The Endearment of Bedlam. Whynot?

I’ll bet you had no idea where the title of this piece was going to take you. To be honest, I didn’t, either. But this time no politics, no outrage, just a whimsical word study.

Bedlam is one of those few words in English whose meaning can’t be guessed by its similarity to other words. It has no root, no ancient Latin antecedent, it just appeared. Its origins, though obscure, are rather sad.

London’s Priory of Saint Mary of Bethlehem was one of the earliest institutions that might roughly qualify as a psychiatric hospital. With little care and no treatment, the condition of the patients, or more accurately inmates, was left to deteriorate such that the collective wild disorder in the filthy and chaotic setting came to be known as bedlam, a local pronunciation of “Bethlehem”.

Endearment is a marvelous word for the student of the history of the English language. Although the ancestors of our language are French and Germanic, most words trace their origin exclusively to one or the other, but not both. Endearment is unusual because it is a mashup of Germanic and French.

The root word dear is obviously of Germanic origin, going all the way back to the Proto-Germanic deurja. But the en-root-ment construction is a basic tool of French descriptive noun building, and most English words such as encouragement are direct liftings from French to English. Endearment is unusual in that it is French structure grafted upon a Germanic root.

We also see the evolution of language in family names. Let’s consider the common Lunenburg County family name Whynot. When you live in Lunenburg County (or pretty well anywhere in Nova Scotia) you’ll know the name is variously spelled Whynott, Weynacht, Weinot, Weinaut, Weinaught, Whynacht, and Weinacht. The last one is the giveaway.

These, and several dozen other classic Lunenburg County names, trace back to the original settlement of “Foreign Protestants” from the borderlands of Germany and France about two hundred and fifty years ago. For some, the anglicization of the name was a deliberate thing so as to appear to be part of the dominant English culture, while for others it was the carelessness (or arrogance) of recording officials.

Finally, let’s take the French family name Beauchamps. When representatives of the family settled in English speaking areas, some kept the name as is, some changed it to Beecham, and some (as in one of my wife’s distant uncles) simply translated it to Fairfield. So much for tracing family trees!

So there we have four quick studies in the twists and turns of the English language. No wonder all of us, English speakers and non-English speakers alike, have trouble with the tongue!