Gentry and Gingerly

In the Dictionary Corner of this week's Radio Times, 'Countdown's Lexicographer' tells us that our term 'gingerly', meaning [in my definition] 'cautiously, carefully, warily', is related to the words 'gentry' and 'gentlemanly', being derived from an Old French term gensor, a form of' the Latin verb genitus meaning 'born'.  Why this Lexicographer is so certain is not clear.  Eric Partridge, in his important volume 'Origins' only goes so far as to say that 'gingerly' probably comes from Old French genchor, the comparative of gent [= well-born]. To proceed gingerly is thus to walk warily - perhaps with the mincing step of a self-conscious gentleman. (Who said that gentlemen - even self-conscious ones - mince*, though ?)  Perhaps they did in the eighteenth century, say, when they had to cross a filthy road.

Walter W Skeat, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge in the late nineteenth century, thought that 'gingerly' came from a Scandinavian term  gingla or gangla meaning to go gently or to totter.   The excellent Encarta Dictionary (1999) tells us that the origin of 'gingerly' is uncertain.  The latest Shorter Oxford English Dictionary agrees with our Radio Times Lexicographer (or, more likely the RTL looked it up in the SOED):  but earlier editions of SOED admitted that it was 'of unknown origin'.  So someone must have fairly recently discovered something new about this (hmm) serious problem.

The moral of all this seems to be that we have a few words in our vocabulary of which no one is quite sure what the origin is**.  Perhaps the RTCL is right; we can't prove otherwise.  But was she right to write of the [Old French] term gensor as 'a different form of [Latin] genitus ? 

*  Interesting footnote:  'mince' (from Latin minor = less, small) means to 'make small - so mincing steps are little, short ones.  Compare our words minor, minute, miniature.

**  Let's try again; 'of the origin of which no one is quite sure.'  That's better.
      
All this blog-post is foolish pedantry, no doubt.   But, in the words of a song that used to be sung by Deanna Durbin in the 1940s [?], "It's foolish but it's fun".

Gentry and Gingerly