Being a response to the Daily Prompt: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/249091/
Profound, and its more common synonym deep, are quite versatile words. There’s the literal sense of the words, measuring how far down something goes. Though we tend to use just deep for that. You’re hardly going to go to the profound end of a swimming pool, perhaps to discuss Proust and the films of Ingmar Bergman.
And then there’s the more abstract meaning of the words, to describe something with an important, valuable intense meaning. Someone can be a very deep person, or a novel can have a very profound meaning. You can feel something, deep down in your heart. We tend to use profound more often in this sense though. You might make a profound statement, or have a profoundly inspiring experience. What makes profound so special that we reserve it for when things are so, well… profound?
I think, as is so often the case with English, it’s all about the sound. Deep, with its single little syllable, and the slightly ridiculous ee sound, just seems so light, so disposable. Who could take it seriously?
But profound, now that’s a word! Those round vowel sounds make it so much more elegant and sophisticated than deep! I think the respective etymology of each word is also important. Modern English words can generally be divided between words of Latin and Germanic origin. In this case, profound derives from Latin, and deep from German. I’ve already written about how we still tend to treat words of Latin origin with reverence. They tend to be used to describe anything of religious, scientific, or psychological importance, whereas Germanic words tend to refer to more everyday things (e.g. haus/house). It makes sense then that we’d save the word profound for really special occasions.
It still amazes me of how that we still see the effects of how this strange mongrel language developed well over 1,000 years ago. To think that we could look at the language in a superficial way and see traces of how people were using the language well before the modern age is just incredible. It really is a profoundly interesting language!
English-Language Thoughts 
Interesting take on the prompt today. Had me sounding out the word and you’re right, it does sound more elegant!
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It really interests me how we characterise sounds, and how the sound of a word can have such an effect on us, and influence what we think of it and how we use it!
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I think a lot of it is ingrained too. If tomorrow deep became the “it” word, people might begin to use it because that might sound more profound that “profound”.
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Definitely, it’s sobering to look at writing from even 50 years ago and see how different everyday words were, and how certain words were in fashion for a few years.
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So true. Like fashion, I think vocabulary is cyclical too. We can only hope to live long enough to see it come back around. 🙂
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I was hoping you were going to do this post today because I had no idea until today that profound was actually a noun too!
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People should use it as a noun more often: it really conjures up images of sailors in tall ships searching the darkest depths of the oceans for sea monsters!
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I really enjoyed this post. The English language is so fascinating.
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Glad you liked it: I think I’ll always find new things to be amazed by about English!
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[…] to be found, and one can find links between apparently disparate words like hundred, doctor and deep. There really is always something interesting to be discovered about the […]
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(Of a state, quality, or emotion) very great or intense:
profound feelings of disquiet –Oxford Dictionaries
~~dru~~
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[…] lesson when we were looking at how to say the time in English. (I’d pretend I was having some profound thoughts about the passage of time on New Year’s Eve, but as you can see from the header […]
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[…] givs it an explosive start and the resulting long vowel sound (originally Oh and now Oo) provides a deep, loud […]
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