Etymon #54
A shadowy offence
The word entered English from Old French in the early fifteenth century. Its earliest recorded use appears in a translation of a French allegorical poem by John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk at Bury St Edmunds, completed around 1426. Lydgate used it to describe the shadow falling across a face. Behind the Old French lay Latin, and behind Latin lay a root meaning shade and shadow.
It travelled from Latin into Old French, and from Old French into English. The Latin root was the word Roman poets reached for when describing shadow and shade. Virgil used it in the Aeneid for the ghosts of the dead, the shades that drifted through the underworld. The Old French form named the shade cast by trees, the kind of cool darkness a traveller might rest under on a summer road. Milton used it in Paradise Lost in 1667, describing woods so dense no light could reach the ground beneath them.
Behind the Latin lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *andho-, meaning 'blind and dark'. It named the condition of being unable to see, of moving through the world without sight. The same root gave Sanskrit andha- and Avestan anda-, both meaning 'blind or dark', in texts composed around 1500 BC. From that ancient root came the Latin word for shadow, the darkness that falls across a surface and briefly takes the light away.
UMBRELLA and PENUMBRA share the same Latin root. UMBRELLA came into English in the early seventeenth century from Italian, where ombrella named a portable shade carried against the sun, literally a little shadow. PENUMBRA came from Latin paene, meaning 'almost', combined with the same root for shadow, naming the half-shadow at the edge of an eclipse where the light is not fully blocked.
Shakespeare used the word in Hamlet in 1604, in its older sense to describe a shadowy semblance, an outline of a person rather than the person themselves. By the 1620s it had acquired a new sense in the language of diplomacy and court politics, naming the feeling of displeasure felt by a person who believed they had been slighted or overlooked. William Temple, the English diplomat and essayist, used the phrase in 1683, writing of allies who had taken great offence at his journey to The Hague. Today it retains a faintly archaic dignity that can lend a humorous flair to casual conversation.
