On Contriving the Shooting of Relatives

I just finished reading some essays of Michel de Montaigne (and a book by Janet Evanovich, lest you think me pedantic). The translation had a few words: arquebus, parricide, and fructify.

The first word, arquebus, is also spelled harquebus, and was gun invented in the 15^th century in Spain and was the first gun to be fired from the shoulder. The barrel was long, so there was a hook in the middle of it which fit into a supporting stick, a precursor to the fork used with other long barrel guns.

It was named by either the Germans or the Dutch, because the words for “hook” and “gun”, at least in Middle Dutch, are hake and busse. That’s also the source of the more commonly known word for a gun, blunderbuss, which comes from donderbus, the Dutch word for “thunder gun.” It was named in the 1650s. You’ll think differently of the name now when Santa calls to his reindeer “…on, Donder and Blitzen.”

The blunderbuss was a shorter gun with a muzzle that flared slightly so as to scatter the shot over a wider area. It was one of the guns carried by the Lewis and Clark expedition as they sought a northwest passage to the Pacific.

Our second word today, parricide, means the act of killing one’s father, mother, or other close relative. (You need not use an arquebus or blunderbuss to be guilty of parricide.) It came to English in the 1550s to name the person who did the killing, but by the 1560s defined the act of killing, the meaning it retains today. It initially had two meanings because the Middle French word from which it came, parricide, had since the 13^th century meant  the killer of a close relative but in the early 15^th century added the meaning of the killing itself. Both meanings came to English. The Middle French got the word from the Latin words for relative (parus) and killing (cidium).

More specific and more common words in English are the killing of one’s father and mother (patricide and matricide, from the Latin words for father, pater, and for mother, mater.) They similarly had the transition from defining the killer, in the 1590s, to defining the killing by the 1620s or 1630s.

The final word is fructify. While this word made my “to write about list” initially after reading The Anthologist, I was reminded of it by its use in the Essays. Fructify is a good word to use in place of the phrase “bear fruit.” The Latin word for fruit is fructus, and is the source of our word fructify. The Old French adapted it first in the 1100s, as fructifier, and we adapted it into English in the early 1300s.

The root word from which fructus comes is facere, from which we get factitious. The meaning of factitious is not far from fictitious. Both represent something created or contrived. Fictitious has a sense of either deception or story, while factitious is about an act meant to look normal when in reality is artificial, like factitious laughter or enthusiasm. Fictitious has been used in English since the 1610s, when it arrived from the Middle Latin word fictitus from the Latin word ficticius, which means artificial or contrived, from the Latin word for false, fictus.

In this blog the use of an arquebus for parricide is only fictitious. My family need not worry.