Etymon #22
One or other
Borrowed from Greek, the word entered English in 1608, when John King, a royal chaplain, preached before James I at Whitehall on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, attacking the double-talk of his Catholic opponents.
The word reached English from Greek, by way of classical Latin, in the early seventeenth century. The Greek was a compound, a prefix joined to a word meaning 'life'.
The earliest meaning was a double life. The Greek named a creature that lived two ways at once, at home in two settings and belonging to neither.
Two familiar English words come from the same ancient root for 'both'. AMBIDEXTROUS describes the person equally good with either hand; AMBIGUOUS, anything open to being read two ways. Both still turn on the idea of two.
By the eighteenth century the word was used to name a soldier who fought from both sea and shore and then a whole kind of warfare. Its greatest hour came on 6 June 1944, the Normandy landings, the largest seaborne invasion in history, when armies were carried across the English Channel and put ashore on defended beaches. The word had come a long way from the creatures it began with.
