The Umpire's Ukase Resulted in a Mulct

Two of the more obscure words I’ve encountered are good words that should have a place in our vocabulary.

The first word to consider today is mulct. Mulct is a transitive verb that means to punish by a fine or by depriving of something. According to my dictionary it comes from the Latin word mulctare, which is a form of the word mulcta, which means a fine. It came to English in the late 15th century. But etymonline.com disagrees with my dictionary on two points: 1. it says it came to English from the French word mulcter (which came from the Latin mulctare), and 2. it could be Oscan or Samnite.

Now, I consider myself to be pretty good with history and geography, and I have never heard of Osco or Samnia. While I could do the easy thing and consult Wikipedia (there’s an entry there) I decided instead to go to ancientscripts.com and see what they say. It turns out that in pre-Roman times the Oscans “occupied the southern part of the Peninsula that was not settled by the Greeks.” According to sanniti.info (a site that receives support from the Ministero per I Beni e le Attivita Culturati) Osco was the language of the Samnites, not a place itself. Whoever they were, they used the Etruscan alphabet and with the hegemony of the Roman Empire lost their ethnic identity and culture. An example of Oscan writing was found at Pompeii.

The second word today is ukase, which is not Oscan for “your baggage”. In fact, it’s not Italian at all, it’s Russian. It originally referred to an imperial order or decree that was made by the Czar and came to English in 1729. (In case you’re wondering, the Russian monarch’s title is spelled differently due to different ways to transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet. The title originated as a word for Caesar, which is why I prefer the czar spelling to tsar or tzar, although I’m fine with csar, too, but that’s not as common. For much more on the subject, go to http://www.citizendia.org/Tsar.)

The word ukase (which I have seen wrongly spelled ukaze) has now come to mean any official decree, particularly (or especially as my dictionary says) one that is arbitrary. In other words, if you don’t like the decision, call it a ukase. (Calling it an arbitrary ukase might be more understood but would be redundant.)

Etymonline.com says that the word, while Russian, came to Russian from Old Church Slavonic or OCS (the earliest known Slavonic language, OCS dates from the 9th century and is used by Slavs in Bulgaria and Macedonia). The u- in OCS is an intensive prefix, and kazati means to order or show. Etymonline says that kazati is related to “the first element of Casimir” and that Casimir is a masculine proper name, from the Polish word Kazimir, which literally means “proclaimer of peace” or “preacher of peace.”

Italy, France, Samnia, Russia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Poland. I feel like I've travelled the world and haven't left my chair!