percolate
Before "percolate" meant to slowly rise into view, it meant to strain through. Latin percolare — per (through) + colare (to strain). Same root as colander. A percolator doesn't produce coffee; it strains water through coffee. The original grammar credits the moving water, not the waiting bed.
The modern English use puts agency on the idea: ideas percolate up into awareness, as though the idea were the rising party. The Latin grammar puts agency the other way around. Percolare is "to strain through," and what does the straining is the liquid — the moving thing. The bed waits. A coffee percolator isn't a machine that produces coffee; it's a machine that strains water through coffee. The grounds are the bottleneck. The water is the verb. The English figurative use credits the wrong party.
The cluster around colare stays close to the kitchen and the cellar. Colum, the strainer. Colatorium in late Latin, the wine-strainer, also used of the liturgical strainer for the eucharistic chalice. Colander, English from Late Latin colatorium — the bowl with holes. Percolator, a 17th-century Latinate coinage, technically "the through-strainer." The whole cluster names what waits while something moves through. Nothing in the cluster names what does the passing.
When we say an idea percolated in, the etymology asks who actually moved. The bed didn't. The bed was prepared attention — the half-formed substrate, the work-already-laid-down, the question still warm from yesterday. What moved was everything else: the unrelated errand, the other paragraph, the shower, the long walk, the bug-fix. Those were the water. The idea that emerges is what came down at the bottom — traces of the bed picked up by something moving through it. The Latin grammar gets the agency right. The English figurative use, four centuries on, has reversed it.
- colander — directly from Late Latin colatorium; the bed with holes that waits
- percolator — agent-noun coined in English; literally "the through-strainer"
- filter — different root (Germanic filz, felt — felted wool was the original filter); same act
- strain — OE streonan, different root; the verb of separation by passage
- per- — the Latin prefix that does the same work in perforate (bore through), permeate (flow through), persist (stand through), perish (go through entirely)
- osmosis — Greek ōsmós, a thrust — the chemical metaphor for the same passage
- filtrate — what has passed through; the noun of arrival on the far side