The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (35 page)

It seemeth that the cause why it is called mortgage is, for that it is doubtful whether the Feoffor will pay at the day limited such summe or not, and if he doth not pay, then the Land which is put in pledge vpon condition for the payment of the money, is taken from him for euer, and so dead to him vpon condition, etc. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the Tenant, etc.

There are a lot of hidden deaths in English. Many people will have noticed the similarity between the words
executive
and
executioner
, but what have the two got in common? Is it that an executioner is just somebody who executes the sentence, just as an undertaker is someone who undertakes to bury you? No. The original legal term for execution was
execute to death
, from the French
exécuter à mort
. So you execute the sentence until they die.

Another hidden
mort
comes in the word
caput
. Monks used to remind themselves of their own mortality by contemplating a skull. This was called a
death’s head
or
caput mortuum
, and the original owner of a
caput mortuum
was definitely
caput
. It’s enough to make you scream
blue murder
, which is a direct translation of the French phrase
mort bleu
, which itself is a non-blasphemous form of
mort dieu
, or
death of God
.

The
gage
in
mortgage
is much more cheerful. It means
pledge
and is exactly the same
gage
that you find when you fall in love and get
engaged
. It’s also very closely related to
waging
war.

Wagering War

You can’t really
wage
anything other than
war
. You can try, but it sounds rather odd. Indeed, the phrase
waging war
gets stranger the more you look at it. Does it have anything to do with wages, or wage disputes, or maybe freeing the wage slaves? There’s a connection between all these different
wages
, and indeed to
wagers
. But you have to go back to the fourteenth century.

A
wage
was, originally, a
pledge
or
deposit
.
Wage
is simply a different way of pronouncing the
gage
in mort
gage
and en
gage
ment.
29
A wage was something given in security. From this
wage
you quite easily get to the modern
wager
: it’s merely the stake, or deposit, thrown down by a gambler. It’s also reasonably simple to see how
money given in security
could end up meaning
money given as pay
. But waging war? That involves trial by combat.

In medieval law it was considered quite reasonable to settle a legal dispute by duelling to the death. Though somebody had to die in this system and there was no guarantee of justice, lawyers’ fees were at least kept to a minimum.

A wronged medieval man would throw down his
gage
/
wage
(or pledge), and challenge his opponent to trial by combat. In Latin that was
vadiare duellum
; in French it was
gager
bataille
; in English you
waged
[pledged yourself to]
battle
.

Not war.
Battle
. It was, after all, a technical legal term for the violent resolution of individual arguments. You
wagered
your body in mortal combat. However, it’s easy to see how the sense of
waging battle
extended from the promise of violence to the act of violence.

In the end, when two countries couldn’t agree, they started
waging war
against each other. This last shift in meaning could reasonably be described as
wage inflation
.

29
The medievals often mixed up their Gs and Ws, which is why another word for
guarantee
is
warranty
.

Strapped for Cash

Why are people so often
strapped for cash
?

Being strapped for cash is actually a good thing. If you’re falling down and you need something to hang on to, a strap is good. If you fall overboard, it’s a good thing if somebody throws you a strap. And if you’ve fallen from the ship of solvency and are drowning in a sea of debt, then you very much want somebody to throw you a strap. Of course, it means that you’re currently in debt, but to be strapped for cash is better than to have no cash at all.

Oddly, the same metaphor has been invented twice. These days, when a bank is about to go bankrupt, the government throws them a
lifeline
. This means that the bank survives, although they are still strapped for cash.

Incidentally,
bank
comes from an old Italian word for
bench
, because money-lenders used to sit behind a bench in the marketplace from which they would do their deals. If a money-lender failed to make good on one of his arrangements, his bench would be ceremonially broken, and the old Italian for a broken bench was
banca-rotta
or
bankrupt
.

Fast Bucks and Dead Ones

So almost every form of money involves death, danger and destruction. A frightened word-lover might start to wish that the stuff had never been invented at all. It is, after all, possible to run a society without any money. America, which is now the land of the
fast buck
, had no money until European colonists arrived.

Well, almost. On the coasts of the North-East they used clam shells called
wampums
that could be threaded together into necklaces, and in Mexico they used coffee beans as a standard by which to barter; but the point, essentially, stands. There were no coins, no notes, no green and folding pictures of presidents.

This presented a problem to those colonists who wanted to trade. The natives looked on coins and banknotes with a mixture of scorn and confusion. What were they meant to do with that? You couldn’t wear it round your neck, you couldn’t even make a nice cup of coffee from it.

Early attempts at trading involved tobacco. Tobacco made a lot more sense than coins. With tobacco the peace pipe could be pulled out, and if you combined it with the coffee beans of Mexico you might feel almost civilised. But of course tobacco needs to be weighed out, and it’s rather bulky. The harvests go up and down, causing sudden inflation and deflation, and you need a warehouse to store it in.

So the traders eventually gave up on tobacco and moved to another staple item that everybody knew and valued: deerskins. A deerskin can be slapped over the saddle of a horse, it’s thin and light, and when you’re not spending it you can use it to keep warm. Buckskins soon became the standard unit of barter in North America, and a standard unit of barter is, in effect, money. So it was buckskins, or
bucks
for short, that were used for trade.

With this in mind, let us turn to Conrad Weiser, the first man ever to
make a buck
. He was born in Germany in 1696, but his family, being Protestant, were forced to flee to Britain in 1709. There they were held in a refugee camp just outside London before being sent to populate the colonies on the Hudson River. In 1712, when Conrad was sixteen, his father took the rather extraordinary step of sending his son to live with the Mohawk tribe for half a year. Conrad learnt the language and the customs of the Iroquois and started an illustrious career as a diplomat for the British among the native tribes of America.

Despite having fourteen children, Conrad still found the time to negotiate most of the significant treaties between the British and the disgruntled tribes and convince them that their real enemies were the French. In 1748 Conrad was sent into Ohio to negotiate with the tribes of the Five Nations. His mission had several purposes. One was to make peace and seek amends after the murder of some colonists. In this he succeeded. The tribal council told him that:

… what was done we utterly abhor as a thing done by the Evil Spirit himself; we never expected any of our People wou’d ever do so to our Brethren [the British]. We therefore remove our Hatchet which, by the influence of the Evil Spirit, was struck into your Body, and we desire that our Brethren the Gov. of New York & Onas may use their utmost endeavours that the thing may be buried in the bottomless Pit.

… which is one of the earliest references to
burying the hatchet
. The next item on the agenda, though, was rather more tricky. It involved rum. Specifically, it involved a request that the British would stop selling rum to the Ohio Indians. To this Weiner replied that:

… you never agree about it—one will have it, the other won’t (tho’ very few), a third says we will have it cheaper; this last we believe is spoken from your Hearts (here they Laughed). Your Brethren, therefore, have order’d that every cask of Whiskey shall be sold to You for 5 Bucks in your Town, & if a Trader offers to sell Whiskey to You and will not let you have it at that Price, you may take it from him & drink it for nothing.

And that is the very first reference to a
buck
as a unit of American currency. The deal was then finalised with a belt of wampum.

This was good news for American trade, but bad news for American deer. However, it was all about to get much worse for the American buck. Not content with their skins, the Americans were about to make a phrase out of their horns.

The Buck Stops Here

You might assume that
passing the buck
has something to do with passing a dollar to the person next to you. This is not so. After all, passing a dollar would hardly shift responsibility to someone. The only thing that these two
bucks
have in common is a dead deer.

Not, of course, that you pass a whole animal. That would be ridiculous. The phrase
to pass the buck
simply involves another part of the buck’s corpse.

Deer don’t have a good time in language. Their entrails are put into pies and their skins are used in lieu of currency; one of the few parts of the buck deer that remains is the horn. Waste not, want not.

A buck’s horn makes a very pleasant-looking knife handle, and a knife has many uses. You can cut up venison with a knife, or you can skin another deer and make a fast buck. You can also use a knife to mark the dealer in a game of poker by stabbing it into the table in front of whoever currently has responsibility for handing round the cards.

This isn’t done much by people who value their furniture, but in the Wild West life and woodwork were cheap, and the first reference to
passing the buck
comes from the diary of a ‘border ruffian’ during the fight for Kansas in 1856. On approaching a place called Buck Creek, he says that ‘we remembered how gladly would we “pass” the Buck as at “poker”’.

This is odd because the dealer usually has a slight advantage in poker. However, among the border ruffians of the Wild West the dealer probably stood a good chance of being shot, as, if you suspect there’s cheating going on, the dealer is the first chap you should murder.

So bucks were passed without cease until the 1940s when they finally stopped in a prison in El Reno, Oklahoma. The prison governor had decided that all responsibility ended with him. He dealt, and the prisoners received. So he had a sign put up in his office saying that ‘THE BUCK STOPS HERE’.

Of course, the buck didn’t really stop there. The prison governor had to answer to the state government and then to the federal government and then to the President, with whom the buck would grind to a final and undeniable halt. This point was not lost upon an aide to Harry S. Truman who visited the prison and saw the sign. He liked it so much that he had a replica made. He gave it to President Truman, who put it up in his office and made the phrase famous.