Coca þola

I was looking up þola in Cleasby & Vigfusson this afternoon even though I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, which is a totally normal thing to do. They said it meant “endure”, as I expected, and connected it to Latin tolerare, which I should have expected.

C&V are not the kind of guys who you have to believe about this stuff; their etymologies tend to be a little folky. But I looked it up in the AHD and Watkins says the words are cognate, going back to PIE *telə- “lift, support, weigh”. Other cognates are toll, the –tel– in philately, the tal– in lex talionis, the –tol in extol, the –lat– in legislator, relate (etc), and ablative (every Latinist’s favorite case), etc. It’s the root of Telamon (Big Ajax’s father), and possibly Atlas and Tantalus as well. That’s a lot of myth bound up in one little morpheme.