pedigree

If, like me, you’re a dog person, you probably associate the word ‘pedigree’ with overly pampered pooches – or the word ‘chum’. Of course, we also use it to describe anything with a snooty background, like royals or break-the-bank wine. But if we peel back the layers of history, the origins of the word ‘pedigree’ are actually quite unglamorous. And French.

Lovely Bella, sadly no longer with us

Our story begins in Anglo-Norman French, somewhere around the early 15th century. Without Ancestry.com or online DNA tests, medieval genealogists drew up family trees to prove who’d fathered who and who owned which chateau. They would draw a three-pronged symbol – three lines radiating from a single point – that connected parents to their offspring. That three-lined diagram looked very similar to the footprint of a large bird, specifically, a crane. So the term ‘pié de gru’ was born, which literally translates as ‘foot of a crane’. (Now, if you remember your GCSE French, or you’re familiar with the scary French Duolingo chouette, you might be thinking ‘sacre bleu, the French word for “foot” is “pied” not “pié”, you plank’. And you would be right – but, back in the medieval period, spelling was a bit of a free-for-all, and it was routinely written that way. Later, poncy scholars who wanted to make the word look closer to its original Latin root stuck a ‘d’ on it.)

Anyway, I digress. As you can probably guess, over the centuries, English speakers did what we do best: we stole the French phrase, chewed it up and spat it out as ‘pedigree’. By the late 16th century, the new spelling had stuck, and the word shifted from describing the physical diagram on a parchment to meaning the ancestral line itself. By the 18th century, the term expanded beyond human aristocrats to include the selective breeding of horses and cattle, eventually landing us where we are today – with certificates for purebred poodles.

My previous dog, Bella, was a purebred dachshund who did indeed come with a certificate. (I’d like to emphasise that I didn’t buy her – I took her on after her previous owner, my great aunt, passed away.) I adored Bella but, as well as that certificate, she came with all sorts of health problems – including terrible back issues due to years of selective breeding to produce that distinctive sausage shape. It’s a sad fact that the pursuit of the ‘perfect’ pedigree has left a tragic legacy across the canine world – as well as dachsies with dicky backs, we also have pugs who can’t breathe properly, German Shepherds with broken hip joints, Shar-Peis with severe skin infections, Great Danes with failing hearts and deaf Dalmatians (I could go on…). Breeding for a specific look often comes at a massive cost to dogs’ quality of life – so if you’re looking to get a dog, remember that rescue is the best breed.

refurbish

If you refurbish something, you renovate, refresh or rejuvenate it to make it look new again, like furniture or phones. Although I could definitely do with some refurbishing…

My personal issues aside, where does the word come from? You undoubtedly already know that the prefix ‘re’ means ‘again’, so added to ‘furbish’ it means ‘to furbish again’. But what’s furbishing? Well, it appeared in Middle English in the 14th century from an Anglo-French word, ‘furbisshen’, a verb which originally meant ‘to polish’. Its lineage stretches even further back than that though, to ‘furben’, an Old High German word which also meant ‘polishing’. There was obviously a lot of stuff that needed a shine back in the day. (Oh, and in case you’re not up on your ancient languages, High German was spoken roughly between 500 AD and 1050, and was the earliest stage of the German language. And Anglo-French words are words that originated from the French language as it was used in medieval England after the Norman Conquest.)

Over time, ‘furbish’ developed an extended sense of ‘renovate’ just in time for English speakers to coin ‘refurbish’ in the 17th century with the same meaning. Its first appearance in print was in 1611, in Randall Cotgrave’s A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. Cotgrave was an English lexicographer (AKA ye olde Susie Dent), and his bilingual dictionary was seen as groundbreaking at the time – that’s because as well as basic translations and explanations of French words in English, it also included idiomatic expressions, phrases, technical terms and even recipes. Cotgrave’s work contributed to the development of bilingual dictionaries and language-learning resources, and influenced how dictionaries were compiled for centuries. Think of it as the 17th-century version of Duolingo, but without the passive-aggressive owl.

Back to ‘refurbish’. It’s an example of an unpaired word, i.e. one that looks like it should have an opposite, but doesn’t anymore. This usually happens because the antonym (a fancy way of saying ‘opposite word’) has fallen out of fashion. Or it might be that it never existed in the first place, for example if we nicked the unpaired word from another language. Other examples of unpaired words include disgruntled, unruly and impervious. If you’d like to know more about whether you can actually be gruntled, ruly or pervious, head to the blog. Spoiler alert – you totally can.

descry

To descry something is to spot it – to catch sight of something faint, distant or difficult to see. You might descry land on the horizon, for example, or a face in the crowd. It’s easy to confuse ‘descry’ with ‘decry’ (although I doubt either of them are coming up that regularly in your daily life), which is understandable – they look and sound similar, but mean very different things. If you decry something then you condemn it, usually loudly and with lots of disapproval.

‘Descry’ and ‘describe’ come from the same Latin root – dēscrībere, meaning ‘to write down’ or ‘to represent’. That Latin word gave rise to an Old French verb, ‘descrier’, which meant ‘to proclaim’ or ‘cry out’ (often in the sense of calling something out that you’ve just seen). That’s where we borrowed it from.

‘Descry’ has been around for a long time, having first appeared in print in 1330, in the Middle English romance Reinbrun. Nope, me neither – it sounds pretty awesome though. Apparently Reinbrun is abducted by some merchants as a child and shipped off to Africa, where he’s presented to King Argus. During his captivity, he gets all buff and turns into a kickass knight. He goes on to rescue Amis, a friend of his father’s, from an enchanted castle controlled by a fairy knight. Sounds good, right? Oh, and just FYI, medieval ‘romances’ don’t actually involve much in the way of snogging – they’re more about heroic adventures, quests, battles and chivalric deeds, often with a bit of the supernatural thrown in. Sadly they’re also in Middle English which means they’re unpossible to comprehenden.