Etymon #65
Moving little stones
The word entered English in 1570, in the first English translation of Euclid's Elements, the geometry textbook of the ancient world. Its preface was written by John Dee, mathematician, astrologer and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, who promised that the skilled reader would be able to fix the places of the planets for all times. In its first English decades the word's usage included the casting of horoscopes. Behind the English lay Latin, and behind Latin lay a small object.
Latin carried it into English directly, drawing on a verb for reckoning. The same verb spread through the Romance languages, into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French, and survives in all four today. It had entered English once before, in the mid fourteenth century, through Old French, but that earlier borrowing faded. Shakespeare used it in Julius Caesar, in a scene of storms and omens, where old men, fools and children were said to do it.
Behind the Latin verb lay a noun for a small stone, a pebble used as a counter on the Roman counting-board. To reckon a sum was to move pebbles. The noun was the diminutive of calx, meaning 'limestone', which Latin had taken from Greek khalix, meaning 'a small pebble'. Beyond the Greek its origin is unknown, though some scholars point to an ancient root meaning 'to split or break up', a connection never settled. The same stone survives in modern medicine as the word for a kidney stone.
CHALK and CAUSEWAY share the same Latin root as this word, the first with certainty, the second with a question mark. CHALK came first, borrowed into Old English from Latin calx, the limestone behind the counting pebble, and in English it was used to name the soft white stone of the southern counties, its modern spelling settled by the early fourteenth century. CAUSEWAY took its modern form in the 1570s, through Old French, from a Latin word for a paved way, built either on the same calx, a road paved with limestone, or on a second Latin calx, meaning 'heel', a road stamped firm by treading, and no one has settled which.
For decades after its arrival the word kept one foot in the stars. In Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2, a cunning man cast a nobleman's birth and told him that by water he should die, and in 1667 Milton in Paradise Lost pictured astronomers who would come to model heaven and number the stars. By the eighteenth century it had cooled into a word for planning. Jonathan Swift, in A Modest Proposal in 1729, the satire that offered the children of the poor as food for the rich, declared that he had fitted his remedy for the one kingdom of Ireland alone. By 1805 it had crossed into American speech, where in the mouths of Yankee traders and clockmakers it came to mean simply to suppose.
Nine letters.
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