THE FIRST TRADE or bartering began between farmers 10,000 years ago or more, and the currency was corn. Long before the invention of coins, let alone banknotes, the value of wheat crops was well understood, even down to the worth of single seeds – that’s the reason that gold, in the smallest transactions, is still traded in grains.
The urge to buy and the satisfaction we get from an armful of designer shopping bags goes back thousands of years too. The Romans had a word for it: emacitus, the desire to buy things. The English version, emacity, became obsolete in the twentieth century, replaced by less elegant terms such as retail therapy and shopaholics.
The Romans also had a warning, Caveat emptor, which means ‘Buyer beware!’ Getting your money back was no easy matter on the Via Appia: the market traders didn’t offer a thirty-day cooling-off period. Goods could not be redeemed, or bought back. Anything irredeemable cannot be converted into cash – your purchase is beyond redemption. Redemption gained a spiritual sense in the Christian world, with the idea that rescued souls had been bought back from the devil. In Middle English it was redempcioun, and in Old French raenson, which became ransom in medieval England: still buying back a soul, but in a rather different way. When Richard the Lionheart, the English king, was captured and held prisoner by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1193, the ransom demand was 65,000 pounds of silver – more than double the amount that the Treasury in London levied in taxes every year. While Richard’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was politicking like mad to raise the money, his brother Prince John (who was running the country while Richard had been off fighting the Crusades) raised about half that sum and offered it as a bribe to the emperor, to keep the king in a dungeon. When he was finally freed, Richard, who had more courage than brains, forgave his malevolent younger brother and even named him as his heir.
A praemium was the booty claimed by the commander of a conquering army, the cream of the spoils. By the era of the English Civil War, the word had been co-opted by the earliest insurance salesmen, and now a premium is the annual cost of your car insurance. It can still mean the first bonus to be paid out, which is why everyone has a few premium bonds.
To buy up every last item in stock was perimere, literally to buy right through, and that gives us peremptory – decisive, final, beyond all question and even dictatorial.
When a product was readily available, it was pro-emptus, which meant that you could get it promptly. On occasions, merchants had more stock than they could display, so the bulk of it was kept in a warehouse or promptuarium. A well-stocked mind is a treasure house, and if you have trouble remembering facts, you need an almanac or ready reference book, sometimes called a promptuary. That’s why an actor who forgets his lines can rely on a helpful whisper from the prompter. And if that actor abandons the script and starts making up dialogue, he is speaking impromptu.
If something was not for sale, it was ex-emptus or exempt. An outstanding purchase is an exemplar, but every sale counts and so everything is a good example … until example lost its initial syllable, somewhere in France 1,000 years ago, and became sample.
Embezzlement is fraud, usually tampering with documents to steal money. The fraudster Bernie Madoff, a former stockbroker who persuaded investors to give him their life savings and somehow defrauded about $65bn, was sent to prison for 150 years – an exemplary sentence, intended to deter copycat criminals.
In Ancient Greece, a commercial traveller with his trunkload of samples was emporos: em + poros, a path. He blazed trading trails such as the Persian Royal Road, which ran from Turkey’s Mediterranean coast to modern-day Iran. Emporium meant merchandise in Latin; today it’s the word for a shop that sells everything. Emporetic paper was rough papyrus used for parcelling up purchases, the ancestor of gift wrap and brown paper.
EVERYTHING THAT IS must exist. ‘I think, therefore I am,’ said the philosopher Rene Descartes, and so he was, but Neolithic man had reached that conclusion millennia before him. That’s why es had a double meaning – to be, and to be true.
In Latin, to be was esse, an essential verb. Ancient wisdom held that the universe was composed of four elements – earth, wind, fire and water – but some mystics claimed there had to be something binding and vivifying them all, a life force, a godhead … a fifth essence. The Greeks believed it was the air that the gods breathed, permeating all matter. Fifth was quinta, so metaphysicians spoke of the quintessence. Victorian scientists believed it was an invisible substance that transmitted light and radio waves, and called it the ether. These days, physicists use the word quintessence to cover some unknown sort of dark energy that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Ether isn’t there, of course. It is entirely absent. Ab in Latin means away, so ab-esse gives us absence. The opposite is to be right in the middle of things, or inter-esse, which is an interesting thought. Einstein said that compound interest was the ‘greatest mathematical wonder of all time’ and ‘the eighth wonder of the world … He that understands it, earns it. He that doesn’t, pays it.’ Don’t be fooled by his wit: Albert was clever with equations but terrible with cash. To afford a divorce from his first wife, he had to promise her every penny of the Nobel prize money that he hadn’t even won yet.
For complex reasons of Latin grammar, prae-esse, which means before being, becomes praesens when it’s a participle. (A participle is a verb that is pretending to be a noun, such as a ‘happening’ … as opposed to a participator, which is anyone who loves to join in and is generally a bit of a party animal.)
Praesens means the present, the here and now. Presently doesn’t; it means soon, all in good time; at least that will give us a chance to make ourselves presentable. Presence can be impressive demeanour and charismatic presentation. The presence-chamber of a palace was the grand reception room where the king met ambassadors and representatives of the people – not so that they could be presented to him, but so they could be admitted into his august presence. On the other hand, a presence can be something ethereal: an incorporeal being that hovers on the edge of the senses. And in a spookily confusing way, a presension doesn’t even derive from the present: it’s a foreboding, a pre-sense of what hasn’t yet happened.
Then there is pro-esse, to be in favour of something, which survives in English as prowess. To make the word easier to say, it gained a consonant, became prodesse and turned into prosper as well as proud. Pride goes before a fall, because it’s one of the deadly sins – and sin is an es word too. Esse, to be, equates to sinfulness: thanks to Adam and that apple, our mere existence is a state of original sin.
The Greek word for existence is ontos. It gives us entity. Ontology is the study of being. The ontological argument is a theoretical proof of the existence of God: the very fact that we’re here and capable of imagining a supreme deity means that there has to be one. Untology, logically, ought to be the opposite, the study of unbeing and atheism, but it isn’t.
Ontologically, existence is truth, because anything that is is truly real. If that doesn’t make immediate sense, say it slowly, like a tranced-out hippy … truly real, man. Es is truth, or sooth. Forsooth means truly, though it always was a sarcastic word, and a soothsayer is a charlatan who foretells the future. But a soothfast man is loyal and truthful, and to soothe was originally to prove a fact. It came to mean the opposite, convincing people that a falsehood was actually true, and by extension soothing became flattery and cajoling – which is how it came to mean mitigating pain and calming the nerves.
Because ontos was existence, the connected word eteos meant reality, and etumon was the true or literal meaning of a word. And that is your actual etymology.