(no subject)
I am reading John Florio's amazing 1603 translation of Montaigne at the moment, and in an essay about Idleness, I came across the following passage:
As we see some idle-fallow grounds, if they be fat and fertile, to bring foorth store and sundrie roots of wilde and unprofitable weeds, and that to keepe them in ure we must subject and imploy them with certaine seeds for our use and service. And as we see some women, though single and alone, often to bring foorth lumps of shapelesse flesh, whereas to produce a perfect and naturall generation, they must be manured with another kinde of seede. . .
Which is a strange and unusual thing to say however you look at it; not to mention an unsettling use of “manured”. But I was more fixated on that word ure, never having seen it before.
It turns out that in ure means “in use, in practice” and comes from an Anglo-Norman variant of Old French euvre. In other words it's directly equivalent to existing English words oeuvre (from French), opera (from Italian) and opus (straight from the Latin source). I had no idea there was this semi-native version of the word floating around - which was still in use well into the 18th century!
At first I thought maybe Florio had gone for an unusual word because it matched the (Middle-) French source, but the phrase Montaigne actually uses is “pour les tenir en office”, so I guess "in ure" was natural enough English back then for it to be a solid colloquial choice.
Incidentally, the corresponding Spanish word is huebra, which was also new to me. It's a fairly obscure legal term for a measure of land, roughly an acre - the etymological sense is of the amount of land which can be "worked" by one man in a day. It's incredible what a diverse range of specific meanings all these cognates have taken on.
As we see some idle-fallow grounds, if they be fat and fertile, to bring foorth store and sundrie roots of wilde and unprofitable weeds, and that to keepe them in ure we must subject and imploy them with certaine seeds for our use and service. And as we see some women, though single and alone, often to bring foorth lumps of shapelesse flesh, whereas to produce a perfect and naturall generation, they must be manured with another kinde of seede. . .
Which is a strange and unusual thing to say however you look at it; not to mention an unsettling use of “manured”. But I was more fixated on that word ure, never having seen it before.
It turns out that in ure means “in use, in practice” and comes from an Anglo-Norman variant of Old French euvre. In other words it's directly equivalent to existing English words oeuvre (from French), opera (from Italian) and opus (straight from the Latin source). I had no idea there was this semi-native version of the word floating around - which was still in use well into the 18th century!
At first I thought maybe Florio had gone for an unusual word because it matched the (Middle-) French source, but the phrase Montaigne actually uses is “pour les tenir en office”, so I guess "in ure" was natural enough English back then for it to be a solid colloquial choice.
Incidentally, the corresponding Spanish word is huebra, which was also new to me. It's a fairly obscure legal term for a measure of land, roughly an acre - the etymological sense is of the amount of land which can be "worked" by one man in a day. It's incredible what a diverse range of specific meanings all these cognates have taken on.