"Only the thoughts one has while walking are worth anything"
, said Nietzsche.
Are they equally so when we practice “walking”?
In other words, when one advances from one place to another by the movement of the legs over a certain distance.
Let's leave this philosophical question aside and focus instead on the question of language raised by this formulation.
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As obvious as it may seem, the verb “to walk” (from the Frankish “markôn”, “to print a step”) designates the fact of moving with the help of one's lower limbs.
But when it first appeared in the 12th century, the term had the definition of “trampling under foot”, that is to say “crushing under one's feet”.
It was not until a hundred years later that it became synonymous with "travelling (a country in particular) using one's legs", as well as "moving towards".
At the end of the 15th century, when speaking of troops, "marching" took on the more general meaning of "moving".
And it is then that the verb is used to speak of any animate object.
In biblical language, as it is written in the
Littré
, it is even said of God, to whom movements are attributed.
"It is he [God] who, inciting me to dare to seek you before me, was good enough to walk"
, we read in
Esther
(1689) by Racine.
On foot, on all fours, on snowshoes…
In the 17th century, the Académie française specifies in the first edition of its dictionary, “to walk” actually meant “to move forward, to move from one place to another, in any way, by any means whatsoever”.
But usage does not forget the original definition of the term, “trampling on the feet”, because it is indeed with the feet that one “walks”.
An expression such as "walking on all fours" then reminds us of this.
Also, to say that one is “walking” would imply redundancy.
Read alsoDo you make these pleonasms?
However, as the Office québécois de la langue française explains,
"the expressions 'walking' and 'walking' are not considered pleonastic in all contexts"
.
In the same way that we use "running" to talk about a particular type of running, it is possible to use these expressions when we want to emphasize the way we walk (on the hands, with snowshoes , etc.).
“In this case, redundancy is used to produce an insistence effect.”