# Sentimental
## Overview
**Sentimental** describes emotions of tenderness, nostalgia, or sadness — often with an implication of excess or self-indulgence. The word occupies an uneasy position: it can be neutral ('a sentimental attachment'), mildly critical ('a bit sentimental'), or sharply dismissive ('mere sentimentality').
## Etymology
From **sentiment** + **-al**. French *sentiment* ('feeling, emotion') comes from Medieval Latin *sentimentum* ('a feeling'), from Latin *sentire* ('to feel, perceive, experience, think'). The PIE root is **\*sent-** ('to head for, to go, to find the way'), with the semantic shift from directional movement to perception occurring in the Italic branch.
## The Sentire Family
Latin *sentire* generated a vast English vocabulary covering perception, feeling, and judgment:
- **Sense**: the faculty of perception - **Sensation**: a physical or emotional feeling - **Sensitive**: responsive to stimuli - **Sensual**: relating to physical pleasure - **Sentence**: from *sententia* ('a way of thinking, an opinion, a judicial decision') — the connection is that a sentence was originally a judge's 'feeling' about a case - **Consent**: *con-* + *sentire* — to feel together, to agree - **Dissent**: *dis-* + *sentire* — to feel differently, to disagree - **Resent**: *re-* + *sentire* — to feel again (repeatedly), hence to harbor ongoing negative feeling - **Assent**: *ad-* + *sentire* — to feel toward, to agree - **Presentiment**: *prae-* + *sentire* — a feeling beforehand, a premonition
## Sterne and the Age of Sensibility
The adjective **sentimental** was popularized — and arguably created in its modern sense — by Laurence Sterne's novel *A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy* (1768). Sterne used the word to describe a mode of travel guided by emotional response rather than rational planning or cultural education. Being 'sentimental' was, in this context, a virtue: it meant being attuned to feeling, responsive to beauty, and morally refined through empathy.
This positive sense reflected the **Age of Sensibility** (mid-18th century), which valued emotional responsiveness as a sign of moral worth. Samuel Richardson's novels, the poetry of the Graveyard School, and the philosophical writing of the Earl of Shaftesbury all contributed to a culture that prized refined feeling.
## The Pejorative Turn
By the late 18th century, **sentimental** had begun to acquire negative connotations. Critics accused sentimentalists of performing emotion rather than genuinely feeling it, of substituting tears for action, and of indulging in feeling for its own sake. By the Romantic period, the distinction between 'genuine feeling' (valued) and 'sentimentality' (derided) was firmly established.
Oscar Wilde captured the critique: 'A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.'
## Related Forms
The family includes **sentiment** (noun), **sentimentality** (noun, the quality of being sentimental), **sentimentalize** (verb, to treat in a sentimental way), and **sentimentalism** (the philosophical or aesthetic valorization of feeling).