Etymon #5
Crossing the line
The word entered English in the late thirteenth century, borrowed directly from Old French in the years after the Norman Conquest had transformed English administrative vocabulary. Its earliest English use named a wrong done against another, a breach of moral law or duty. The Old French source carried an older meaning that survives, buried, in the modern word.
In the late fourteenth century, William Langland wrote Piers Plowman, a Middle English dream-vision in which the dreamer Will searches for salvation through the sin and corruption of his time. Langland reaches for the word repeatedly to name wrongs done against truth, neighbour, and God. The word's earlier life lay in Anglo-Norman legal writing, where it had named violations of duty and law for nearly a century before.
In Old French, the compound named a movement before it named a wrong. The literal meaning was older and more physical: leaving one side of a line to reach the other, when that movement was not permitted. From this physical act the moral and legal meanings later grew.
The two roots that built the compound survive separately in modern English. PASSPORT carries one of them: a document granting the right to cross between countries. TRANSIT carries the other: the act of moving across from place to place. Both preserve the neutral physical meaning the older compound darkened into wrongdoing.
