[51] The knave of clubs. The name was also given to Lord Palmerston.
CHAPTER VI
WORDS AND MEANINGS
We have all noticed the fantastic way in which ideas are linked together in our thoughts. One thing suggests another with which it is accidentally associated in memory, the second suggests a third, and, in the course even of a few seconds, we find that we have travelled from one subject to another so remote that it requires an effort to reconstruct the series of links which connects them. The same thing happens with words. A large number of words, despite great changes of sense, retain the fundamental meaning of the original, but in many cases this is quite lost. A truer image than that of the linked chain would be that of a sphere giving off in various directions a number of rays each of which may form the nucleus of a fresh sphere. Or we may say that at each link of the chain there is a possibility of another chain branching off in a direction of its own. In Cotgrave's time to garble (see p. [21]) and to canvass, i.e. sift through canvas, meant the same thing. Yet how different is their later sense development.
BAN—BUREAU
There is a word ban, found in Old High German and Anglo-Saxon, and meaning, as far back as it can be traced, a proclamation containing a threat, hence a command or prohibition. We have it in banish, to put under the ban. The proclamation idea survives in the banns of marriage and in Fr. arrière-ban, "a proclamation, whereby those that hold authority of the king in mesne tenure, are summoned to assemble, and serve him in his warres" (Cotgrave). This is folk-etymology for Old Fr. arban, Old High Ger. hari-ban, army summons. Slanting off from the primitive idea of proclamation is that of rule or authority. The French for outskirts is banlieue, properly the "circuit of a league, or thereabouts" (Cotgrave) over which the local authority extended. All public institutions within such a radius were associated with ban, e.g., un four, un moulin à ban, "a comon oven or mill whereat all men may, and every tenant and vassall must, bake, and grind" (Cotgrave). The French adjective banal, used in this connection, gradually developed from the meaning of "common" that of "common-place," in which sense it is now familiar in English.[52]
Bureau, a desk, was borrowed from French in the 17th century. In modern French it means not only the desk, but also the office itself and the authority exercised by the office. Hence our familiar bureaucracy, likely to become increasingly familiar. The desk was so called because covered with bureau, Old Fr. burel, "a thicke course cloath, of a brown russet, or darke mingled, colour" (Cotgrave), whence Mid. Eng. borel, rustic, clownish, lit. roughly clad, which occurs as late as Spenser—
"How be I am but rude and borrel,
Yet nearer ways I know."