Banks
In this modern world, most of us hear the word bank & think immediately of a financial institution. How did bank make its way there from its original meaning, a lump of mud?
Back in the 1200s, most the Scandinavian languages used a form of bank to mean a swelling or rise of soil in a sea, river or shoal. We still see this meaning when we refer to a river bank. We use the verb form when we bank up the soil to form a berm. When we bank the ball off a harder surface during a game of billiards or basketball, we’re riffing on the idea that something floating in the river might bounce off the river bank.
Some of the first bits of “furniture” were earthen structures — heaped up soil or dried mud. When the word bank made its way to Scotland, it grew to mean a raised area on which one might sleep, & the Scots called such a thing a bunker, which eventually broadened to apply to the building in which many sleeping spots exist. In time, the sleeping spots themselves got shortened to bunks.
In Old English, bank morphed into the word bench, meaning long seat. And since there’s not that much difference between a bench & a table, both bank & bench began also meaning table — giving us the word workbench & the table at which a moneylender might sit — a bank.
Do we speak some kind of nutty language or what?
My thanks go out to this week’s sources Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, Merriam Webster, Wordnik, & the OED.
That is all so very logical. But I had no idea the two kinds of banks came from the same root. I figured one was French and one was Germanic or something. I always learn something here, Mr. Monger!
ReplyDeleteHi Anne - Thanks. And I love the irony that stuffing one's money under the mattress actually is akin to putting it in the bank.
DeleteI sent this to my son because I knew he'd love it. I'm posting his response.
ReplyDeleteThat is really interesting. I had sometimes wondered about the word, mostly because it is the same in so many languages. And like bank is German for chair but also maybe French? Like in "en banc" but also Portuguese has the same kind of thing going on where "o banco" is the bank where money goes but "a banca" is a bench or "the bench" in the sense of where a jury (which is composed of judges) sits.
So I wonder if this set of usages entered romance languages from the Germanic ones?
Indonesian has "bank" but it only means a place with money. Definitely a loan word from Dutch.
Hey Sondra (& son) -- thanks for coming by. Etymologists haven't nailed the root word down. They're pretty darn sure it came from something Scandinavian, probably Old Norse, but nobody really knows. So somehow those pillaging Nords must have spread the word (so to speak).
ReplyDelete