The Task of Askew and Askance in One Basket

I promised last week that we would look askance and askew at the task of discussing basket and cask.  That means you will have to wait until next week to find out what peruke means (a new word for me that I read this last week.) Do not "wig out" while you wait.

Askance and askew both begin with the letters that form the word ask, but are they related? Since askance means “with a side glance” and askew means “to one side” it seems likely, right?

Well, askance has some mystery in its etymology. Chaucer used it, although as two words (ase and quince) to mean “in such a way that” or “even as; as if” according to etymonline.com. Its appearance as one word can only be traced to the 1520s. The Oxford English Dictionary has separate listings for both askance and a Middle English word askances but there seems to be no connection between the two. The word is likely a compound for of “as” and an Old French word quanses (pronounced like Kansas) that meant “how if” and came to Old French from the Latin word quam that means “how” combined with si meaning “if.” From the sideways squint to a look of suspicion or disapproval is a short distance. Seldom is the word in the U.S. except in pairing with a form of the word “look.” It is an adverb, but seems only to ad the verb look.

Askew, on the other hand, while also having a secondary meaning of disapproval, means “to one side” or “out of line.” Its etymology is similarly uncertain, but when it appeared in the 1570s it may have been as a combination word (like askance) meaning of “a skew.” It may have come from the Old Norse a ska, but since we also have the English word skew I think it more likely to be related to that word. Skew is from the late 1400s, and means “to turn aside.” It came to English from the Old North French word eskiuer that meant to “shy away from” or “avoid.” Skews sense of turning something else aside coincides with the first appearance of askew, and it was not until 1872 it was first used of an unfair characterization, and not until 1929 did was it used of numbers unfairly characterized.

If you are reading any books from the 1400s you may run across the word askoye with the same meaning as askew. Don’t look askance at it.  But remember the words askew and askance come from different sources.

Task is the only one of today’s words for which we know the etymology. It arrived in English in the early 1300s, like Skew from the Old North French, from their word tasque. It originally meant a bit of labor imposed as a duty. The French word came from the Vulgar Latin word tasca, which is a metathesis of the Medieval Latin word taxa, which is a back-formation of the Latin word taxare, from which we get the word tax.  The expansion of the meaning of the word task to a general chore is from the 1590s.

The phrase “take one to task” is more closely related to the old meaning of forcing someone to undertake a certain work as a duty or tax. While some people pronounce ask as if it were axe I have not heard the same substitution of tax for task, yet the two are more closely related etymologically.

That leaves us with only basket in our basket of words for today. A basket is a container made from thin strips of wood woven together or anything that looks like it. (Except the basket in basketball, which originally was a bushel basket but now is just woven string.) The word basket came to English in the early 1200s from an Anglo-French word, bascat. Another word with obscure etymology, it may have come to Anglo-French from the Latin word bsascauda, but the Roman Poet Martial says that bascauda is from Celtic Britain, so “back atcha!” The mystery continues.

Just like, for one more week, the mystery “What does peruke mean?” will continue.