Etymon #55
The archer's flaw
The word entered English in the mid-fifteenth century, formed from two existing English words. Its earliest recorded use as a single compound word appears in 1591, in Arte of Warre, a military manual written by an English soldier who had served in the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule in the 1560s and 1570s. It named a narrow vertical slit cut into a castle wall. Behind one of its two elements lay a Middle Dutch word meaning to watch or peer.
One element came from Middle Dutch into Middle English, the other was already rooted in Old English. The Middle Dutch watching word had entered Middle English by the late fourteenth century. William Langland used it in Piers Plowman, his long allegorical poem about the search for Christian salvation, where the devils rush to block up the slits in the walls of hell to stop the light of heaven breaking through. The second element meant a hollow or cavity, recorded in Old English by the ninth century.
Behind the Old English element lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *kel-, meaning to cover or conceal. From that root came the Old English verb meaning to cover or hide, and the noun naming a hollow space, a place where something might be out of sight. Behind the Middle Dutch element lay a Germanic root for watching without being seen, surviving in glupen in German meaning to look at slyly, and gluipen in Dutch meaning to sneak.
HELL and HULL share the same ancient root as the second element of this compound. HELL came from Old English hel, named for the concealment of the dead beneath the earth, recorded in English by the ninth century. HULL came from Old English hulu, the outer casing of a seed or ship, the covering that keeps what is inside out of sight. Both descend from the same Proto-Indo-European root meaning to cover or conceal.
