What does the word “gubernatorial” mean?
It’s anything related to a governor, and mostly used for the governors of US states.
I’m currently reading A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, and I was struck by this passage (emphasis mine):
Just as bear-killing fueled one’s manhood, lack of such prowess did the opposite. In neighboring Vermont in 1815, Governor Jonas Galusha, seeking reelection, proudly announced that he would hunt a particularly notorious bear known as “Old Slipperyskin” with a hitherto-unknown hunting method. Galusha slathered himself with female bear scent and strode off into the woods, only to return to his entourage at a full sprint, the bear behind him. (He lost the gubernatorial campaign.)
I’d never seen the word gubernatorial before.
I could guess it from the context – Galusha wasn’t re-elected as state governor – but I looked it up, and it turns out it’s a word to describe anything related to a governor. It’s mostly used in the USA, which is why it was unfamiliar to me. The only time I recall using the word “governor” in the UK is to describe a board of school governors, which I’m only vaguely familiar with. (As I write this, I assume we have governors in our government, but it’s not something I’ve ever thought about.)
An NPR article by Acacia Squires explains the history of the word – it comes from the Latin word gubernator, one who governs. That gives us the English word governor via French, which swapped the ‘b’ for a ‘v’, but at some point the ‘b’ returned in the word gubernatorial.
I feel like there must be other Latin words where ‘b’ became ‘v’, but I’m struggling to think of any except habere, to have. (Double-checking that example is how I discovered that the National Archives have a guide to medieval Latin.)