Valedictory - valetudinarian

Do not confuse these two words. Although they share an root, they have moved far apart from eacg other in current English.

Etymological note: The Latin verb valēre means 'to be well'. The singular imperative is vale, and the plural valete. These were used as a standard parting, literally 'Be well' - closely equivalent to the archaic English 'Farewell'.

• When this root is combined with 'diction' (saying', from Latin dÄ«cere, it yields valediction, and the related valedictory. The noun valediction means '[saying] farewell [goodbye]'. (The poet Donne wrote a famous poem to his mistress when he had to go abroad called 'A Valediction', Forbidding Mourning'.) The adjective valedictory describes such things: a departing Vicar may preach a 'valedictory sermon', or a failed one may leave 'valedictory curses'.
  • In American, more than British, English 'a valedictory' is 'a speech made to mark a parting, most particularly 'a speech made at the end of a course in College or University by a representative of those who are graduating'. Such a speaker is a Valedictorian.

• When vale is combined with the abstract noun suffix -tude and the adjectival suffix -arian, it gives valetudinarian. This noun means 'a person who is very interested in her [or his] his own health'; often 'someone "who enjoys curiously bad health" (Oscar Wilde; 'someone who takes great pains with his [or her] own well-being'. Mr Woodhouse, in Jane Austen's Emma (1815) is a valetudinarian in literature. It can be used as an adjective as well.
  • The rather older form valetudinary, oddly, originally meant 'not well'. (OED's earliest citation is from 1581: "Either it is sickly,..or it is healthy,..or it is valetudinarie, neither pure sicke nor perfit whole (Mulcaster, Richard (1581) Positions, wherin those primitive circumstances be examined, which are necessarie for the training up of children 1581 (1887) xxx., 110. This is perhaps the better adjective; but as a noun, it is archaic, and used to be used for what is now called a 'hospital' - 'a place where people go in hopes of being cured'.) The adjective is now more often used "[In later use freq.] implying anxious attention to the state of one's own health" (OED, meaning 1.b..