Deracinate (pronounced dih-ras-uh-neyt)
(1) To pull up by the roots; uproot; extirpate; eradicate.
(2) To isolate or alienate (a person) from a native or customary culture or environment (especially to expel people from their native land and into exile).
(3) To liberate or be liberated from a culture or its norms.
1590s: A calque of the French déraciner, from the Old French desraciner (uproot, dig out, pull up by the roots), the construct being dé- + racine + -er. The de- prefix was from the Latin dē-, from the preposition dē (of, from (the Old English æf- was a similar prefix). It imparted the sense of (1) reversal, undoing, removing, (2) intensification and (3) from, off. In French the dé- prefix was used to make antonyms (as un- & dis- function in English) and was partially inherited from the Old and Middle French des-, from the Latin dis- (part), the ultimate source being the primitive Indo-European dwís and partially borrowed from Latin dē-.. Racine was from the Old French, from the Late Latin radicīna (a little root), from the Classical Latin radix & radicis (root), from the Proto-Italic wrādī, from the primitive Indo-European wréhds & wrād- (branch, root). The prefix –er was used to form infinitives of first-conjugation verbs and was from the Latin –are, from the Middle High German –ære & -er, from the Old High German -āri, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, from Latin -arius. The -ate suffix -ate used in the English formation was a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as estate, primate & senate). Those that came to English via French often began with -at, but an -e was added in the fifteenth century or later to indicate the long vowel. It can also mark adjectives formed from Latin perfect passive participle suffixes of first conjugation verbs -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as desolate, moderate & separate). Again, often they were adopted in Middle English with an –at suffix, the -e appended after circa 1400; a doublet of –ee. Deracinate, deracinates, deracinating & deracinated are verbs and deracination is a noun; the noun plural is deracinations. The noun deracinater (or deracinator) is non-standard.
In English, deracinate is used mostly as a decorative alternative to the descriptive but brutish "uproot" and is probably one of those words which has survived to enjoy it's infrequent appearances because it appears in the Duke of Burgundy's speech in William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) Henry V (circa 1599); the Shakespeare connection has headed-off a few linguistic extinctions. Use in agriculture and horticulture appears to be rare (the punchier alternatives better understood) although it might be expected when gardening is a part of a literary novel. In figurative use, the inferences tend to be negative and focus on isolation, alienation, deportation and the cultural separation sometimes felt by diasporic communities. In English, since 1921 it has been used to mean "uprooted from one's national or social environment" (especially to expel people from their native land and into exile).
Lindsay Lohan gardening with a lopper, decapitation a less demanding path to destruction than deracination, New York City, May 2015. She appears to be relishing the task.
However, in figurative form deracinate can carry a positive connotation. It can mean "to liberate or be liberated from a culture or its norms" and in that sense sometimes appears in right-wing commentaries on certain aspects of the culture wars, There the point being made relates to the different ways "cultural alienations" are treated, depending on who is being alienated from what. Someone who is a white, middle class Christian and rejects the beliefs and cultural traditions of their church to emerge as a materialist atheist tied to Enlightenment values is not regarded as "culturally alienated" or a victim of "cultural oppression", indeed, if their transformation is noted at all it may be to call them a "rational" or "an intellectual". Some might call them "a heretic" but gleefully a rationalist would anyway agree. For others however, it's argued they can only ever be seen as "a victim". This seems especially to apply to those from indigenous populations who, if they reject belief in or adherence to the sorts of things Christians are entitled to dismiss as "superstitions", they're treated as "oppressed" and "alienated". In that sense, the critics say, being something like indigenous (or another ethnic or cultural minority) is "compulsory", some of the very intellectuals who are themselves proudly (and by choice) alienated from a cultural inherence of perhaps centuries declaring those from minorities similarly separated must be victims of hegemonic cultural oppression. In this sense the critique is something like that made of Western anthropologists who opposed modernizing influences being allowed to "infect" traditional cultures, presumably so they could be preserved in their "unspoiled state" for anthropological study.
Although right-wing politics might seem an unusual source for such arguments, it is intellectually consistent and the internal logic conforms with their hierarchy of priorities. Although usually they decry post-modernism and most flavors of critical studies (critical race studies (CRT) a particular target) as little more than glossings of nihilism, the right to adopt a world-view at variance with one imposed by cultural tradition has a long history and the importance of defending it well explained by the French philosopher Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet; 1694–1778) and more succinctly still by the Anglo-Irish Whig statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797). In the prevailing climate, minority ethnic & cultural identities do seem to remain compulsory (though it may be the converts to post-modernism wisely keep quite about it) but in the the culture wars, no truce has been declared.
Duke of Burgundy's speech (Shakespeare, Henry V Act 5, Scene 2)
