Wednesday, June 19, 2019

To cover

To cover

It makes sense that an ancient word meaning to cover would give us words like kerchief, garment, & garnish, but it takes a bit of imagination to connect an ancient verb meaning to cover to some of its other progeny.

These days, the word garret conjures images of Paris, painters, & poets, but garret originally meant a turret or small watchtower — a place that might offer a spying soldier some cover. We also see this military sense of cover in the word garrison.

And because we can’t have cover without having uncover, we have the word apperture, meaning an uncovering or opening. And apperture gave birth to something that might uncover one’s appetite, the aperitif, & to the opening to a musical event, the overture.

And because we used to turn off the gas lights to signal the end of the night’s revelries, & doing so involved covering those flames, the word curfew was born of this same root meaning to cover.

Want to be sure you’re covered when buying something? You can rely on your warranty, (also warrantee), or guarantee (also guaranty). 

Need a cover under which you might park your car? Try a garage.

And they all come from one little Proto-Indo-European root. Linguists write it today as *wer-.

This little root also managed to populate languages other than English with words. Sanskrit, Latin, German, Old Irish, Gothic, Old Persian, Old Church Slavonic, & Lithuanian all have words having to do with covering, all from this one little root, *wer-.

I apologize — once more — for not being able to reply to comments on my own blog. Makes no sense to me, but life is funny.



Big thanks to this week’s sources:  Merriam Webster, Lexico, Collins Dictionary, Wordnik, & Etymonline.

1 comment:

  1. These make sense to me. The French word for fire is "feu" so cur-feu becomes curfew. I love it when you can see the logical progression of the emergence of these words.

    But seeing that the root of all these is the prefix "wer" of course takes my mind to wer-wolves. I wonder if they are "covered" in some way. Maybe you can address this in another column, since you can't respond to comments on your own blog. I'd hoped that glitch would go away, but it seems to be permanent. What a pain!

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