The OED notes that this semantic development parallels that in Latin with respond: re-spondēre from re- ‘back, undoing’ + spondēre ‘pledge oneself, undertake a liability, hence to rebut a liability or legal obligation’. Indeed, the dominant early meaning of the word was legal, a sense we are still aware of in the phrases ‘to be answerable for something’ and ‘to answer to a charge’. This earlier notion of ‘answer’ is vitally related, in the Maldon context and elsewhere, to its etymology, since Anglo-Saxon andswarian means literally ‘to swear against’, to make a formal, legal reply to a charge. As the example of forswerian, just discussed, suggests, the term has greater potency and acquires increasingly serious implications as one goes back in time. Then he quotes from The Battle of Maldon and picks up the -swear- thread again:Ī word of importance to our theme which is buried in this passage is answer, which is today an unremarkable, mundane term. Hughes goes on to relate other examples of such word-magic from the Life of St Wilfrid and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. The key verb in the text at this point is, fascinatingly, forsworen, literally ‘forsworn’, indicating that the verb forswerian could mean ‘to hinder by swearing to render powerless by incantation to make useless by magic’. 2 Described as one of the evil tribe of Cain and an enemy of the Lord, he puts a spell on the weapons of his victims, the Scyldings. One of the most dramatic instances of the use of a malign spell in Anglo-Saxon literature is wrought by the monster Grendel. In a section on ‘numinous words: charms, spells and runes’, Hughes writes: The book packs considerable detail, scholarly insight and amusing lists into its 280 pages, so I’ll follow its lead and keep this post short. I read a nice account of another such etymology in Geoffrey Hughes’s Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanities in English (1991). Semicolon is a folk etymology of samey colon, on account of its resemblance to the other mark.
Remorse is ‘ biting back’, your conscience gnawing at you.
Breakfast breaks a fast, the vowels disguising it well. Some familiar words have etymologies right in front of us yet apt to stay hidden.
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