Etymon #14
That's the point
Borrowed from Italian, the word entered English in 1611, in a Jacobean travel writer's account of Venice. Its original sense was nothing to do with what most readers now picture: it named a small instrument.
The word's path runs back through two languages. Italian formed the word as a diminutive of an older Italian noun. That older noun came from Latin. Thomas Coryate, a Jacobean travel writer who walked from England to Venice and back, brought the Italian word into English in his 1611 account of Venetian streets.
The earliest meaning was a writing tool. The Latin source word named the sharp bone, wood, or metal instrument that Roman scribes pressed into wax tablets to form their letters. The instrument was double-ended, with a sharp point for writing and a flat end for smoothing the wax to start again.
The same Latin root appears in English words including STYLE and STYLUS. All three trace back to an ancient writing instrument, though the senses have travelled far apart.
Italian craftsmen styled a thin dagger after the writing tool, and the word followed. That was the meaning Coryate brought into English in 1611. In 1613, Francis Bacon coined a verb form while writing about the recent assassination of Henry IV of France, fixing it in the political-plot vocabulary. More than three centuries later, in March 1953, a small advertisement in an Ohio newspaper described a new Italian fashion: a slender shoe poised on a heel. The word that had once named an assassin's dagger had become a Florentine shoemaker's footwear.
