Stories That Words Tell UsO'Neill, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Speakman)
History
Stories That Words Tell Us
O'Neill, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Speakman)
English language -- Etymology
It was also in the English Civil War that we first find the word
_capitulation_, which now generally means to surrender on certain
conditions. Before this, _capitulation_ had more the meaning which it
still keeps in _recapitulation_. It meant an arrangement under
headings, and the word probably was transferred from describing the
terms of surrender to describing the surrender itself.
One of the many words connected with war which came into the English
language from the French in the seventeenth century was _parade_,
which means the showing off of troops, and came into French from an
Italian word which itself came from the Latin word _parare_, "to
prepare." Another of these words which has been much used in
descriptions of the battles of the Great War, and especially in the
"Battle of the Rivers" in the autumn of 1914, is _pontoon_. Pontoons
are flat-bottomed boats by means of which soldiers make a temporary
bridge across rivers, generally when the permanent bridges have been
destroyed by the enemy. The word is _ponton_ in French, and comes from
the Latin _pons_, "a bridge." Most words of this sort in French ending
in _on_ take the ending _oon_ in English. Thus _ballon_ in French
becomes _balloon_ in English. _Barracks_ also comes from the French
_baraque_, and the French had it from the Spanish or Italian _barraca_
or _baraca_; but no one knows whence these languages got the word.
The word _bombard_, also much used during the Great War, came into
English at the end of the seventeenth century from the French word
_bombarder_, which came from the Latin word _bombarda_, an engine for
throwing stones, and which in its turn came from the Latin word
_bombus_, meaning "hum." Even a stone hurled with great force through
the air makes a humming noise, and the "singing" of the bombs and
shells hurled through the air became a very familiar sound to the
soldiers who fought in the Great War. The word _bomb_, too, comes from
the French _bombe_.
The words _brigade_ and _brigadier_ also came from the French at this
time. So, too, did the word _fusilier_, a name which some British
regiments still keep (for example, the Royal Fusiliers), though they
are no longer armed with the old-fashioned musket known as the
_fusil_, the name of which also came from the French, which had it
from the Latin word _focus_, "a hearth" or "fire." It is curious how
the names of modern British regiments, not even carrying the weapons
from which they have their names, should take us back in this way to
the days of early Rome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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