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

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