(This post wanders a bit before getting down to business, apologies in advance.)
In my studies I’ve occasionally run across Bald’s Leechbook, a medieval book in Old English that provides medical advice for a variety of ills. The book includes recipes for unguents and potions to apply or ingest. (The leech in leechbook doesn’t refer to leeches; it’s the Old English word læce, which refers to a doctor.)
I was reminded of all this because Dave Wilton’s Wordorigins.org newsletter for February 9 (paywall) is about the word mercury, which the Anglo-Saxons called quicksilver. In the newsletter, he quotes an analgesic recipe from the Leechbook that goes like this:
Wiþ magan wærce, rudan sæd & cwic seolfor & eced bergen on neaht nestig. Eft gnid on eced & on wæter polleian sele ðrincan sona Þæt sar toglit.
Even if you don’t happen to read Old English, if you look closely, you can see cwic seolfor, which is the reference to mercury/quicksilver. (“Quick” in quicksilver is an old word meaning “alive”, as in “the quick and the dead”.) But I got interested in another word that appears in the passage: eced.
Wilton provides a translation for the passage, but as an exercise for learning Old English, I tried my hand at it before looking at his. I eventually arrived at this:
For great pain, taste red (ruddy) seed and quicksilver and vinegar at night [while] fasting. Afterwards, knead vinegar and pennyroyal into water, give to drink, [and] immediately the pain goes away.
Let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the advice here to use heavy metals as part of a remedy, yikes.
Ok. I had to look up several words, one of which was the aforementioned eced, which turned out to be the word for vinegar (the Saxons also used the word eced-win). Once I saw that, it was obvious: vinegar = eced = acid.[1]
The Saxons got the word eced/æced from the Romans, whose word was acētum. We don’t use the Saxon word anymore; our word today, obviously, is vinegar. This came from French, which got it from Latin, which hints at the fact that a lot of folks in northern Europe learned about viniculture from the Romans. The word vinegar is vin (“wine”) + aigre (“sour”). The aigre part is ultimately from Latin acer (“sharp, sour, bitter”). It’s probably clear why something acidic — like wine that had fermented in the wrong direction, so to speak — would be described as “sharp” or “sour”.
The Saxon word æced/eced has many relatives, though not in Old English; we got most of the related terms at later stages of English.
A more formal name for the acid in vinegar is acetic acid (“vinegar-acid acid”), a name that might seem on the redundant side, maybe? (Fun fact: acetic acid is a solvent in silicone-based caulking, which is why freshly installed caulking can smell weird.)
More metaphorically, someone who makes sharp or pointed (but clever) observations is said to have an acerbic wit. One practitioner was Oscar Wilde: “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go”. Another was whoever wrote (often attributed to Dorothy Parker) “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force”.
Someone who’s eager has a keen/sharp interest in something. Although this comes from the French word aigre, as in vinegar (hence “sour”), the word eager took a positive turn in English. A semantic contrast but etymological cousin is the word acrimony, which describes a sour relationship between people.
A more distant relative that might surprise you is the name oxygen. This name was coined as a French term by the chemist Lavoisier in 1777 for the “vital air” he was experimenting with. The oxy- part is the Greek word for acid (oxys, “sharp”); the -gen part is the same as in “generation”. It turns out Lavoisier incorrectly thought that the element oxygen was a necessary component for generating acids. That proved not to be true, but the name stuck.
These terms are all suggestive of a sour or sharp taste. The same ak root that’s behind these words also took on a different sense of sharp, namely a sharp feel. This sense came to be used with words for sharp tips or for high points. Here are a few examples:
- acute: sharp, severe
- acme: highest point, tip
- acrophobia: fear of heights
- acropolis: the elevated (or top point) of a city in ancient Greece.
- edge: the sharpened side of a cutting instrument
- acupuncture: therapy that involves sharp points, i.e., needles.
And a fun one: Akron, Ohio, named because it was founded on the high point between two rivers.
I always enjoy learning about links between a word in Old English and words we still use today. On the downside, it does distract me from working on my Old English homework for class. 🙂
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[1] It would be interesting to learn more about what other sources of acid were available in the old days. It can’t have been many, and it’s my understanding that they had nothing like the really strong acids (hydrochloric, nitric, sulfuric + 4 more) that we have today.