Etymon #25
Close to idiom
Borrowed from French, the word entered English in the late fourteenth century. By 1549 Thomas Chaloner had used it in his English translation of Erasmus's Praise of Folly, a humanist text about the wisdom of fools. The Greek original named something altogether different.
The word travelled from Greek into Latin, and from Latin into Old French, acquiring a sharper edge at each stage. In Greek it named a private person. In Latin, its meaning shifted to an ordinary person, someone without specialist knowledge. Old French narrowed it further to someone uneducated. By the time it reached Middle English, the original meaning had been lost.
The Greek root meant 'private' or 'one's own'. From it came a word for a specific kind of person: someone who lived entirely outside public life, keeping to themselves while the world went on without them.
The same Greek civic world produced DEMOCRACY, from demos 'the people' and kratos 'power', and POLITIC, from politikos 'of the citizen'. Both named the life of public engagement at the heart of Athenian society. This word named its opposite.
In fifth-century Athens, public life was not optional. Every citizen was expected to participate in civic duty. Pericles, whose Funeral Oration was recorded by Thucydides in 431 BCE, put it directly: a man who takes no interest in public affairs has no business being here at all. The Greek word for a person who stayed private began to harden. By 1590 English law had changed the meaning. Henry Swinburne's legal treatise defined the word as someone 'so witlesse, that hee can not number to twentie'. The private citizen of Athens had become something else.
