tempor

The root tempor comes from Latin tempus, genitive temporis, which meant both "time" and "a particular season or period." To a Roman, tempus was not abstract clock-time so much as a stretch of time with edges — a span, an occasion, the right moment. From that single seed grew a surprisingly varied family.

The most literal child is temporal: temporis + -al = "relating to time." But it picked up a famous second life through the medieval church. Theologians split the world into two realms: the eternal (God, the soul, heaven) and the temporal — everything bound by time, meaning the here-and-now physical world. So temporal power came to mean worldly, earthly authority (a king's), as opposed to spiritual authority (the Pope's). One word, two faces: "having to do with time" and "of this passing world." (The temporal lobe of the brain is unrelated in sense — it sits by the temples of the head, a different Latin source.)

Add the suffix -ary ("relating to") and you get temporary: something that lasts only for a time, a limited span — therefore not permanent. Clip temporary down in casual office English and you get temp, the worker hired just for a while.

Put the prefix con- ("together, at the same") in front and you get contemporary: con- + tempus = existing "at the same time." From there it forks two ways: people who live in the same era are contemporaries (your contemporaries are your peers), and things that belong to the present era are contemporary (contemporary art, modern). Same word, slightly different aim — same-time-as-each-other vs. same-time-as-now.

Turn the root into a verb with -ize and you get temporize: literally "to act according to the time" — to play for time, to stall, to trim your behaviour to suit the moment rather than commit. The neutral idea of "timing your actions" curdled into the sense of evasive delay.

The surprise members are musical and stormy. Tempo entered English from Italian, where tempo (descended from the same tempus) means the time or speed of a piece of music — keep tempo, fast tempo. And tempestuous traces to Latin tempestas, "a (stretch of) weather, a season" — which drifted to mean specifically bad weather, a storm. So a tempest is literally "what the season throws at you," and tempestuous describes anything storm-like: wild seas, or a wild, turbulent love affair.

Two cousins worth knowing: tense (grammatical past/present/future) comes from the same tempus through Old French, and extempore ("out of the time" = on the spur of the moment, improvised) is a near relative. The whole family circles one idea — a span of time, the right moment — and then scatters into the worldly, the musical, and the stormy.