What Marriage Really Is

. . . as according to the Norse.

As promised yesterday, today’s word-of-the-day is “fellow,” since the Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories was so kind as to refer me to this word when I looked up “companion.”

According to this book, “fellow” is descended from the Old Norse word for partner, félagi. Literally, this word means “fee-layer.” The plural, félagar, “were hose who laid together their property (fee) for some common purpose.” It goes on to say that even marriage was called a félag, or “fee-laying.”

Old English stole this word and changed it to féolaga; it has since changed to “fellow.”

Moral of this story? All you need for a marriage is to be sharing property (which makes apartment buildings seem pretty odd). Also, it is technically incorrect to call a boyfriend one’s “fellow” if one is not living with him.

True Friendship

Every day in my German class, we start out with a slang word of the day (auf Deutsch, natürlich). Today, we were going over different words for friends and acquaintances. One that really struck me was “der Kumpel” or “der Kumpan,” which the professor said meant “buddy.” As soon as I saw it, I thought how close to the English “companion” it was. This, of course, spurred me to look up the etymology for the word “companion.” (Yes, I am a language geek.)

According to the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, companion comes from the Latin companio (com-, with + panis, bread), and from the Gothic gahlaiba, one who eats of the same bread (ga-, with + hlaifs, bread). The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories goes further, saying, “The Latin companio is probably a loan translation from some such Germanic word, converting the individual constituents of the Germanic compound into their Latin equivalents.” It also refers me to the etymology of the word “fellow,” so that’ll be tomorrow’s post.

Moral of the story: true friends are the ones you eat with (but probably not the ones you eat).