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Doubt
A Slippery Word
We throw the word ‘doubt’ around as though we knew what it meant.
Most of us don’t.
Part of the problem is that it can be either a noun or a verb, and the meaning shifts considerably from one part of speech to the other.
Either way it’s used, its origin is the Proto-Indo-European word dwóh, which as a noun means ‘two.’ As in, ‘Two is a small number’ or ‘I have the Two of Hearts.’ But used as a verb, it means ‘to be of two minds about.’ In other words, ‘to be undecided.’ Though we now sometimes use it as an adjective (‘two pencils’), it had no such usage originally.
But that was a long time ago, and today we use it to mean something negative: to doubt something is to disbelieve it. (Think of Doubting Thomas, for example. That’s him up at the top of the post. We could just as easily call him Disbelieving Thomas.)
But that’s not what the word means, at all. It means ‘uncertainty’ when it’s a noun, or ‘to be uncertain about’ when it’s a verb.
When we say, “I doubt that what you just said is true,” we mean that we’re uncertain about the truth of the statement, not that we disbelieve it. Likewise, when we say, “I have some doubt about that,” it means we’re uncertain about it, not that we think it’s false. In other words, doubt is something that could easily go…
