diktatoro

The gift: it began as a job title. In the Roman Republic the dictator was a constitutional office. When a war or a crisis demanded one hand on the tiller, the Senate had a magistrate appointed with full authority for a maximum of six months, after which he laid the power down and went home. Cincinnatus is the famous case, twice appointed and twice returning to his farm. The office was legal, temporary and honourable - and the word only turned into the insult it is now because a run of men in the late Republic, Sulla and then Caesar, took it and declined to give it back. Diktatoro carries all of that history, and it is worth knowing that the word for the twentieth century's worst men started life as a fixed-term public appointment.

Against tirano. Tirano at 2,355 is the Greek word and the older idea: someone who seizes power without right, whether or not they use it badly. Diktatoro is the Latin one and, in modern Esperanto as in modern English, means someone who rules alone without legal limit. The nuance that survives is temperature: tirano is the literary, moralising word, the one in a poem or a sermon, and it stretches to a domestic tyrant - la tirano de la kuirejo. Diktatoro is the political-science word, the one in a newspaper. A cruel father is a tirano; the head of a one-party state is a diktatoro.

The family, and one distinction to keep. Diktaturo is the regime, the system of rule; diktatoro is the person holding it. Diktatora is the adjective, and diktatoreco the quality. All of them rest on dikti, to dictate - which in Esperanto still does its ordinary daily job of speaking words for someone else to write down, so dikti leteron is to dictate a letter and has nothing sinister in it. Diktilo, on the tool suffix, is a dictaphone.