) when the word formed is identical in form to another word in which re- does not have any of the senses listed above. As late as the early twentieth century, the dieresis was sometimes used instead of a hyphen (eg reemerge) but this is now rare except when demanded for historic authenticity or if there’s an attempt deliberately to affect the archaic. Re- may (and has) been applied to almost any verb and previously irregular constructions appear regularly in informal use; the exception is all forms of “be” and the modal verbs (can, should etc). Although it seems certain the origin of the Latin re- is the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (which has a parallel in Umbrian re-), beyond that it’s uncertain and while it seems always to have conveyed the general sense of "back" or "backwards", there were instances where the precise was unclear and the prolific productivity in Classical Latin tended make things obscure. The Latin prefix rĕ- was from the Proto-Italic wre (again) and had a parallel in the Umbrian re- but the etymology was always murky. In use, there was usually at least the hint of the sense "back" or "backwards" but so widely was in used in Classical Latin and beyond that the exact meaning is sometimes not clear. Etymologists suggest the origin lies either in (1) a metathesis (the transposition of sounds or letters in a word) of the primitive Indo-European wert- (to turn) or (2) the primitive Indo-European ure- (back), which was related to the Proto-Slavic rakъ (in the sense of “looking backwards”).
The
hyphenated form re-act (to act or again perform) began
to develop during the 1650s (although the hyphen wasn’t de rigueur for decades)
and there’s evidence to suggest there was often either an exaggerated pronunciation
of the “re-“ or a slight pause between syllables to distinguish it from react. Forms like overreact & overreaction
(1928), interreact, interreaction (1820s), reactivate (1902 & reactivation et
al were coined as required. React is a
noun & verb, reactive is an adjective, reactor, reaction & reactant are
nouns, reactionary is a noun & adjective, reactivate, reacted &
reacting are verbs,; the noun plural is reacts.
Lindsay Lohan reacting, demonstrating her emotional range (left to right: happy, surprised, terrified and despairing).
The noun reactant (a reacting thing) came from chemistry
and dates from 1901; as an adjective it was noted in the literature by 1911 although
it may have been in oral use for some time and the noun reactance had been in
the vocabulary of science since at least 1893.
The noun reactor (one that reacts) was a standard entry in the books of
Latin instruction by 1825 but came into common use in the electrical industry
after 1915 to describe “coil or other piece of equipment which provides
reactance in a circuit”. The word is now
most commonly associated with nuclear energy, the reactor technically the
component in a power-plant, submarine etc, where the nuclear reactions are
contained but in the popular imagination often used of the power-generating installations
to describe the entire facility. The
adjective reactive dates from 1712 in the sense of “a repercussive, echoing”
although that use is long obsolete. It
was re-purposed in the early nineteenth century to mean “caused by a reaction”
and by 1888 as “susceptible to (chemical) reaction” and in chemistry the related
forms were reactively, reactiveness & reactivity, the words required as new
chemicals and elements were subjected to experiments determining the behavior when
exposed to others.
The noun reaction (action in resistance or response to another action or power), although later much used in chemistry, dates from the language of physics & dynamics in the 1640s and came frequently to be seen in discussions of politics and international relations. It was modeled on the French réaction, from the older Italian reattione, from the Medieval Latin reactionem (nominative reactio), a noun of action formed in Late Latin from the past-participle stem of Latin reagere. In chemistry it was of course invaluable when describing “a mutual or reciprocal action of chemical agents upon each other” and it was the standard noun thus used by 1836. The more general sense of "action or feeling in response" (to something said, an event etc) was from the early twentieth century. The phrase reaction time (time elapsing between the action of an external stimulus and the giving of a signal in reply) was a creation of experimental science and first documented in 1874; it was later widely used (both as a precise measure and something indicative) in fields as varied as zoology, sport and electoral behavior. Sometimes, the experiments to measure reaction times were conducted in a reaction chamber.
The adjective reactionary (of or pertaining to political reaction, tending to revert from a more to a less advanced policy) dates from 1831 and was on the model of the French réactionnaire. It was part of Karl Marx's (1818-1883) standard set of descriptive terms by 1858, used to convey the idea of “tending toward reversing existing tendencies” and was the opposite of the ”revolutionary”. The classic reactionary era is now that created by the Congress of Vienna (1514-1815) when the old monarchies contrived to ensure they wouldn’t again be threatened by something like the French Revolution (1789). So dominant did the use in politics become that the use in science (of or pertaining to a chemical or other reaction) became rare. In political science, the term reactionary is applied with rather more precision than in general use where, like fascist, it’s tended to become a general term of disapprobation for those who espouse an opposing view. When applied with some academic rigor, it refers properly to the view that a previous political state of society is desirable and that action should be taken to return to those arrangements. A reactionary is thus different from a conservative who wishes to keep things as they are but perhaps (at least sometimes) synonymous with ultra-conservative or arch-conservative, the classic example in politics being Prince Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859; foreign minister or chancellor of the Austrian Empire 1809-1848) who constructed an intricate model of Europe which was design to avoid another unpleasantness (for the ruling class) like the French revolution (1789) and its aftermath. It’s usually thought of as somewhere on the spectrum of conservatism although there are logical (as well as linguistic) problems with that and either in theory or historic practice, reactionary ideologies, although radical, haven’t always been the most extreme of the breed. Even that sort of terminology wasn’t reliably indicative of anything except what the author intended, Sir Garfield Barwick (1903–1997; Chief Justice of Australia 1964-1981) giving his autobiography the title A Radical Tory (1995), a few reviewers enjoying the opportunity to point out he was neither.
Thou shalt not: Pope Pius IX and friends.
In the UK there were of course already the Tories but it was the French Revolution from which English gained the descriptors "conservative", "right-wing" and "reactionary". Conservative was from the French conservateur and was applied to those deputies of the French assembly which supported the monarchy (ie they wish to conserve that which was). The term right-wing came to be used because when the Estates General was summoned in 1789, liberal deputies (the Third Estate) sat usually to left of the presiding officer's chair while the (variously usually either conservative or reactionary) members of the aristocracy (the Second Estate) sat to the right (the clerics were the First Estate and it’s from here is derived the later idea of the press as the Fourth Estate). Reactionary was from the late eighteenth century French réactionnaire (from réaction (reaction)) and was used to denote "a ideology directed to return the structure of the state and the operation of society to a previous condition of affairs". The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates the first use of the word in English to 1799 and political scientists have managed to coin variations like reactionist and even the (thankfully rare) reactionaryism. In theology, the classic reactionary was Pope Pius IX (Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti, 1792–1878; pope 1846-1878) who in 1864 published Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors), a still controversial document which listed all the ideas of modernity which His Holiness thought most appalling and which should be abandoned because the old ways are the best. Had he lived, his Holiness would have noted with approval the entry in that manual curmudgeons, Henry Fowler's (1858–1933) A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926): "The word derives its pejorative sense from the conviction, once firmly held but now badly shaken, that all progress is necessarily good."
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