Roots
Essaying the past
Deepti

The word ‘essay’ originally meant ‘test the quality of’ as it started life as the Latin word exagium or ‘ascertaining’. From this Latin word, the French picked up essayer that meant ‘testing quality’ and this word created another word essai or ‘trial’ that was used in the sense of ‘an attempt’. In the context of writing, French essayist Montaigne named his collection of essays Essais in the sense of ‘attempts’. The label stuck; the lexis of English picked up the word as ‘essay’ and it ultimately came to mean ‘composition’.

Once upon a time, a meticulous person was a timid person. The word ‘meticulous’ comes from the Latin metus, which means ‘fear’. Hence, a timid and fearful person was always worried about goofing up. This led to the word ‘meticulous’ carrying the sense of ‘over careful about detail’. The march of years took away the negative side of the word and left the current sense of ‘showing great attention to detail’ intact. Your salary is your allowance to buy salt according to etymology. ‘Salary’ has been ‘borrowed’ from the Latin salarium that meant ‘allowance to buy salt’ and the Roman soldiers did actually get such an allowance. Later, it was used for the stipend paid to priests. Today, salary is used for payment made for non-manual work and ‘wage’ for manual work.

The ultimate in status symbols, the limousine is an eponym that owes its origin to the Old French region of Limousin. The folk of this region wore a caped cloak that was called limousin. When the early version of this luxury car came out, it had a cape-like roof that protected the outside driver seat. This roof was named after the limousin and much later the car became the Limousine or affectionately, the Limo. When a child was born in Ancient Rome, the father acknowledged its paternity by placing the newborn on his knee. Since the knee is genu in Latin, the derivative ‘genuinus’ became the DNA test for the ancient Romans. This gave English the word ‘genuine’ in the sense of ‘natural’ or ‘proper’.