taste

The root taste comes from Old French taster, meaning 'to feel, to touch, to try by touching' — and behind that lies Latin tangere, 'to touch.' So at its origin, tasting was a kind of touching: you put something in your mouth and let your tongue touch it to find out what it is. The connection between touching and tasting is preserved in a quiet cousin of this family — the word tact (a delicate sense of how to handle people, literally a 'touch').

From that core act of trying-by-touching, the family grew in two layers. The first layer is sensory and literal: a taste is the flavor your tongue detects, and taste buds are the tiny organs on the tongue that do the detecting. An aftertaste is the flavor that lingers after the food is gone (after + taste).

The second layer is the leap that makes this family interesting: from physical flavor to aesthetic judgment. Just as your tongue can tell good food from bad, your mind can tell good art, clothing, or behavior from bad. This is 'taste' as refined judgment — and the whole -ful / -less family lives here. Something done tastefully shows good judgment; the adverb tastefully means done in an elegant, well-judged way. Its opposite, tasteless, splits cleverly into two meanings that mirror the two layers: food with no flavor (literal) and behavior with no class (figurative — a tasteless joke).

Finally, the prefix dis- (not, away) reverses the whole thing: distaste is the feeling of being turned away from something, an aversion — the mental version of a bad taste in your mouth. Build the -ful and adverb endings onto it and you get distasteful (offensive, unpleasant) and distastefully.

So the family runs along one line: from touching with the tongue, to flavor, to judgment, to liking and disliking. Whenever you meet a taste word, ask whether it's about the mouth (taste-bud, aftertaste) or the mind (tasteful, distaste) — the same root covers both.