From pig-sticking to etiquette and the parking ticket

One of the pleasant by-products of internationalism is the multilingual labelling you get on products that are sold throughout (eg) Europe. My power saw is a sierra in Spanish - of course, the jagged mountain range - and German users of my mower can refer to adjusting the height of the cutter by the one-word Hoheneinstellung (sorry, the programme in which I am writing this doesn't seem to be able to manage the diaerisis over the 'o'). And where we use the six-letter term 'handle, our German gardening cousins need the ten-letter but pleasant-sounding word Griffstiel.

But what prompts me to write this little blog is my purchase yesterday of 'laser labels' for one of my computer projects. The French users of these labels call them etiquettes laser (sorry once again for the absence of acute accent on the first 'e'). The Germans refer to etiketten fur (another missing daerisis) laserdrucker ; the Spanish etiquetas laser; and the Dutch etiketten voor laserprinter.

Now I thought 'etiquette' was something to do with good manners. My first thought was that the French ''e' acute' usually indicates a missing 's' in the derivation. Could the original for these European labels be nothing to do with good manners, but some sort of term like 'stickette' ? I rather liked that idea, and wondered why we Brits didn't use 'stickette' rather than 'self-adhesive label'.

But no - sticky labels are indeed etymologically related to etiquette. In the more formal days of high society in the mid-eighteenth century advice on proper behaviour was sometimes handed to would-be socialites on printed cards or 'tickets'. It seems that good manners were thought to depend to a large extent on one's ability to 'affix the right label' to social distinctions.

The origin of the term was probably German sticken or Dutch steken (related to English 'stick' - think of pig-sticking) meaning to pierce or prick: the term is still used in those languages to refer to embroidery. It seems just possible that applied patches of fabric lent their name to slips of paper, dockets, cards, notices and so on, in sixteenth century England. Pinning was like sticking, whether sticking by pin or sticking with adhesive. 'Sticky' meaning gluey didn't enter our language until the eightenth century. The notion of 'stuck' was associated with pins, nails or spears rather than seccotine or copydex.

As for the French language's custom of using the acute 'e' to indicate a former (but now abandoned) 's', often in a word derived from Latin, this seems indeed to be what happened in this case: the difference being that French etiquette derived not from Latin but from the Germanic verb sticken.

So English 'sticky label' is after all linked to etiquette both semantically and etymologically.

From pig-sticking to etiquette and the parking ticket