“Deserve” de-served

When deserving forgot to serve

Are you envious because I am generous?

Matthew 20:15

There is no such thing as an owed gift. I suppose that is the reason we find it difficult to be grateful for a salary. Salaries are not perceived as gifts. A salary is effort endowed with a numerical value.

Interestingly, a few studies have uncovered that a sizeable proportion of employees tend to be unconvinced that their salaries are adequate compensation for the work that they do (Check: Sources for Further Thinkering). Intuitively, the cause of workers’ discontent with their salaries is the belief that they are deserving of more.

While the question of what causes perceptions of unfair pay is itself ripe for thought, in this brief Wonder Garden seed, I would like to focus more on the captivating etymological development of the word deserve.

Before any etymological excavation, though, I would like to point to an interesting connection between the discontent of corporate employees and the phenomenon of inequality aversion in capuchin monkeys.

Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, talented ethologists, conducted a study in 2003 in which they sought to uncover whether such a thing as a proto-morality existed in primate species closely related to humans.

Their experiment involved placing two capuchin monkeys in neighbouring cages, visible to each other, and teaching them to perform a simple task. Upon successfully completing the task, the monkeys received a grape as a reward. The monkeys thus learned to associate successful completion of the task with receiving a grape.

In one of the trials, however, the experimenter offered one monkey a grape upon completion of the task but gave the other monkey a less rewarding slice of cucumber instead. The second monkey was not pleased. Both monkeys had performed the same task, but they were not rewarded equitably—and the second monkey took notice of this (Check: Sources for Further Thinkering).

This suggests that the human desire for fairness may be deeply entrenched in our biology. It seems to be a quality that we share even with capuchin monkeys.

Returning to our etymological excavation.

In the twenty-first century, the word deserve implies “to be worthy” of something. This is how Merriam-Webster defines the word, and most of us would agree that this definition captures its modern sense.

Interestingly, scrutinising the roots of the word brings a very different meaning to light. The Online Etymology Dictionary reveals that, in its earliest instance, the Latin deservire meant “to serve well, serve zealously.”

I find it remarkable that the whole notion of service has been almost completely evicted from the modern meaning of the word.

Deserving, in the past, meant zealous service; today, it means being worthy of something.

If this word serves as a diagnostic for illuminating the current state of the world, it reveals something saddening: being deserving was once focused outward—How can I serve fully and zealously?—but has now turned inward: What am I worthy of?

What is particularly alarming is that, even though two-thirds of the word deserve is serve, when we ask what we are worthy of, we are exempt from thinking about service at all!

This brings me to what I believe is an important question:

How can we strive to serve zealously without wondering what we deserve on account of our service?

~ Granville D. Austin

Sources for Further Thinkering:

Wage Structures, Fairness Perceptions, and Job Satisfaction: Evidence from Linked Employer-Employee Data

Two Monkeys Were Paid Unequally: Excerpt from Frans de Waal’s TED Talk

Matthew 20:1-16 – The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard

Deserve – Etymology, Origin & Meaning

Monkeys reject unequal pay | Nature