Objective and subjective

I was going to write some more about hair, inspired by a discussion at work as to who had what kind of hair, and the fact that there are personal and cultural differences between the precision with which one might describe hair colors. I am sure whole generations of Dutch, for example, have been severely traumatised (not) by the fact that they themselves may have been of the opinion that their hair was golden brown, strawberry blond, deep chestnut, or a lighter shade of pale, but that according to their passports, they were either blond, brown, red or black, and nothing else. And I had wanted to link that to a discussion of objective and subjective perception.

But before I started writing, I checked out the meaning of objective and subjective, and came to the conclusion that etymology was much more interesting than hair color (or the perception thereof). But I will not bore you with information that you can easily find for yourself in any number of online dictionaries. What I have to offer instead is my only little collection of common English words containing the string "ject", which is derived from the latin "jacere" (to throw). Here they are:

eject, projectile,
reject, rejection, abject, dejected
subject, subjective, object, objective, adjective, conjecture

If we look only at the meanings that first come to mind, the first line of my list contains words that are mostly still used to refer to physical movement, and are therefore closest to the original concept of throwing. The second group segues gently from movement to emotion (not such a strange link, considering that the word emotion is a derivative of the word motion). In the third line the idea of movement has mostly been lost, and we have entered the world of abstraction.

I am sure this is leading somewhere, but I am not quite sure where yet. When it comes to me, I will come back and add it here. For the moment, I am just taking it as a demonstration of how very rich (and therefore also confusing) language can be.