Basking in Masked Flasks

At the beginning of the month this blog covered ask and other words in that arena. As I was writing the blog other words using “ask” as part of the word came to mind. While I considered askance the task of blogging about words like basket I nonetheless decided, with cask and flask nearby, to bask in some of those words and unmask any common roots.

Let’s get some of the etymology out of the way and see which of these words, as Sesame Street puts it, “just doesn’t belong here”:

Askance – Old English as with Old French quanses (which they got from Latin)

Askew – Uncertain, possibly from “on skew”. Skew is from Old French.

Bask – Old Norse baðask

Basket – Anglo-French bascat

Cask – Middle French casque (from Spanish and Vulgar Latin)

Flask – Medieval Latin flasco

Mask – Middle French masque (from Italian and Middle Latin and maybe more)

Task – Old North French tasque (and eventually a metathesis of Vulgar Latin)

In case you are not up for the mental rigors of the Sesame Street game, the two that are not from or through French, bask and flask, are where we will begin.

Bask, which means either to be exposed to a pleasant warmth or a pleasant situation, came to English in the late 1300s. It originally meant to wallow in blood, and while its root word baðask has two syllables the English has always been bask. (It is likely not because that letter that looks like a crossed d is confusing.) 

How do we get from wallowing in blood to wallowing in pleasant warmth? Blame Shakespeare. In the play “As You Like It” he used the word in reference to sunshine. Had it already morphed by 1600 into a less sanguine meaning already or was that a Shakespearean invention? We may never know. By the way, sanguine has had a similar softening metamorphosis from meaning bloody to meaning  rosy – like cheeks – and optimistic.

Flask came directly from the Medieval Latin word for container or bottle. If anyone tells you the word is actually Teutonic in origin, let them know that, according to the OED, it may be “chronologically legitimate, and presents no difficulty except [for the] absence of any satisfactory etymology.” Don’t you love it when you can “zing” someone that effectively? The word flask is now used mostly in two ways: for the glass bottles we find in laboratories, and for the flat, usually metal, bottle found in someone’s pocket and filled with alcohol.

The other word I want to look at this week (the rest you’ll have to wait a week to find out about) is mask. It came into use in English in the 1530s, from the Middle French. The Middle French got it from the Italian word maschera, which came from the Medieval Latin word masca, meaning with mask or ghost or nightmare. It is uncertain where the Medieval Latin word came from. It is possible it came from the Arabic word maskharah (Sounds like it, doesn’t it?) except maskharah means mockery or buffoon. If a mask originally was meant to mock someone, that would make sense. There also was an Old French word mascurer that meant to blacken the face. But, etymonline.com says, “compare Occitan mascara “to blacken, darken,” derived from mask- ‘black,’ which is held to be from a pre-Indo-European language, and Old Occitan masco ‘witch,’ surviving in dialects; in Beziers it means ‘dark cloud before the rain comes.’”  Occitan is a language spoken mainly in Southern France east of the Basque (no relation except phonologically to bask) areas of France.

Mask came to English before masquerade, which arrived 60 years later, but from the French word mascarade. (Why did we use the French que when they didn’t? Another mystery.) Or it may have come from the Spanish mascarada (a masked party or dance) or the Italian mascarata (a ball at which masks were worn.) Choose your favorite language source.

Yes, the Italian word maschera is the same root word from which we get mascara, the cosmetic for covering lashes. For 40 years it was spelled mascaro. It was only in 1922 it took the Spanish spelling of mascara. The phrase "40 lashes" has nothing to do with mascara. 

Next week: the task of askance, askew, basket, cask, task.