3 min
The Laws Behind the Lingo
Have you ever wondered why the new year starts in the middle of winter, and not with the new beginnings of spring? For a long time, the Roman calendar did in fact begin with the springtime in March. In the year 153 BCE, though, the Roman Senate effectively changed it to January for bureaucratic reasons—and they never changed it back. Julius Caesar’s famous calendar reforms of 46 BCE confirmed the new system, and over 2,000 years later the majority of the Western world still recognizes January 1 as the first day of the year. This Word Stories instalment highlights the way long-forgotten laws—including Roman laws—can shape the way we see and talk about the world.
windfall
In idiomatic English, a windfall is an unexpected gain. It might be a large tax refund that you weren’t planning on, for example, or a scandal that comes out of nowhere for your political opponent. At its roots, though, a windfall was literally a matter of the wind making things fall to the ground. When trees get blown over in a forest, or their branches get blown off, the wood left lying around is traditionally referred to as windfall (Rolls of Parliament, 1464), and in fact the word is still used this way in technical contexts. The dominant idiomatic sense emerged because in medieval law poor peasants in need of firewood had a right to collect such wood from royal forests—a provision that still applies to public forests and “Crown land” in many places today. Over time, the image of commoners getting a lucky break due to forces outside their control took on a metaphorical sense: a windfall might be any kind of profit that just happens to come your way (as seen, for example, in N. Udall’s English translation of the Apophthegmes of Erasmus, 1542). This extended sense of windfall is also still used today, and it has eclipsed the old literal meaning to the point that most people use the idiom without thinking about—or even knowing about—its original connections to free firewood.
Caesarean
In the operation known as a Caesarean section (commonly shortened to C‑section or simply Caesarean), surgeons cut into a pregnant woman’s abdomen to remove the baby from her uterus. According to one popular bit of folk etymology, the name of this procedure includes the adjective Caesarean because Julius Caesar was born this way. There is, however, no real evidence for this claim, and in fact everything we know about Roman medicine makes it very unlikely. The ancient Romans expected a Caesarean section to entail the death of the mother, and Julius Caesar’s mother lived to a relatively old age. Among some Romans, the connection between Julius Caesar and the term Caesarean in its surgical sense ran the other way: according to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (Natural History, ca. 80 CE), Caesar had a great ancestor who was famously delivered this way, with the result that the family name Caesar came from the name of the operation—not the other way around. Pliny’s imaginative suggestion gained some support from a quirk of the Latin language: the verb caedere means “to cut”, and one way to say “a person who has been cut (out)” would be caeso.
None of these ad hoc theories about the origin of Caesarean section are backed up by any solid evidence, but there is one very reasonable explanation that does relate to Julius Caesar’s name. In the Roman Republican period, one law known as a Lex Regia (“Law of Kings”) made it mandatory to try to save Roman babies by performing C-sections whenever pregnant mothers died. In the later Imperial period, this law was more commonly called a Lex Caesarea (“Law of the Caesars”), since Caesar’s heirs adopted the name Caesar and made it a functional synonym for “king” or (more in line with traditional Roman taste) “emperor”. This is why even we moderns can refer to the Caesars when we just mean “Roman emperors”. In this context, it would have been very easy for generations of people to equate the emergency C-section procedure with the name of the Caesarean law—and then go on to invent stories explaining how Caesarean births must be connected to Julius Caesar himself.
a baker’s dozen
Bakers are known for selling items by the dozen, but in idiomatic English a baker’s dozen is thirteen—not twelve. This strange usage is likely rooted in the medieval practice of adding an extra loaf of bread to the purchase of a dozen. Bakers did this to stay on the safe side of the medieval English law called the Assize of Bread and Ale, which laid out strict punishments for shortchanging customers.
Although this practice of bakers including bonus loaves to their dozens seems to go back as far as the reign of Henry III in the 1200s, the actual phrase a baker’s dozen only appears in print much later. The earliest attestation of the idiom fails to specify an actual number, and refers instead in more general terms to an amount noticeably greater than what is strictly needed. To be more specific, the passage makes joking reference to the 88 volumes of a large encyclopedia set as a baker’s dozen of books (T. Nashe, Have with You to Saffron-Walden, 1596). When a number is specified in connection with the expression, it is usually thirteen (J. Florio, Queen Anna’s New World of Words, 1611), but a baker’s dozen could also sometimes be fourteen (F. Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785). In recent centuries, common usage of the idiom has become standardized and stabilized: a baker’s dozen is always about a specific number of things these days, and the number that people have in mind is always thirteen.
