destination - etymology & story - podictionary 557

The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English defines destination as:

“a place to which a person or thing is going”

This is in fact one of those examples of human laziness because this sense of destination is actually short for the phrase place of destination.

The word destination showed up in English during the life
of Shakespeare when English speakers were expanding their language and
weaving new words out of old, and at first it meant more or less “an
act of predicting,” except with more force to the accuracy of the
prediction.  Someone who proclaimed that you were destined to become a
star, or maybe a bum, was engaging in the act of destination.  So the
phrase place of destination was that place where it was
predicted you’d be at the end of your trip.   People got lazy saying
three words and so abbreviated it down to one about 200 years ago.

Much further back—back to the 1300s in English—destiny appears.  The Devil’s Dictionary defines destiny as:

“A tyrant’s authority for crime and fool’s excuse for failure.”

Urbandictionary offers
a marginally more upbeat pair of definitions, the more popular one
placing oodles of faith in the meaning of life, but second in popularity

“A really stupid way for people to blame their failures on something other than their own shortcomings”

While the first is a little flaky, the second is a little cruel in my mind.  Luck does come into it I think.

But where does all this leave us in the etymology of destination and destiny? 
The sense of that more hopeful Urbandictionary definition is that there
is some fixed, preordained outcome that each one of us is headed for
(and here neither I nor Urbandictionary mean death).  It’s the sense of
something fixed that underlies both destination and destiny.  It isn’t a coincidence that in one of the definitions I saw for destination it said “where one is bound.”  To be bound is to be “tied up,” “made secure” and according the Oxford English Dictionary the Latin destinare meant to “make fast or firm.”  Both destination and destiny, I see from the American Heritage Dictionary evolve from an Indo-European root sta that meant “stand” and is there also in the etymology of such unmoving words as statue and stationary.

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