4 min
Words That Haunt the Autumn
The shadows are getting long, and kids are enjoying their hoards of treats. Let’s take a fall hike through some of the sweet yet haunting vocabulary of autumn.
costume / custom
The roots of the English word custom run back through the Anglo-Norman custume/custome (and thereby the Old French coustume/coustome) to the classical Latin consuetudo, all of which meant “custom” in the sense of “a habit” or “something customary”. The latter connotation allowed the French loanwords to refer by extension to the force of local custom in establishing laws to be obeyed and duties or taxes to be paid—an association that has survived in English since the 15th century in the habit of calling local taxes and levies (and the official process of enforcing them) customs. This is why people need to go through customs to see about paying the appropriate duties when they cross a national border.
The Old French coustume (in the sense of “something customary”) later gave English the word costume through different channels. The standard French derivative costume found its way into 17th-century English (with a little help from the influence of the Italian cognate costume) as a technical term in the creative arts. The custome of a play, novel, etc. was used to refer to the customary characteristics of the people, time and place being represented. For cultured French and then English speakers, custome thus corresponded to what we today would call the “style” or the “setting” of a piece. In the 18th century, this artistic usage narrowed to focus on the way wardrobe choices in particular could set the scene in terms of clothing and hairstyles. Eventually costume came to refer to such outfits themselves. By the 19th century, it had become possible to talk about the costume a stage actor was wearing, and before the end of that century any special outfit used for a dramatic kind of dressing up could be called a costume in English. This final derivative sense of the word—evoking dramatic outfits and theatrical garb in particular—remains the dominant meaning of costume today.
sugar
The production of sugar was pioneered in ancient India, where the Sanskrit word śárkarā (meaning “grit” or “gravel”) came to be used as the name of the granular sugar derived from cultivated sugarcane. Many centuries later, when the Arabs of the medieval Iberian Peninsula began to grow sugar, they used the derivative form súkkar—inspired perhaps by the Persian form šakar or the Hellenistic Greek form sakkhar/sakkharon. Wherever the Arabic form came from, it soon gave rise to new forms in Christian Europe as contact increased through crusading and global trade. In Medieval Latin, sukkar was adopted as succarum—helped again perhaps by the Greek form sakkhar/sakkharon that lies behind English cognates like saccharine and saccharide. French then picked up succarum in forms like çucre/sucre, and passed the word on to English in a wild profusion of variants (zuker, sucur, sucre, sucar, etc.) that eventually settled down in Early Modern English as sugar (W. Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 3, scene 3, 1616).
Like the word saffron, which English speakers borrowed from Arabic culture around the same time, the noun sugar also became a technical term in medieval chemistry—which at the time included the kinds of esoteric experiments called alchemy. Any laboratory product that looked a bit like granulated sugar could be called a sugar. Sugar of Saturn, for example, was a name given to powdery lead compounds, in part because the slow-looking planet Saturn was traditionally associated with the heaviness of lead (R. Mathews, The Unlearned Alchymist His Antidote, 1662). With the advent of modern chemistry, such usages of the word sugar fell out of use, and the term was extended in a different direction: any substance that resembled sucrose (or “table sugar”) on a molecular level might now be called a sugar (W. Henry, The Elements of Experimental Chemistry, 1826). For this reason, people commonly refer to soluble carbohydrates like fructose, dextrose, maltose, etc. as sugars in everyday English as well.
In more metaphorical and idiomatic usage, the sweetness of sugar has also given rise to the use of the word sugar to mean “kisses” or “physical affection” in phrases like Gimme some sugar (Reports of Cases Decided in the Court of Appeals of the State of Georgia, 1921). In the same colloquial vein, Sugar has emerged as a sweet-talking pet name for loved ones, like the similarly popular pet name Honey (Dialect Notes, 1930). By such associative routes, the word sugar has wandered a long, winding way from its ancient roots as a word for gravel.
cemetery
In ancient Greek, a koimētērion was a dormitory. The word literally means “sleeping place”, based on the verb koiman (“to sleep” or “to lull to sleep”), and the related ancient Greek noun kōma (“sleep”) was borrowed by English speakers in the 1600s to refer to the prolonged sleep state we know as a coma. Because the Greek-speaking Christians of the Roman Empire believed that the dead were in a sense just “sleeping” and would one day be raised, they used the word koimētērion to refer to burial areas. Roman Christianity adopted this term for a “sleeping place” of the dead as coemeterium, and passed it on to Middle English speakers as cimitorium—a term for a Roman catacomb (J. Trevisa, Polychronicon, 1387). Over time, the word was applied more generally in English to the church grounds (and eventually the burial grounds) where the faithful laid their dead to rest, in variants like cœmiterium, cymytoyre, semetory, cœmitery, coemetery, and of course the 17th-century form that survives today: cemetery.
superstition
In ancient Rome, the noun superstitio was used to describe basically any engagement with the supernatural that was considered inappropriate or excessive. The beliefs and practices of good Romans were called religio (the term that eventually gave English the word religion), and beliefs and practices that were seen as beneath good Romans were condemned as superstitio (the term that evolved into our word superstition). It’s not clear exactly how the word came to carry the negative supernatural connotations it later bequeathed to English. The actual Latin root verb involved was superstare (meaning “to stand over”, from super- “over” and stare “to stand”). The noun superstitio would therefore refer in literal terms to something “standing over” something else.
One ancient folk etymology passed on by Cicero in his treatise De Natura Deorum (“On the Nature of the Gods”, 45 BCE) suggests that superstitio got its name from parents being excessively religious in hopes of keeping their children alive and “standing above” (Latin superstites) the ground. Others have suggested that the word’s evocation of “standing over” refers to the temptation of putting oneself on a higher level than others by using questionable magical practices. In any case, the Latin word’s negative supernatural connotations still haunt our derivative noun superstition, which entered English around the turn of the 15th century via French. In English as in French, superstition refers to beliefs and practices that are seen as somehow erroneous or transgressive. Much like the ancient Romans, people who take an active interest in the supernatural tend to talk about being guided in their own lives by civilized religion or enlightened spirituality. Somehow it always seems to be other people who act out of mere superstition.
