Etymon #15
What goes around
Borrowed from French and Latin, the word entered English before 1393, in the writing of the Middle English poet John Gower. Its original sense was nothing to do with what most readers now picture: it named a kind of motion in the sky.
The word's path runs back through two languages. French took it from a post-classical Latin noun, which itself came from a classical Latin verb meaning to roll. The Latin verb had described both physical motion and abstract reflection for centuries before the noun form entered the broader vocabulary of medieval Europe.
The earliest meaning was a return. The Latin root named the action of rolling back to a starting point, and in medieval astronomical writing it described the regular orbital motion of a celestial body, the way a star or planet completes its path through the sky and arrives back where it began.
The same Latin root appears in English words including VOLUME, CONVOLUTED, and INVOLVE. All three trace back to the ancient verb 'to roll', though the senses have travelled far apart. The original meaning of VOLUME was a papyrus scroll, the form a written work took before it took the form of a book.
In 1688, when English Protestants forced the Catholic King James II from the throne and brought in William of Orange and Mary, writers reached for this word to name the event. In its old sense, the word meant a return: a coming-back of constitutional rule, an orbit completing its turn. A century later, in 1789, when the French stormed the Bastille, the word was reached for again, but the sense had shifted. Now it meant breaking, not returning. By the nineteenth century, the political sense had eclipsed the astronomical one in everyday English.
