The Usher and the Ostler

It was a wedding, earlier this afternoon in the ancient church just opposite our home, that made me think of the term 'usher'. How does one 'ush', and where does the term come from ?

To start with, one doesn't 'ush' - there is no such word. But we might well have guessed (correctly) that someone had used it by now: in fact SOED cites the 'dialect and colloquial' verb to 'ush', a 'back-formation' from the word 'usher'.

We have had the term 'usher' in our language, in one form or another, since Chaucer's day, when English adopted the French huissier to mean a 'door-keeper'. This French word derived from the medieval Latin ussarius, which in turn had evolved from the old Latin ostiarius.

This basis of this is ostium - Latin for a door; and the ultimate root here is L os meaning a mouth.

We can see how to the Romans the 'mouth' metaphorically became a door - a hole in the wall that we pass through. But it is curious how in modern use the 'mouth' metaphor can operate both ways, in and out. The mouth of Hell, I take it, is one that greedily gobbles up a regular intake of sinners: once inside, you stay there.

The mouth of a volcano may well swallow up any one unwise enough to stand on the rim; but it also is the mouth from which the lava is spewed. A mouthpiece for the government utters authoritative speech, which we simple people are expected to 'swallow' as gospel. The mouth of a wasps' nest and the mouth of a cave both allow ingress and egress - the 'door' metaphor again.

The mouth of a river, though, is really a one-way passage; true, a rising tide can, as it were, push water back into the estuary, but it is disgorging rather than swallowing that the term signifies.

'Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings . . . ', runs the proverb; but nevertheless we can 'put words' in people's mouths (ready for them to regurgitate, of course).

Incidentally, although in days gone by you might meet an 'ostler' at the door of an inn, the term does not mean a door-keeper and is in no way related to ostiarius. 'Ostler' is related to 'host' and 'hotel', 'hospitals' and 'hospitality', all based on a quite different old Latin word hospis meaning a 'host'.

The Usher and the Ostler