Etymon #26
Became sharp inside
Borrowed from Old French, the word entered English in the late fourteenth century. It appears in the Canterbury Tales, composed c1387-95, where Chaucer warned that woe betide the cook whose sauce lacked sharpness. The Old French source word named something the senses could measure directly.
The word reached English through Anglo-Norman, from an Old French verb meaning 'to pierce' or 'to sting'. Behind it lay Latin pungere, the same root that gave English PUNGENT by a more direct route. PUNGENT stayed with sharp flavours and smells. This word moved through language and then into emotions.
That Latin root meant something immediate and physical, the sensation of being pricked or stung. The earliest English uses reflected it directly, a sharp taste or smell. The modern sense did not abandon that quality. It turned it inward.
The same Latin root produced two familiar English words. PUNCTUATION came from Latin punctuatio, the act of marking with points, the system of marks that gives written language its pauses and boundaries. COMPUNCTION came from Latin compungere, to prick severely, the sharp sensation of a guilty conscience. All three descend from the same Latin verb.
As the word began to move beyond the kitchen, John Dryden used it in Of Dramatick Poesie in 1668, to describe a style of language, the kind of brevity that cuts straight to the point. By the early 1700s it had moved again, leaving the writer's pen behind. In 1766 Oliver Goldsmith used it in The Vicar of Wakefield to describe something that cut deeper than an ordinary feeling.
