Trag

The German root trag- and the English verb "to drag" are cousins, both descended from an ancient word for pulling or drawing something along. In English, we mostly kept the physical sense of the word; we drag a heavy bag or a reluctant child. German, however, took this primal image of bearing a load and built an entire cathedral of abstract thought upon it. Consider the word Tragweite. At its most literal, it means something like "carrying-width," the range of a projectile. But its real power lies in its figurative sense: significance, or consequence. It asks us to picture an idea, an event, a decision, and to see how far its effects are carried, as if by a thrown stone rippling the water. Then there is Gesellschaftsvertrag, the social contract. Here, trag- appears in Vertrag, or contract, from vertragen, to bear with one another, to endure, to agree. A contract is a set of promises two parties agree to bear. A Gesellschaftsvertrag is the ultimate abstraction of this: the set of fundamental promises an entire society agrees to carry together. This is the German instinct: to start with a physical act and, by adding one piece after another, to construct a term for the most profound concepts of law and society.