When you put a quote into your post, it means when replying it's removed--thus when I reply, it's removed from your post. This is obviously good when people are quoting each other, because it prevents posts from having a bunch of nested quotes... but it means when you're quoting from another source (i.e. not another poster) it vanishes out. Is is therefore far preferable to, when quoting another source, put it in italics, quotation marks, or indentations, so it does not disappear.
For the benefit of the reader, what was quoted was:
"Origin of venerate
1615–25; < Latin venerātus, past participle of venerārī to solicit the goodwill of (a god), worship, revere, verbal derivative of vener-, stem of venus, presumably in its original sense “desire”; Venus)"
Anyway, you say "Word History and Origins" but omit to explain what that is; it looks like it's the "Word History and Origin"
part of its page on dictionary.com.
The problem is that on that very page, it explicitly tells us the
English meaning of the word is "to regard or treat with reverence; revere". No mention of worship there; this only comes up in the Latin original. What matters for the meaning of a word in a language is the meaning of the word in that language, not what its "original" meaning was in an earlier language. For example, modify in English means to change, but the original Latin word (modificare) means to measure off or regulate.
But, let us be fair, veneror/venerari in Latin did have that as one of its meanings. But that was only one of the possible meanings. Here's the definitions offered in
"Elementary Lewis" (an abbreviated version of the Lewis & Short Latin dictionary):
"veneror ātus, ārī, dep.
VAN-,
to reverence, worship, adore, revere, venerate:
deos:
simulacrum in precibus:
eos in deorum numero:
Larem Farre pio,
V.—
To revere, do homage to, reverence, honor:
secundum deos nomen Romanum,
L.:
patris memoriam,
Ta.:
amicos,
O.—
To ask reverently, beseech, implore, beg, entreat, supplicate:
nihil horum,
H.:
vos precor,
veneror . . .
uti victoriam prosperetis, etc.,
L.:
Et venerata Ceres ita surgeret, i. e.
honored with the prayer that she would spring up, etc.,
H.:
cursūs dabit veneratasecundos,
V."
So yes, we can see worship in one definition, but also other more moderate meanings (revere, do homage to, honor, ask reverently, besseech, and so on). The "full" Lewis & Short entry can be found
here, which goes into more detail but is also a bit long to quote.
So to claim that venerate means worship based on the source you appealed to, one must ignore the actual English definition of it and go to the definition in another language, then ignore other definitions in that other language.
