triumph

The Triumph of Titus and Vespasian, Giulio Romano, c. 1540

19 March 2025

The word triumph comes to us from Latin, but its usual meaning in that language is not the one we commonly give to it in English. To the ancient Romans, a triumphus was a parade celebrating a great military victory. The victorious general would ride a chariot through the streets of Rome to the steps of the Senate, a slave standing beside him holding a crown of laurels over his head. The general’s army would follow, leading the defeated enemy commander, captured slaves, and great wagons of spoils from the victory. The day was a holiday, and the entire city would turn out to cheer, to feast, and to drink. Roman poets also used the word triumphus to refer to the victory itself, as did later prose writers in Imperial Rome. But this second sense was relatively rare in Latin, and the word usually referred only to the procession and accompanying celebrations.

But in medieval Anglo-Latin we see the sense of triumph meaning the victory itself, not just its celebration. Here is an example from Bede’s c. 731 Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in a hymn that uses victory in battle as a metaphor for virginity, 4.20, 398.

Multus in orbe uiget per sobria corda triumphus, sobrietatis amor multus in orbe uiget.

(Much triumph flourishes in the world through sober hearts; much love of sobriety flourishes in the world.)

But triumph was not borrowed into English during the pre-Conquest period. I know of one example of the word in an English text, but it is an example of the Latin word appearing in an English text, not an anglicization of the Latin. That text is the translation of the history of the world written by Orosius, a late Roman historian. The translator uses triumphan—the Latin root with an Old English accusative suffix—and adds a lengthy note not contained in the Latin original on the meaning of the word, thus indicating that it was not familiar to his audience:

Þæt hy triumphan heton, þæt wæs þonne hy hwylc folc mid gefeohte ofercumen hæfdon, þonne wæs heora þeaw þæt sceoldon ealle hyra senatus cuman ongean hyra consulas æfter þæm gefeohte, syx mila from ðære byrig, mid crætwæne, mid golde & mid gimstanum gefrætwedum, and hi sceoldon bringan feowerfetes twa hwite. Þonne hi hamweard foran, þonne sceoldon hyra senatus ridan on crætwænum wiðæftan þam consulum, and þa menn beforan him dryfan gebundene þe þær gefangene wæron, ðæt heora mærþa sceoldon þe þrymlicran beon.

(They called that a triumph, that was when they had overcome a nation in battle, then it was their custom that all the senators should come out to meet their consuls after the battle, six miles from the city with a chariot adorned with gold and gemstones, and they should bring two white four-footed animals. Then as they went homeward, the senators would ride in chariots behind the consuls and the men who had been captured would be driven bound before them, so that their glory should be more magnificent.)

Triumph really makes its English appearance in the late fourteenth century, when it is used both to mean a victory celebration and the victory iteself. Geoffrey Chaucer uses the word in his poem Anelida and Arcite, written c. 1375, which opens with a description of a triumph given for Theseus following his conquest of the Scythians. Yes, the context is Athenian, not Roman, but medieval poets aren’t known for being scrupulous about historical accuracy, and the change of venue shows that Chaucer is using the word in a context a bit broader than Roman history:

With his tryumphe and laurer-corouned thus,
In al the flour of Fortunes yevynge
Let I this noble prince Theseus
Toward Athenes in his wey rydinge,
And founde I wol in shortly for to bringe
The slye wey of that I gan to write,
Of quene Anelida and fals Arcite.

(With his triumph and thus laurel-crowned in all the flower of Fortune’s bounty, I leave this noble prince Theseus riding on his way toward Athens, and I will soon try to bring about the sly way in which I began to to write of Queen Anelida and the false Arcite.)

Chaucer is still using the word in the sense of a victory processional, but at around the same time John Trevisa uses triumph to refer to a victory itself in his translation of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon:

Atte laste Maxencius was overcome atte brydge Pount Milenum, and Constantine went to Rome, and made peynte the signe and tokene of þe crosse in þe riȝt hondes of þe ymages þat senatoures hadde arered in worschippe of his triumphis and of his victorie, and he made write underneþe, “Þis is þe signe and tokene of þat God of lyf þat may nouȝt be overcome.”

(At last Maxentius was defeated at the Milvian Bridge, and Constantine when to Rome and had the sign and token of the cross painted onto the right hands of the images that the senators had erected to honor his triumph and victory, and he caused to have written underneath, “This is the sign and token of the God of life that may not be defeated.”)

Since the late fourteenth century, both senses, the historical sense referring to a Roman victory celebration and a more general one referring a victory or great achievement have been in common use in English.

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Sources:

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 4.20, 398.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “Anelida and Arcite.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, lines 43–49, 377.

Higden, Ranulf. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis: Together with English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century (1874), vol. 5. John Trevisa, trans. Joseph Rawson Lumby, ed. London: Kraus Reprint, 1964, 121–23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. triumphus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. triumphe, n.

Orosius. The Old English History of the World. Malcolm R. Godden, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2016, 2.4, 112–15.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, triumph, n., triumph, v.

Image credit: Giulio Romano, c. 1540. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

spendthrift / dingthrift

17 March 2025

Etymologically, spendthrift is rather unremarkable. It is a simple compound of the verb to spend and the noun thrift, meaning savings. A spendthrift, therefore, is someone who spends their savings, one who wastes money.

The earliest use of the word that I’m aware of is in Stephen Batman’s 1582 translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things). Batman adds the following commentary to Bartholomæus’s section on gold:

Golde maketh wise men glad: and spendthrifts mad.

Preceding spendthrift by a couple decades is dingthrift, that is someone who dings or smashes their savings. Ding has ameliorated over the centuries; now it means a minor blow or strike, while in the past it was more forceful. We see dingthrift in Thomas Drant’s 1566 translation of one of Horace’s satires:

I woulde the not a nipfarthinge,
nor yet a niggarde haue,
Wilte thou therefore, a drunkard be,
a dingthrifte, and a knaue?

And a nipfarthing is a miser (as is a niggard, a word which is etymologically unrelated to the n-word but whose use in present-day discourse should be avoided for obvious reasons). This is the earliest known use of nipfarthing, too.

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Sources:

Bartholomæus Anglicus. Batman vppon Bartholme His Booke De proprietatibus rerum. Stephen Batman, trans. London: Thomas East, 1582, 16.4, 254. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Horace. “The Fyrst Satyre.” In A Medicinable Morall, that Is, the Two Bookes of Horace His Satyres. Thomas Drant, trans. London: Thomas Marshe, 1566, sig. A6v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. spendthrift, n. & adj., spend, v.1, thrift, v.1; third edition, March 2021, dingthrift, n., ding, v.1.; September 2003, nipfarthing, n.

Image credit: Jiří Bubeníček, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

virus / viral

Influenza viruses under an electron microscope

14 March 2025

[15 March edit: corrected Proto-Indo-European roots]

Virus is a word that has evolved alongside the evolution in medical knowledge; before the twentieth century a virus was something quite different from the microorganisms we assign the name to today, and even more recently the word has broken the bounds of biology and infected the realm of silicon and circuits.

Virus is from Latin, where the word means poison, venom, or a bodily discharge such as pus or semen. In classical Latin it only referred to animal semen but was extended to human semen in medieval Latin. Because of this last meaning, it’s tempting to associate the word with vir, meaning man and the source of the English word virile, but it appears as if the root of virus is quite different, and there are apparently no Latin uses of virus to refer to human semen. The Latin vir comes from the Proto Indo-European root *uiH-ró-, associated with masculinity and warriors and giving rise to other words such as violence and virtue, while virus comes from the PIE root *ueis-, associated with poison.)

The word makes its English debut toward the end of the fourteenth century. It appears in John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properites of Things) where, citing Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, it associates virus, in the human semen sense, with the Latin vir, man:

Among the genitals on hatte þe pyntyl, veretrum in latyn, for it is a man his owne membre oþir for it is shamefast membre oþir for virus come ouȝt þerof. For propirliche to speke, þe humour þat comeþ out of mankynde hatte virus. So seiþ Isidre.

(Among the genitals, the penis is called veretrum in Latin, for it a man’s own member, first because it is a shameful member, second because virus comes out of it. To speak correctly, the humor that comes out of mankind is called virus. So says Isidore.)

Around the same time, virus appears in the sense of pus or discharge from a wound in a translation of Lanfranc of Milan’s treatise on surgery:

If þe vlcus be virulent, þat is to seie venemi [. . .] If þe virus be wiþoute heete & þe membre haue noon heete, waische it wiþ watir.

(If the ulcer is virulent, that is to say with venom [. . .] If the virus is without heat and the limb has no heat, wash it with water.)

A couple of centuries later the Latin sense of virus as poison entered English usage. This use appears in a figurative sense in the 1599 publication of Master Broughton’s Letters:

In an epistle to the Lord Treasurer, you will put his Graces fame in print: in your letters to D. Stoll. you will set his Graces fame past cure: in priuate letters to himselfe, belching out vnsauourie menaces of that, which here you haue disgorged. Wherein you haue spent all the vires and power you haue for the defence of a vaine paradox, and spit out all the virus and poyson you could conceiue, in the abuse of his reuerend person.

And the virus-as-poison sense can still be found in current usage, as this 1988 citation from the Chronicle-Telegram of Elyria, Ohio shows:

Farmers cut the legs off woolen stockings to wear on wrists and forearms, for the virus of a snake bite would be absorbed by the woolen yarn, minimizing the danger of infection.

The modern biological sense of virus as a microscopic pathogen appears in 1900. From the Journal of Comparative Pathology and Therapeutics of that year:

Thanks to the researches of Löffler, we also know that the virus of foot-and-mouth disease passes through a Berkefeld filter when it is suspended in a watery liquid, but it is arrested by such a filter from an albuminous liquid, and, presumably on account of its small size, it has not yet been made visible to the human eye.

As this citation shows, viruses were originally distinguished from bacteria and other microorganisms by their size. Filters could trap bacteria, but viruses were small enough to pass through them. As a result, many very small microorganisms were originally classified as viruses, although we wouldn’t do so today. Today, a virus is a DNA or RNA molecule surrounded by a protein coat that can only exhibit biological functions inside a host cell. Alexander Nelson’s 1946 Principles of Agricultural Botany exhibits this modern understanding of what a virus is:

Some viruses have been isolated from the host, and all have proved to be some form of nucleic acid; they are of the nature of nucleo-proteins.

And even more recently, a new type of virus has been envisioned, the computer virus, appearing first in fictional accounts of future technologies. Science fiction often invents technologies that only later become a reality. Jules Verne anticipated the submarine and scuba gear in his 1869 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and H. G. Wells wrote about atomic bombs in 1914. Computer viruses are another technology that first appears in fiction. The first known reference to a computer virus is in David Gerrold’s novel 1972 novel When Harlie Was One. Gerrold specifically modeled the concept on pathogenic biological viruses:

“Do you remember the VIRUS program?”

“Vaguely. Wasn’t it some kind of computer disease or malfunction?”

“Disease is closer. There was a science-fiction writer once who wrote a story about it—but the thing had been around a long time before that. It was a program that—well, you know what a virus is, don’t you? It’s pure DNA, a piece of renegade genetic information. It infects a normal cell and forces it to produce more viruses—viral DNA chains—instead of its normal protein. Well, the VIRUS program does the same thing.”

“Huh?”

Handley raised both hands, as if to erase his last paragraph. “Let me put it another way. You have a computer with an auto-dial phone link. You put the VIRUS program into it and it starts dialing phone numbers at random until it connects to another computer with an auto-dial. The VIRUS program then injects itself into the new computer. Or rather, it reprograms the new computer with a VIRUS program of its own and erases itself from the first computer. The second machine then begins to dial phone numbers at random until it connects with a third machine. You get the picture?”

[. . .]

“You could set the VIRUS program to alter information in another computer, falsify it according to your direction, or just scramble it at random, if you wanted to sabotage some other company.”

Gerrold’s VIRUS was a specific program with that name (he also envisioned an anti-virus program called VACCINE), but it wasn’t long before other writers had picked up the idea. John Brunner’s 1975 science fiction classic The Shockwave Rider features computer viruses and coins the use of worm in relation to such programs:

If I’d had to tackle the job, back when they first tied the home-phone service into the net, I’d have written the worm as an explosive scrambler, probably about half a million bits long, with a backup virus facility and a last-ditch infinitely replicating tail.

And from the June 1982 issue (#158) of the comic Uncanny X-Men:

We simply design an open-ended virus program to erase any and all references to the X-Men and plug it into a central federal data bank. From there, it’ll infect the entire system in no time.

But by the time that X-Men comic hit the newsstands, the first real computer virus was already in existence. A ninth-grader in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania wrote the “Elk Cloner” virus in 1981, that spread among Apple II computers via infected floppy disks. By modern standards, Elk Cloner was pretty harmless, although it was persistent and was still being spotted a decade later. It wasn’t until 1984 that computer scientists started publishing papers using the term virus.

The adjective viral makes its debut in 1948, originally restricted to characterizations of the biological entity. But like the move to computers, the adjective has infected another domain, that of marketing. Viral marketing appears in 1989, referring to word-of-mouth advertising. From the magazine PC User of 27 September 1989:

At Ernst & Whinney, when Macgregor initially put Macintosh SEs up against a set of Compaqs, the staff almost unanimously voted with their feet as long waiting lists developed for use of the Macintoshes. The Compaqs were all but idle. John Bownes of City Bank confirmed this. “It's viral marketing. You get one or two in and they spread throughout the company.”

The advent of public access to the internet meant that viral marketing itself could go viral. From the New York Times of 30 August 2001:

Many of the new games are viral, meaning that they permit players to spread the games by e-mail to friends.

And from a 2004 essay by Andrew Boyd that uses go viral to refer to the initial efforts of the political group MoveOn.org:

MoveOn itself was founded well before the war, or even Bush’s presidency, as an effort during Bill Clinton’s impeachment to push Congress to censure the president and “move on.” Their petition also went viral, gathering half a million signatures in a few weeks. After that, the group used its list to raise money for progressive Democrats. By the time Bush was threatening war, MoveOn had become a well-oiled machine.

So virus and viral have gone from poisonous slime to internet meme in just six centuries.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, third edition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, s.v. weis-. wiro-.

Bartholomæus Anglicus. On the Properties of Things (De proprietatibus rerum) (before 13998), vol. 1 of 3. John Trevisa, trans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, Book 5, Chap. 48, 1.261.

Boyd, Andrew. “How a Twenty-Year-Old Revolutionized the Internet.” In Adrienne Maree Brown and William Upski Wimsatt. How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2004, 167–72 at 168

Brunner, John. The Shockwave Rider. New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 176. Archive.org.

Carrigan, Tim. “New Apples Tempt Business.” PC User, 27 September 1989. Quoted at Wordspy.com.

Davis, Connie. “Murray Ridge Road Once Swamped with Forests.” Chronicle-Telegram (Elyria, Ohio), 13 September 1988, A-11/3. NewspaperArchive.com.

Etymological Dictionary of Latin Online, 2010, s.v. vir, virus. Brill: Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online.

von Fleischhacker, Robert, ed. Lanfrank’s “Science of Cirugie.” Early English Text Society. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894, 80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gerrold, David. When Harlie Was One. New York: Ballantine, 1972. Archive.org.

Latham, Ronald E., David R. Howlett, and Richard K. Ashdowne. Dictionary of Medieval Latin form British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. virus, n.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. virus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

M’Fadyean, J. “African Horse-Sickness.” Journal of Comparative Pathology and Therapeutics, 13.1, 31 March 1900, 1–20 at 16. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mallory, J. P. and D. Q. Adams. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006, 261, 263.

Marriot, Michael. “Playing with Consumers.” New York Times, 30 August 2001, G1/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Master Brovghtons Letters. London: John Wolfe, 1599, 14. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. virus, n.

Nelson, Alexander. Principles of Agricultural Botany. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1946, 464. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. virus, n.; 2005, viral, adj.

Photo credit: Cynthia Goldsmith, 2005. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

slim

A slim customer: General Edmund Allenby, c. 1917.

12 March 2025

The most common use of slim is as an adjective meaning slender or thin, but that is not the only use of the word, and its earliest known appearance in English is as a noun meaning a tall person. It’s a sixteenth-century borrowing from Dutch. In English, slim, meaning slender, almost always has a positive connotation, although in Dutch it can be negative as well.

There is also a slang sense of slim meaning sly or clever, with a connotation of untrustworthiness. One famous use of the slang term is in the 1962 David Lean film Lawrence of Arabia in which American journalist Jackson Bentley (played by Arthur Kennedy) has this exchange with Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness). The conversation is supposed to represent speech from c. 1916:

Faisal: Do you know General Allenby?

Bentley: Watch out for Allenby. He's a slim customer.

Faisal: Excuse me?

Bentley: A clever man.

Faisal: Slim customer. It's very good . . . I'll certainly watch out for him.

But this and the other senses of slim are much older than this movie or the era it is set in.

The earliest use of slim in English, in the sense of a tall person, that I’m aware of is in a definition of the Latin longurio in Thomas Cooper’s 1548 Latin–English dictionary:

Longurio, longurionis, masc. gen. Homo prælongus. A long slimme. Varro apud Nonium.

The adjectival use of the word appears in the mid seventeenth century. In his 1630 poem An Epitome of the Worlds Woe, George Duchante uses slim to mean small, slight, or thin, but in reference fortune or luck, not to a person:

Vnto his mother Altine wrote a letter,
That she might beare his banishment the better.
(Mother said he) I n’ere gaue credit to,
Or trusted Fortunes slimme and subtle show
Although ’twixt me and her did often grow,
Great friendlinesse ’'twas fild with fraud I know.

Three years later, William Harvey’s medical text Anatomical Exercitations uses the adjective in reference to people:

And therefore amongst grown persons, the long slimme Fellows, (whose Thighs, but especially their Shanks, are longer then [sic] ordinary) can stand, walk, run, or vault longer, and at more ease, then square, and well trussed men.

But this sense was by no means confined to medical contexts. George Thornley’s 1657 translation of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe uses the adjective:

How is it possible for one to catch him? he's small and slim, and so will slip and steal away. And how should one escape, and get away from by flight?

And the slang untrustworthy sense also appears in the mid seventeenth century. Here is an example from Elizabeth Fools Warning, a 1659 poem advising women to not marry older men:

His promises then did please me well,
I loved to go fine I must you tell,
Oh! I was fowly cheated by this old slim,
And on a Palmsunday was married to him
Unknown unto my kindred all
On slippery yce I then did fall.

Again, the noun precedes the adjective in the record, although not by much. We see slim used to mean sly and untrustworthy in a 1664 anti-Catholic polemic by Henry More:

Onely I cannot let go this seasonable opportunity of triumphing in her behalf, in that she is so throughly [sic] reformed from that notorious, though subtle and slim, piece of Antichristianism, I mean that Self-ended Policy in those Doctrines and Practices which are so many in the Church of Rome and so profitable, and yet Our Heaven-directed Reformation has perfectly refined us and cleansed us from them all.

All these senses seem to be in continuous use through to the present. But in the 1980s a grimmer sense of slim made its appearance, that is in slim disease, an African-English coinage for what would become known as AIDS. The term makes its published appearance in the medical journal The Lancet from 19 October 1985:

Most patients present with fever, an itchy maculopapular rash, general malaise, prolonged diarrhoea, occasional respiratory symptoms, and oral candidiasis, but the most dominant feature is extreme wasting and weight loss. Hence the syndrome is known locally as slim disease.

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Sources:

Cooper, Thomas. Thesaurus linguæ Romanæ and Britannicæ. London: Thomas Berthelet for Henry Wykes, 1565, s.v. longurio, sig. BBbb 6v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO). [The OED cites a 1548 edition.]

Duchante, George. An Epitome of the Worlds Woe. London: Thomas Cotes and Richard Cotes, 1630, n.p. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. slim, adj.

Harvey, William. Anatomical Exercitations. London: James Young for Octavian Pulleyn, 1653, 330. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Liberman, Anatoly. Word Origins . . . and How We Know Them. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 199–200.

Longus. Daphnis and Chloe. George Thornley, trans. London: John Garfield, 1657, 61–62. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

More, Henry. A Modest Enquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity. London: J. Flesher for W. Morden, 1664, 475. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. slim, adj.; Additions Series, 1993, s.v. slim, n.

Serwadda, D., et al. “Slim Disease: A New Disease in Uganda and Its Association with HTLV-III Infection.” Lancet, 19 October 1985, 849–52 at 849. Elsevier: Science Direct.

With, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Fools Warning. London: Francis Coles, 1659, 4. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Unknown artist, c. 1917. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

polite

“Politeness,” James Gillray, hand-colored etching, c. 1779

10 March 2025

[Edit, 11 March: cleaned up translation of the Trevisa quote and fixed some typos and poorly worded passages]

It is quite common for a word with a specific and literal meaning to develop figurative or metaphorical meanings that are related to the literal one. And sometimes we can see this same change across multiple languages. Such is the case with polite. The Latin verb polire means to smooth, to polish, and its past participle, politus, and adverbial form, polite, came in that language to mean cultured or refined, a metaphorical polish.

The word first is first recorded in English as a surname—a Robertus Polyte is listed in the records of the reign of Henry III for the year 1263.  The adjective polite appears in English in the late-fourteenth century. The original meaning in English was a literal one of “smooth, polished.” John Trevisa’s 1397 translation of Bartholommaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things), sort of an early encyclopedia, says this about the stone beryl:

Berill is a stoon of Ynde yliche in grene colour to Smaragde but it is wiþ palenesse, and polit and schape among þe Yndes in sixe-cornerd schap þat dymnesse of colour may be excited by þe reboundyng of þe corners. And oþerwise yschape it haþ no bright schynyng.

(Beryl is a stone from India alike in its green color to emerald, but is marked by its paleness; polited [polished], and shaped in the Indies into a six-cornered shape such that the dimness of color may be excited by the reflections of the corners. And otherwise shaped it has no brilliance.)

Both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary classify Trevisa’s use of polit here as an adjective, but it is clearly fulfilling a playing role in the sentence, in apposition to paleness; we would use politeness here if writing this today. Trevisa is translating from Bartholomæus’s Latin, which may account for the OED saying the word is a direct borrowing from Latin, rather than via French, which is correct in this particular case but may not be true generally. Certainly, literate folks of the period would have been familiar with both the Latin and Old French.

Over time, polite began to be used in reference to language. Robert Henryson writes in the prologue to his translation of Aesop’s Fables, c. 1480:

Thocht fenyeit Faabillis of auld Poetrie,
Be nocht all groundit upon treuth, yt than
Thair polite termes of sweit Rethorie,
Ar richt plesand unto the eir of man.

(I think the fictitious fables of old poetry are not all grounded upon truth, but their polite terms of sweet rhetoric are right pleasant to the ear of man.)

And as with Latin, polite in English developed into a general sense of refined, cultured, elegant. Ben Jonson’s 1601 play The Fountaine of Selfe-Love has these lines:

Amor[phus]. Succinctly spoken: I doe vale to both your thanks, and kisse them; but primarily to yours, Most ingenious, acute, and polite Lady.

Phi[lautia]. Gods my life, how he do's all to be qualifie her! Ingenious, Acute, and Polite? as if there were not others in place, as Ingenious, Acute, and Polite, as she.

Hed[on]. Yes, but you must know Lady, he cannot speake out of a Dictionary method.

This sense survives today chiefly in the phrase polite society. Finally, the sense of courteous or well-mannered developed in the mid-eighteenth century.

We see the same development of meanings in French, where the word poli appears around the year 1160 with the meaning of smooth, shiny. By the late-twelfth century the word was being applied to words and diction, meaning careful, well-chosen, and it acquired the meaning of cultured in the late-sixteenth century and well-mannered in the late-seventeenth. And a similar pattern occurs at about the same time in Spanish and Italian. Interestingly in Occitan, a Romance language spoken in southern France and parts of Spain and Italy, the pattern is reversed, at least in the record. In Old Occitan the word polit was first applied metaphorically to well-chosen words in the mid-twelfth century, and the literal meaning of smooth, polished did not develop until the fourteenth century.

So we have a semantic change that occurs in Latin, then centuries later the same pattern repeats itself in a number of languages that borrowed or inherited the word with its original meaning.

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Sources:

Bartholomæus Anglicus. On the Properties of Things (De proprietatibus rerum), vol 2 of 3. John Trevisa, trans, M. C Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 16.20, 837.

Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III, vol. 12 (1261–64). London: Stationary Office, 1936, 260. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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Image credit: James Gillray, c. 1779. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.