Occupy Wallstreet

Another television moment (carried over from last week due to space): I couldn’t believe my ears. Someone on a reality show on television, I think it was a police officer or border patrol agent, while intending to say cache instead pronounced the word cachet. Cache is identical in sound to cash (and you can have a cache of cash; I wish I did). Cachet is two syllables, the phonetically written as ka-shey.

A cache is a hiding place, especially in the ground, and also is used to refer to that which is placed in the hiding place. It actually came from a French-Canadian slang  word that developed in the 1660s and is still used to describe a shed elevated on poles that provides safe (from animals) storage of food and equipment.  As a back-formation of the French word cacher, which means hide or conceal, it can be traced back to the Vulgar Latin word coacticare, which means store up or collect and is obviously the frequentative form of the Latin word coactare. It came to English in 1797 to describe a hiding place and by the 1830s cache was used for anything that is stored in a hiding place.

Cachet is from the same French word but a completely different path to English. Coactare was adopted into an Old French dialect as cacher, with a meaning “to press or crowd.” At some point in time (at least by the 16^th century) it came to refer to the seal that was used on a document and was spelled cachet. It became widely used as part of the phrase lettre de cachet, referring to a letter under seal of the King. Because of that it developed a sense of prestige, a sense it maintains today. It still refers to that seal or stamp or official impression on a document, but also means superior status or prestige.

Last week I mentioned occupy and occur and said I’d get to them this week. Is the occu- start to each word reflective of a similar etymology?

Occur either came in the 1520s from the Middle French word occurrer (happen unexpectedly) or directly from the Latin word occurrere, which means to run to meet or present itself. It was formed by combining the prefix ob-, which means against or toward (as used in obstacle, for example) and currere, which means to run (from which we get current, as in a river).  How do you get from “against a current” to happen? As you meet the obstacle, it presents itself, and appears in front of you, and happens.  It presents itself in the course of events, according to etymonline.com. The idea of occur referring to “coming to mind” didn’t occur to anyone until the 1620s.

Occupy is older, from the mid-14^th century, and you also have the choice of your preferred etymology. One option is that it originated from the Latin combination of the aforementioned prefix ob- with the intensive form of the Latin word for grasp or sieze: capare (from which we get capable). The resultant word is occupare and was adopted directly into English. The other option is to run it through Old French, which had a word for grasp or sieze, occuper, that also had a sense of taking up space. If you choose the latter option, realize it would have been “irregularly borrowed” from the Old French word. (Whatever that means. Did they give it back at some point?)

An interesting historical deviation of the word occupy was its use in the 16^th and 17^th century as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. (Which reminds me – did you ask about the joke about the Priest and the Nun who got stuck in a blizzard?) It prevalence during those centuries resulted in its avoidance in polite usage for several hundred years.

I suspect it is the 16^th and 17^th century use of the word occupy that the protesters had in mind when they chose the appellation “Occupy Wallstreet.”