Etymon #71
Screams then sighs
The word entered English in the 1570s, from Latin. Its earliest recorded sense described the deliberate infliction of bodily pain. Thomas Nashe used it twice in a single year, in 1593. In Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, a religious work about guilt and repentance, he described monks who starved and mortified their own flesh. In Strange Newes, a pamphlet written during his print feud with the writer Gabriel Harvey, he warned against straining one's own mind too hard in pursuit of cleverness.
It travelled directly from Latin. In 1623 the lexicographer Henry Cockeram used the English word to describe a bronze bull built for the tyrant Phalaris of Sicily, its inventor Perilaus promising that a victim's screams would come out sounding like the bellowing of the animal itself. Phalaris tested the device on Perilaus before having him thrown from a cliff.
Behind the Latin verb lay two parts, a prefix and a root. The prefix meant thoroughly, a matter of emphasis rather than direction. The root meant to crucify, built on the Latin word for a cross. This word for a cross has no confirmed ancestor beyond Latin. One proposed link is to an ancient word for a human backbone, but the word may have entered Latin from a language outside the Indo-European family.
CROSS and CRUSADE share the same Latin root as this word. CROSS reached English from Old Norse, which had itself borrowed it from Old Irish, tracing all the way back to the Latin word for the stake on which the condemned were hanged or impaled. CRUSADE arrived far later, in the 1570s, from French, describing the medieval Christian military campaigns to recover the Holy Land, its own root the same Latin verb meaning to mark with a cross.
By the eighteenth century the word had drifted from the physical rack toward something milder. Samuel Johnson, writing in his periodical The Idler in 1759, used it to describe the suffering of a shopkeeper forced to listen to a customer talk on and on with nothing worth saying. By 1830 the word was being used to describe the sound of a poorly played bassoon, tormenting an entire church congregation on a Sunday morning.
Twelve letters.
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