EXCESS VIOLENCE

I was outraged when I discovered that the words rage and outrage are not etymologically connected. Rage was borrowed into English in the thirteenth century from Old French raige; that goes back to Latin rabies, which meant "madness" (and, yes, is the root of the English word rabies), and ultimately traces to Proto-Indo-European kebh, "violent". Outrage is also a French loanword from the the thirteenth century, but in this case it derives from the word oultrage, which meant "excess" (the idea being that when something becomes excessive, it is outrageous), and that's from Vulgar Latin ultraticum, meaning "going beyond". The root there is the recognizable Latin word ultra, which hails from PIE al, still meaning "beyond". Because of pronunciation, oultrage was rebracketed as outrage and that's how we got the modern word.