Today’s word—new to me, but decidedly not new-new—is another unfamiliar-when-out-of-context term for me, and who knows, perhaps for you as well. The word is to refect.[1] I get no clue from the word just by staring hard at it. So I looked it up and learned that it means “to refresh, esp. with food and drink.”
When I saw this non-obvious definition, I got a glimmer of how I had seen the term before, just not in this form. There’s a word refectory, which I think I learned during our stint in the UK. If you lived in a dorm when you were in college, where did you have your meals? Dining hall? Cafeteria? Whatever you called it, that’s another word for refectory: the dining facility in a college or other institution.
So now it makes sense. A refectory, a word I kind of knew, is where you refect—that is, where you refresh yourself with food and drink.
The word refectory is not used in the US as far as I know, though it might still be in other parts of the English-speaking world. But the verb to refect is listed as archaic in the American dictionaries I consulted. The OED has this note: “The word apparently fell out of use before 1700 and was revived in the 19th cent., but has always been rare and is now somewhat rhetorical.” I’m not entirely sure what they mean by rhethorical here, but it seems clear that they mean people aren’t running around saying “Hey, wanna refect later?”
Speaking of out of use, the term goes back to the 1400s. It’s constructed from the re- prefix plus the Latin root facere, “to make.” (Latin facere is also the origin of fact and feat, fait in French, and hacer in Spanish after an f > h sound shift.) So to refect is to remake oneself, something that some food and drink is definitely conducive to.
For origins today, I finally got around to looking something up that I’d been wondering about for a while. Why is the vehicle for transporting injured people called an ambulance? I mean, an ambulance does the opposite of ambling, right? Does it in fact come from the same root as ambling and ambulatory and all those other “walking” terms?
Short answer, yes. The longer answer is that an ambulance was not originally an ambulance as we know it today. The first sense in which ambulance appears in English in the early 1800s is to describe a field hospital: a mobile army surgical hospital, or MASH. (From 1819: “to remove them [sc. the wounded] to other ambulances or temporary hospitals.”) We got the term from French, where it was used in this same sense, and where the “walking” part (ambul-) alluded to the mobile nature of the facility.
Pretty quickly—like, by 1825—the term was also being used to describe a wagon in which patients were transported to the field hospital. It’s not clear (to me, at least) how this transference took place. For example, did something like ambulance wagon (“wagon for transporting to the ambulance”) get shortened to just ambulance? Or is it another example, like cash or marzipan, where the word moves across a set of related words to lodge in an unexpected new place?
As if that weren’t mysterious enough, the word ambulance was also used in the 1800s in the US to refer to a large covered wagon—a prairie schooner. I have no information on how that term originated, or whether it’s in any way related to the injured-people ambulance wagon.
It’s definitely an example, though, where knowing the root of a word is not particularly helpful in understanding what the word means today.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] I observe that Microsoft Word’s spell checker red-squiggles this word, and really wants to auto-correct it to reflect. [^]