Magically Glamorous Grammar

I got a lot of reading done over the holidays, and my list of words has grown. So let’s get to some of them.

One of the books I read was sent by one of my wife’s good friends and my Words With Friend. The book is entitled Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog In a footnote on p. 14 is written

…glamour is an outgrowth of the word grammar; they are, in fact, the same word, through the magic of something called ‘dissimulation,’ in which grammar becomes glamour in much the same way that peregrine becomes pilgrim. Whichever way you spell it, the word was originally about magic and witchcraft. Grammar meant learning, which a few centuries ago was understood to involve magic, or at least astrology. And even today a glamorous person casts a spell.

The way etymonline.com has it, the common source word was gramarye, and came from the Old French word for learning, gramaire, especially of a magical sort. You can go back further to Latin and Greek, but why would you? Gramarye arrived in English in the 14^th century (although it had already been an English surname for over a century) and by the end of the 1300s had become spelled grammar. Grammar eventually came to be restricted in its use to mean “rules of language” but until the 1500s gramarye meant “learning in general, knowledge peculiar to the learned classes,” including astrology and magic. In the late 1400s grammar developed the secondary meaning of “occult knowledge." It was this meaning that evolved into the Scottish word glamor.

By the way, a grammar school was, according to Samuel Johnson, “a school in which learned languages are grammatically taught.” According to etymonline.com Johnson also has the word grammaticaster as “a mean verbal pedant.” (That could be an indictment on English teachers past or current.) It was in the U.S. in 1842 that the phrase was used to identify “a school between primary and secondary where English grammar is taught.” According to dictionary.com the phrase in the U.S. is now synonymous with elementary school and in Britain refers to a secondary, or what in the U.S. is called a high school.

Back to the Scottish word glamor. (While this spelling is indicated to now be a chiefly U.S. alternative of glamour, the original spelling is retained in the adjective form, glamorous, which came into English in 1882.) The Scottish word’s migration into common English usage as a noun began in the 1720s. But its popularity can be attributed to Sir Walter Scott, who used it in his long 1805 narrative poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”:

And one short spell therein he read:

It had much of glamour might;

Could make a ladye seem a knight;

The cobwebs on a dungeon wall

Seem tapestry in a lordly hall;

A nut-shell seem a gilded barge,

A sheeling seem a palace large,

And youth seem age, and age seem youth;

All was delusion, nought was truth.

The word still contained the magical meaning, and would take another 35 years for the first recorded use of glamour in its current primary sense of the quality of fascinating, alluring, or attracting. Almost 100 years later, in 1939, Condé Nast publications created the magazine now bearing the name Glamour.

There’s really nothing magic about it any more. But there is something glamorous about grammar.