March 26th - Etymology of Demand
Etymology of Demand
Our word "demand" seems to be part of the long-standing mudsling rivalry between the English and the French. The word "demandè" just means "to ask" in French. Imagine being an 11th century Saxon during the Norman conquest. You wouldn't like those guys with their fancy new words.
Quick history lesson:
So you got these Germanic tribes called the Angles and the Saxons that start raiding Britain and take control of the whole island and eventually start writing shit down in Olde English, (with a super limited vocabulary that instead of saying stuff like "boat," they'd mince words together like "sea" and "horse" so you would get the idea they were talking about a boat), and with those writings they start having a homogenized cultural identity through shared language. Then you get Danish raiders (themselves speaking a Germanic dialect) taking over parts of East Britain and we get most of our naval terms from them like "keelhauling," "yacht," "sloop," "skipper," and "brandy." Then you have Norsemen taking over wide swaths of northern England (again, Germanic speaking), but everyone is pretty much getting along, killing a bunch of folks but then assimilating into an Olde English kind of mode - bards composing alliterative poems on lutes, hanging out drinking ale in taverns (one of the only things of Roman cultural import that wasn't discarded when those Latin speaking underwear warriors were driven from the British Isles), nobles taxing (in a surprisingly modern way) the shit out of the peasant class, and they pretty much solved their fiefdom conflicts with mob football (in which towns would compete to get a ball into a designated area by any means necessary - (aka brawling all day) possibly originating from an older war celebration tradition of kicking around the decapitated heads of the conquered).
Then King Edward the Confessor dies. He's a childless old man, and shit falls apart fast.
Meanwhile in Normandy, the Norsemen conquerors there have become romance language speaking Frenchmen and William the Conqueror thinks to himself, " I want England." And with a somewhat flimsy claim to the British throne, gets his ships ready for war.
The acting king of England, Harold, is trying to defend the north of England from the king of Norway, Harald, and sneaky King Willy comes up from the south with his Norman goons, fights and fucks their way through England (while Harold is busy with Harald) and takes charge of things - throwing the Saxon elite into exile in Scotland. Harold kills Harald but is killed by William and now the Normans are the big cheese. King William asks the pope for permission to conquer England (after he's already conquered it) and the pope is like, "sure buddy. Send me some jewels or something shiny though wouldja?" The pope tells the English Christians to bend the knee (like they had a choice), and William the bastard son of the lineage of the first Norman king Rollo, the Viking popularized by History Channel's Vikings, sets up governance and changes the language of the ruling class and then goes back home to France, talking that silver tongue and eating up fattened goose livers.
At this period in Olde English is the transition into Middle English with lots more Latin influenced words dominating the written word of the aristocracy and destroying many Saxon animal skin parchments.
So, I don't know, but I can imagine being a Saxon peasant and starting to mockingly use this new word "demand" (to ask), but constructing a new connotation of a proletariats "well, fuck you too," reaction to subjugation. The soft request of "asking" from the French became Webster's "asking with authority," or more succinctly: telling by asking. So, is our English word "demand" one of the rare examples where the ruling class didn't control hearts and minds through Orwellian language censorship and control? A word born of the working class?
That's pretty neat right?