Etymon #11
From mouth, twice
A century and a half after the Norman Conquest, when French was still entering English, the word arrived from Anglo-Norman at the turn of the thirteenth century, drawn from a deeper Latin source. Its earliest English sense involved the tongue and a kind of slow attention, though the Latin verb behind it carried a second meaning as well.
Before reaching English, the word had a long life in Latin and Anglo-Norman. Marie de France was composing her Anglo-Norman lais, short verse poems that became foundational to medieval French literature, at the court of Henry II when this word was already in use in the French vocabulary that English would soon absorb. It travelled from post-classical Latin into Old French in the 12th century, then into English at the turn of the thirteenth. Behind it lay a classical Latin noun and a cousin verb of the same root.
The classical Latin verb meant to taste, and it also meant to be wise. The same verb that named the careful palate named the careful mind. Tasting and knowing were one word in Latin.
The Latin root produced English words at both ends of its meaning. INSIPID, from the negation of the tasting branch, names both the lack of flavour and the lack of intelligence in a single word. HOMO SAPIENS, the species name humans gave themselves in the eighteenth century, draws on the wisdom branch, meaning wise man, named for the same act that names a careful taster.
