None of the above words are related. Although I could be lying.
Late twentieth-century satire magazine Spy used to run a hilarious feature called “Separated at Birth?,” in which the editors juxtaposed the photos of two absolutely unrelated (we think) celebs, public figures and notorious sorts who looked remarkably alike. Two of my favorite installments were Yasser Arafat paired with Ringo Starr, and on the even more obscure side, Muammar Kaddafi paired with game-show ubiquitor Bert Convy (who had no identifiable credential for being on game shows other than the fact that he was always on game shows).
Let’s play that game a bit, with some Starrs and Arafats (Kaddafis and Convys are too passe). Separated at birth? Guess which two of the following three pairs team unrelated parentage, and which one indeed represents direct bloodlines:
• pest/pester
• pen/pencil
• pencil/penis (sorry, I couldn’t resist)
Did you spot the two unrelated pairs? And the pair of words that are related?
Let’s take up the unrelated ones first—starting with the pair whose non sequitarianism is perhaps most difficult to discern: Pester did not originally mean “being a pest.” To pester was “to impede,” and is likely related to an obsolete English verb impester,
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Bill Brohaugh
meaning “hobble,” which probably traces back through French to an assumed Latin word (impastoriare) meaning “hobble.” The past of pest is a bit more severe. When it came into English, it was used to mean the Black Death—the bubonic plague. Pest traces through French back to pestis, the Latin word for “pestilence.”
Then there’s option #3, for which I apologize: pencil/penis. Yes, they look alike, and as I said, I couldn’t resist . . . because they are the related words. Penis is Latin for “tail” or, um, “penis” (likely by vulgar Latin slang use of the “tail” meaning). Pencil came to us a figurative use of the diminutive of penis —“little tail”—meaning “brush.” In English, a pencil was a brush before it was a writing instrument.
And that convenient red herring pen/pencil? Pen does so very much look like a shortening of pencil, but the word for the writing tool comes from French penne —“feather,” as in a feather quill.
A little advice: If you’re writing this all down . . . use a pen. 6