I'll leave it to everyone else to follow that etymological premise down the various paths it opens up. I bring it mostly to note that it helps put to rest a thought that concerned me a great deal when I was a teenager, and that still rears its ugly head from time to time: namely that we all wear "masks" in our daily interaction, and that we are all, in that sense, false. But the notion that the masks are determined to play a socially symbolic role, though still allowing "the individual, undisguised voice" to sound through, ought to mean that our use of masks in public life can be, in some ways, more honest than whatever we would mean if we talked about walking around with our faces naked, this being, of course, an extended metaphor. The mask of a public persona can make it unambiguous what role it is we intend to play at a given moment.Hannah Arendt wrote:Persona, at any event, originally referred to the actor's mask that covered his individual "personal" face and indicated to the spectator the role and the part of the actor in the play. But in this mask, which was designed and determined by the play, there existed a broad opening at the place of the mouth through which the individual, undisguised voice of the actor could sound. It is from this sounding through that the word persona was derived: per-sonare, "to sound through," is the verb of which persona, the mask, is the noun.
The danger, it seems to me, lies in so relying on one particular public persona that it becomes virtually inseperable from the private person, at which point everything you say or do becomes associated with a role you can't reasonably be expected to play at every moment.