A Little Book of Language (David Crystal, 2011)

CHAPTER 26 Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history and origins of words, and it’s a subject that is full of
surprises. Take the words ‘salary’ and ‘sausage’. These days they have completely different
meanings. A salary is the amount of money someone is paid in a year for doing a job.

A sausage is a type of food made of meat shaped into a thin roll.

But once upon a time they were the same word. How can that be?
‘Salary’ came into English in the fourteenth century. It comes from the Latin word ‘salarium’, which
meant ‘salt-money’. Roman soldiers were given money especially to buy salt, which was a very
important substance, as it helped to preserve food. ‘Sausage’ also arrived in English in the
fourteenth century, coming from another Latin word ‘salsicium’, which meant something made from
‘salted meat’. The common element in the two words is ‘sal’, which is the Latin word for ‘salt’.
Several other English words have their origins in salt. ‘Sauce’ is one. This was ‘salsa’ in Latin,
meaning that something was ‘salted’. ‘Salad’ is another, coming from ‘salata’ in Latin, also meaning
‘salted’. Over the centuries, these words have changed their meaning so that they now refer to very
different things. People have sauce on their salad and their sausages, and pay for it with their salary.

Every word in a language has a history, and dictionaries tell us what that is. Let’s stay with food. They
will tell us, for example, that: ‘melon comes from French; it arrived in English in the late 1300s. Potato’
comes from Spanish; it arrived in English in the mid- 1500s ‘yoghurt’ comes from Turkish; it arrived in
English in the early 1600s ‘spaghetti’ comes from Italian; it arrived in English in the mid-1800s ‘sushi’
comes from Japanese; it arrived in English in the late 1800s.
These are all words which have kept the same meaning since they arrived in the language. The
potatoes that were first eaten when Shakespeare was alive are the same sort of vegetable as the
potatoes we eat today. Many other words have changed their meaning since arriving in English.

Today, if we say that someone is ‘silly’, we mean that they are foolish or stupid, often in a funny sort of
way. But 1,000 years ago it didn’t mean this at all. When the word was first used in English it meant
‘happy’ or ‘blessed’. Then it developed the meaning of ‘innocent’. Later still it meant someone who
deserves our pity because there’s something wrong with them. To say that someone was ‘silly’ meant
that they were feeble-minded. These days, of course, we can be silly even though we’re intelligent.

Words continue to change their meaning today. Here are some examples from the world of the
internet:
 ∙ A ‘mouse’ has been a kind of small animal for over 1,000 years, but since the 1960s it has
also come to mean a hand-held device to control a pointer on a computer screen.
∙ ‘Spam’ was originally a kind of tinned meat, but since the early 1990s it has come to mean
unwanted email messages.
∙ To ‘surf’ originally meant to ride on a surfboard, but since the early 1990s it has also come to
mean moving from site to site on the internet.

Of course many of the slang words have come into existence through a change of meaning, such as
‘wicked’ and ‘cool’. Sometimes words change their meaning in ways which make us think about them
very differently. When I was a boy, the only sense of ‘cowboy’ that I knew was the one in films, where
there were ‘cowboys and indians’. The cowboys were always the good guys. But since the 1970s,
another meaning has come along. If we hear someone talk about ‘cowboy builders’, that’s not nice.
They’re people who don’t have the right skills and who do inferior work. Today, cowboys are the bad
guys. That’s an example of a word taking on a bad meaning.

We find the opposite type of change taking place too: words taking on a good meaning. ‘Nice’ is an
example. This word came into the language in the 1300s meaning ‘foolish’ or ‘ignorant’. It later
developed other negative meanings, such as ‘showy’, ‘fussy’, or ‘lazy’. But gradually other senses
developed. To be ‘nice’ could mean that you were ‘well-dressed’ or you were ‘particular’ or ‘careful’
about things. In the 1700s it developed a wide range of positive meanings, such as ‘agreeable’,
‘pleasant’, ‘kind’, and attractive’, and these are the ones we have today.

Words also change by becoming more general in meaning. When ‘office’ first came into English, in the
late 1200s, it meant a particular kind of religious service. Only people such as priests and nuns had an
office, which they followed every day. Today, the word has a much more general range of meaning. It
can mean any kind of official position or duty, or a room where people carry out administrative tasks.
We say things like: Mary’s office is in the City. John works in the Foreign Office. She holds a high
office in the government. The word still has its religious meaning, but that is only one small part of its
use today.

The opposite type of change is when words become less general in meaning. Their sense narrows. In
Old English, the word ‘mete’ (spelled ‘meat’ today) meant any kind of solid food. Today, ‘meat’ is
restricted to the flesh of certain kinds of animals. Only occasionally do we find a word which keeps the
older meaning. When people talk about ‘sweetmeats’, for instance, they’re referring to such things as
candied sweets and sugared nuts. That’s nothing to do with animal flesh. Nor is ‘mincemeat’ (as used
in mince pies) anything to do with animals. But these are exceptions. Only a small part of the original
meaning of ‘meat’ is used today. We have to keep a wary eye open for these changes of sense when
we read books written many years ago. We must be careful not to read in the modern meaning. For
example, when we read in a Shakespeare play that someone was ‘naughty’, we might think that this
word had the same meaning as it has today. In fact, it’s very different. To say that a little boy is being
naughty today means that he’s being badly behaved - a bit of a mischief. But if characters in
Shakespeare are called ‘naughty’, it means much more than that. They are being truly wicked or evil.
The scholars who study etymologies are called etymologists. And there’s plenty of research for them
to do, because many words are mysteries. We have no idea where they came from. Take ‘jam’, for
instance - the stuff we put on bread. Why do we call it ‘jam’? Jam is made from fruit which has been
boiled along with sugar until it is a nice messy spread. Did people originally call it ‘jam’ because they
thought of the fruit being crushed or ‘jammed’ down into a pulp? think so, but we don’t know for sure.
There are hundreds of words like this. Nobody knows where the word ‘bap’ (meaning a bread roll)
came from. Nobody knows why scientists are called ‘boffins’. Nobody knows why people who do
crazy things are said to be ‘bonkers’. Is it because they’re acting as if they’ve had a ‘bonk’ on the
head? Etymologists try to find the answers to these questions.

All words have a history - and that includes the names of people and places. We won’t find these in a
dictionary because they exist outside of a language. We might know such names as ‘Paris’,
‘Bordeaux’, and ‘Francois’, but that doesn’t mean we can speak French! And similarly, people who
speak other languages can talk happily about such names as ‘David’, ‘Elizabeth’, ‘Manchester’, and
‘Kentucky’ without knowing a word of English. Nonetheless, we can still study the history of these
names. And when we do, we find that every name has a story to tell.

BEING A GROOM
The study of a word’s history can also help explain why some words appear to be strange. Take the
word ‘groom’, as in ‘bridegroom’. Why is it ‘groom? A groom is someone who is an employee,
especially one who looks after horses. What’s it got to do with getting married? A bridegroom isn’t the
bride’s servant. Nor is he someone who is going to clean his wife’s skin and hair to make her look
smart! So why is he called a groom? Etymology can give us the answer. When the word was first
used in English, it was actually different in form. It was ‘bridgome’, pronounced ‘breed-go- muh’. The
first part, ‘brid’, meant ‘bride’. And the second part, ‘gome’, meant ‘man. ‘Gome’ was a word which
was used a lot in Old English, but people stopped using it during the Middle Ages. By the 1500s,
nobody knew what a ‘gome’ was. So they replaced it with a more familiar word which had the same
sort of sound, ‘groom’. ‘Bridgome’ became ‘bridegroom’. People do this quite a lot. If they don’t
understand a word, they simply change it to make it sound more intelligible. When the word
‘cucaracha’ came into English from Spanish in the early 1600s, people must have found it very
strange, because they soon altered it to the more friendly- sounding ‘cockroach’, even though a
cockroach has nothing at all to do with cockerels. Nor does ‘sparrow-grass’ (a colloquial name for
‘asparagus’) have anything to do with sparrows.