A Concierge Debouching

Among the French words that we use quite commonly in our language, are debouch and concierge; the former meaning (most commonly) to emerge from a narrow opening, and the latter a caretaker or 'porter'.

The verb deboucher in French can be either transitive (signifiying to 'force something out of an opening' - eg a cork from a bottle); or intransitive, meaning to 'emerge from an opening'. This usage is mostly confined to military contexts: I remember hearing the word during my national service, without really being aware what it meant. It derives fairly obviously, from the French word bouche meaning 'mouth, and means to 'emerge from a narrow entrance or defile'. We occasionally also borrow the French phrase bonne bouche meaning a tasty mouthful, a tit-bit*.

* Fr bouche, like Italian bocca, derive from Latin bucca = cheek, mouth. A trumpet in ancient Rome was a bucina, and a trumpeter was a bucinator.

Concierge, the term used most commonly in France for the caretaker of a block of flats or apartments, is a more intriguing word that entered our own language from France in the sixteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary believes that it evolved from an early French word cumcerges derived from Medieval Latin consergius, representing an Old Latin conservus, the con- prefix meaning 'together with' and the main part servus meaning a slave or servant. Thus the word might have originally meant a 'fellow-slave'.

There certainly was (according to R E Latham's Revised Medieval Latin Word-List (1994) a medieval Latin term consergeria, referring to the office of door-keeper; but while the element serg- seems not to have a clear derivation from the Latin servus, there is a clearer derivation of medieval Latin sergia from L cera meaning wax, or candle. Could the office of door-keeper have had some association with candles ? The person who identifies you in candle-light when you arrive at the door in the dark ?

A Concierge Debouching