Origin Stories: Fractious (and Factious)
“Origin story” is an expression for a superhero’s backstory — for instance, Superman was born on Krypton just before it was destroyed. Many words also have fascinating origin stories. While English comes largely from Latin (and from Greek, and from Latin through French and Spanish, with some Germanic roots and a bit of Sanskrit, etc.), you’ll find that word usage can change quite bit over a couple thousand years.
Fractious sounds a lot like “fraction,” doesn’t it? It actually means “Unruly, troublemaking, quarrelsome,” or simply “irritable.”
There’s a good reason the fractious sounds a bit mathematical. The word fraction once meant brawling or discord (as in, “A fraction broke out outside the pub”) -“ even today, a fraction (in math) is something that has been broken up.
Don’t confuse fractious with factious, meaning affected by party strife, breaking into factions or cliques within a larger organization. (Actually, those two words are pretty similar, so if you confused them, it wouldn’t really be the end of the world. A factious group could easily become fractious.)
The Students for Progressive Action were a fractious bunch, always fighting with one another over exactly which progressive action should take priority.
Related Words:
Obstreperous – unruly, noisy
Refractory – stubbornly disobedient
Captious – faultfinding, making a big deal of trivial faults
Also, the GRE classics belligerent, bellicose, and pugnacious all mean “combative, quarrelsome, given to fighting.”