Word of the Week: Anxious

Quite a few mavens of the grammar world will tell you that there is one and only one use of the word anxious: "to be fraught with anxiety." They'll then proceed to tell you that you should never use it as a synonym for eager. Anxious is a relatively new word from the 1600s, which derives from Latin for "troubled in mind." Eager, on the other hand, is from the 1300s and comes from the French meaning "keen, sharp." Over the course of the last 200 years, however, the two have come to have a similar meaning due to their similar emotion - a sense of immediacy and importance. Anxious has been deigned as being slightly more negative; eager being the more positive. However, there is no reason that they cannot be interchanged. Anxious might simply be used to express so strong an eagerness (for a particular outcome) as to be unhappy at the potential lack of the desired outcome.