Vocation came to English via the Latin vocatio, a noun that meant “calling” and was itself a derivative of the Latin verb vocare, which meant “to call or summon.” It's not surprising, then, that when English speakers first started using vocation in the early fifteenth century, the word meant “a spiritual calling.” This meaning became secondary in the early sixteenth century, however, when the more worldly sense of “a strong inclination towards a trade or occupation” came into popular use. And during the latter years of the century, that secular meaning of vocation evolved into the noun's contemporary sense of “one's primary profession or career.”
©2023 Michael R. Gates
February 22, 2023
February 7, 2023
Case File #023.02.07: NEIGHBOR
Neighbor is a true purebred, one of those rare contemporary English words that can be traced back directly to the Anglo-Saxon period. Its Old English ancestor was a compound formed from two components: neah, which meant “near” or “nigh,” and gebur, which meant “dweller” or sometimes “farmer.” Thus, to the old Anglo-Saxons, neahgebur simply referred to another farmer who dwelled nearby. When the word passed to Middle English, it transformed into neighebour and then became the more familiar neighbor (or neighbour for you Brits), but all the while it retained its original meaning of “nearby dweller.” It wasn't until some time after the late fifteenth century, when the variant neighborhood was formed, that neighbor also came to mean “something immediately adjoining or relatively near something else” instead of only being used to designate a nearby dweller like the one whose music is always too...damned...loud.
©2023 Michael R. Gates
©2023 Michael R. Gates
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