January 15, 2007
Etymology and History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:40 PM EST I have always been fascinated by etymology, the history of words, perhaps because it so often reveals other kinds of history. The date when a word entered the language often indicates when a concept or an issue entered the consciousness of the people. Take anti-Semitism, for instance. The word is a remarkably recent addition to the English lexicon, arriving only in 1881 (from the German—where else?). Heaven knows anti-Jewish sentiment is ancient enough, as members of the small Jewish minority in medieval Europe served all too well as convenient scapegoats for kings trying to evade responsibility for misfortunes (and, very often, their debts). But the basis of that sentiment was religious. Jews were not Christians and, indeed, were often portrayed as “Christ killers.” But the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of a different kind of anti-Jewish sentiment, one that was racial, not religious, in nature: The trouble with Jews was not their religion; it was the fact that they were, well, Jews. Western European countries had emancipated the Jews in the nineteenth century, removing numerous disabilities. Jews could sit in the British Parliament, for instance, beginning in 1862, and by 1885 there was a Jewish peer, Lord Rothschild. Other countries did likewise. Bismarck’s personal banker, Gershon Bleichroeder, was ennobled in 1872, the year after the constitution of the German Empire removed most Jewish disabilities. But as Jews entered the mainstream of European life, there was an inevitable backlash, a backlash that in Europe would turn into the horrors of such things as the Dreyfus affair and, eventually, the Holocaust. But anti-Semitism also quickly spread to this country in attenuated form, becoming what can only be called a fashion. While the New York men’s clubs that were founded in the mid-nineteenth century had often had Jewish members, they stopped admitting Jews after about 1880. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that this “fashionable” anti-Semitism began to wane. The novel by Laura Hobson, Gentlemen’s Agreement, made into a movie directed by Elia Kazan that won the Oscar for best picture in 1947, marks, perhaps, the beginning of the end of this form of anti-Semitism. Or, on a far lighter note, take the word impecunious. It is, of course, just an upscale word for being without money, and it entered the English language in 1596. It is a great example of an “inkhorn term,” words with usually Latin or Greek roots coined by pedants and writers showing off that flooded into English in the age of Shakespeare, supplementing and sometimes replacing perfectly good words that had been in use for centuries, such as penniless. But lurking within impecunious is a much older history, dating back to the dawn of money. The Latin word for cattle or livestock is pecus, and before the invention of coins, in the seventh century B.C., cattle often served as a unit of account, one of the functions of money. So to be impecunious means, literally, to be without cattle. (The word fee, as well, has bovine origins, coming indirectly from the Old English feoh, meaning cattle.)
The other day I ran into a neat example of the power of etymology to explain or exemplify history, this time by a word that isn’t there. English is notorious among major languages for the sheer size of its vocabulary. The average speaker of English uses half again as many different words in ordinary speech as the average speaker of, say, French or German. All languages have “missing words”—words that are found in most other languages but not that one. French, for instance, lacks a word meaning “shallow”; they say “peu profond”—“little deep”—instead. But English probably has fewer missing words than most. Like the dog that doesn’t bark in the night, however, missing words are very hard to notice. I learned a new one the other day. I was listening on CD to a lecture by Professor Thomas Childers of the University of Pennsylvania called “The History of Hitler’s Empire” that I highly recommend, and he noted just in passing that English lacks a word for a sudden, unconstitutional change in government. Instead we either use the French term, coup d’état, or the German, Putsch. This says much about the politics of those countries that derive their political institutions from England. While French and German history are liberally sprinkled with these types of political events, the history of the English-speaking peoples is not. The last successful coup d’état in the English-speaking world, after all, was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, three hundred and nineteen years ago. That remarkable record leaves its trace—or in this case its lack of one—in the language.
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