pedestrian

A foot turned into an insult, which is a wonderfully human thing to do. In Latin, pedester meant “on foot,” the opposite of the horse-backed equester, but writers also used it for prose that trudged along without poetry’s flash. English picked it up in 1716, and for a while a pedestrian sentence was basically a plodder in a wig. Then the physical meaning arrived: a pedestrian was simply someone who got around the hard way, with shoes, sidewalks, and shin splints—no saddle required. It’s the same little foot-root hiding in pedal, biped, and centipede, which is why a word for the most ordinary way to move also became a word for the most ordinary kind of style. A pedestrian, in other words, is what happens when language looks down and notices your feet.