Etymon #61
Davenant's hardly dull
The word entered English in 1651, in Gondibert, an unfinished verse epic by Sir William Davenant, poet laureate and theatre manager, written while he was imprisoned by the Parliamentary government in the Tower of London, awaiting trial for high treason after the execution of Charles I. John Milton, who would later write Paradise Lost, was then serving as its Latin Secretary and intervened to secure his release. Davenant used the word for the hidden schemes and plots of men who could not be trusted. Behind the English lay a French verb, and behind that an Italian one, and behind both lay Latin. The man who introduced it to English is buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.
Latin carried it into Italian, and Italian carried it into French, before it reached English in the seventeenth century. In Italy the word entered the language of the theatre, where commedia dell'arte, Italy's improvised comic theatre, popular from the sixteenth century, built its plots around deception and scheming. It had appeared in English once before, in the late fourteenth century, borrowed from Old French or directly from the Latin, but failed to establish itself. Samuel Pepys, the naval administrator whose diaries are among the most vivid accounts of seventeenth century London, used it in the 1660s to capture the clandestine love affairs of the court of Charles II.
Behind the Latin verb lay two older parts, a prefix and a noun. The first was in-, the Latin prefix meaning ‘into’. The second was tricae, a Latin plural noun meaning perplexities, hindrances, trifles and tricks. Cicero, the Roman statesman and orator who died in 43 BC, used it in his letters to describe the petty obstacles and distractions that get in the way of serious matters. Its own origin is disputed, with theories ranging from a PIE root meaning ‘to turn’ to connections with the ancient languages of Central Asia, neither of which has been confirmed.
TRICK and EXTRICATE share the same Latin root as this word. TRICK came into English from the Norman dialect of Old French in the early fifteenth century, probably from the same Latin root, though the precise connection is disputed. EXTRICATE came from Latin extricāre, built from the same root with a prefix meaning 'out of', naming the act of disentangling someone from a difficult situation. It is the word we reach for when someone needs rescuing from an awkward conversation or a bad decision.
For its first half century in English the word named deception and secret plotting. Aphra Behn, the playwright and spy who became the first professional woman writer in English, used it in 1679 in The Feign'd Curtizans, a comedy set in Rome where disguise and mistaken identity drive every scene. The plotting sense was established by 1714. The modern sense, to excite curiosity or fascination, did not arrive until 1894. The Oxford English Dictionary called it a modern gallicism, an English word that had taken on the French meaning.
