Trothplighted
FIANCÉ(E), n. This word, meaning a person engaged to be married, is a French import, hence its variable spelling. In French, fiancé indicates a man engaged to be married, and fiancée a woman, but English doesn’t have grammatical gender, and non-grammatical gender is whatever we want it to be, so I say do what you want with that extra e. Go wild, add some more. Fiancéeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Fiancé(e) comes from the verb fiancer, which currently means “to get engaged,” but used to mean “to promise,” and grew out of the verb fier, “to trust.” Those are related to Latin fidus, “faithful,” and fides, “faith,” so you get the general idea.
A weird thing about “fiancé(e)” in English is that we have our own native English word, “betrothed.” It’s pretty much the exclusive province of historical and fantasy fiction at this point. Nobody getting married in 2020 is regularly calling their future spouse “my betrothed,” not unless they’re both LARPing.
It’s too bad, because not only does it sound cool as hell, but also, like a good homegrown English word, “betrothed” is genderless. It has a similar semantic journey to “fiancé,” being about faithfully keeping promises—staying true, telling the truth, which you can almost see in “troth,” which meant a promise to marry someone, or just “a true thing.” English used to have the word “trothless,” which meant false or treacherous, and also “trothplighted,” which meant the same thing as “betrothed.” (“Plight” used to mean any kind of condition, not only a negative one, so “trothplighted” was the state of having pledged one’s troth.) I think we should bring them all back.
I got into this subject after a conversation with a friend on twitter:
This led me to hunt down the origin of “Verlobte(r).” After having looked up both “fiancé(e)” and “betrothed,” I guessed “Verlobte(r)” would have similar semantic roots, something about promises or truth or staying faithful. As far as I can tell, this is not the case.
“Ver-” is a common German prefix that, much like science and gender, means whatever we want it to mean. Prefixes are often squishy. “Ver-” is a cognate with English “for-,” which you can see in “forgive” and German vergeben. Geben is “give.” Cool, right?
Both “ver-” and “for-” come from roots meaning “far” or “away,” and by extension, sometimes “through” or “completely” or “beyond.”
A DIGRESSION ABOUT PREFIXES:
Did I, a native English speaker, know any of that stuff I just wrote? Do I instinctively know what the “for-” in “forgive” means? Or “forbid” or “forsake”? Nope.
When that happens, linguists say the prefix is “no longer productive,” which means that contemporary English speakers are not going around adding “for-” to whatever verb they like in order to make new words. This is also true of the “be-” in “betroth.”
An example of an English prefix that is still productive is “re-.” I can make up the verb “glowl” and then tell you I “reglowled” something, and you’ll be like well, I don’t know what she did, but whatever it is, apparently she did it again. Whereas if I tell you I “forglowled” something, neither of us is gonna know what the fuck I’m talking about.
A weird and cool (and confusing) thing about contemporary English is that we don’t have a lot of productive prefixes. Instead, we like to add prepositions after our verbs: step in, step down, step the fuck off. If you’re a native speaker, you’re unlikely to mix up “sleep in” and “sleep around,” but it’s a lot harder to make sense of those if you didn’t grow up speaking English.
OKAY NOW BACK TO GERMAN:
So anyway, “ver-” has a lot of possible meanings as a prefix. One is still somewhat productive, but it’s a negative one meaning “into pieces, to ruin, to destruction, mis-.” I’m confident* that’s not what we’re dealing with in Verlobte(r). And “ver-” and its other meanings are all over the place in German verbs. Like verlieben, which means “to fall in love.” That comes from lieben, “to love,” and we can deduce that this “ver-” indicates a process or transition, something like “through/into.”
The second part of Verlobte(r) might come from the verb loben, “to praise.” I can’t find anybody on the English-speaking internet confirming that, but I do like the idea that your Verlobte(r), the person you intend to marry, is a person you praise—and perhaps a person you praise fully, beyond all others.
If any German-speaking readers want to comment on this, please reply! Until then, I will continue to believe this folk etymology that I’ve invented for myself.
*I am as confident as a person who doesn’t speak German and has spent ten minutes googling this can be, that is.
In Capital-R Romance this week, I read a variety of texts on nineteenth-century mourning customs. As usual, this information was relevant to perhaps two sentences of my manuscript, but dammit, I’m getting those sentences right.
The content of this particular foray into research was grim, but the process was fun. Probably the best part was finding an 1877 advertisement for La Scabieuse (this word looks like “scabies” and means “pincushion flower,” a plant in the honeysuckle family used to treat scabies in folk medicine). La Scabieuse called itself the premiere house of mourning in Paris. The shop was located at 10 Rue de la Paix, still a very fashionable address. The ad said:
Ladies who do not wish to go out or worry about a single detail of mourning need only write to us.
A person accustomed to this delicate mission will come to the address indicated at once, bearing immense chests of everything necessary for full mourning, ready made. [Translation is my own.]
This was followed by a list of available mourning articles, including not just dresses, coats, and hats, but jewelry (only wood and jet were permitted), handkerchiefs, hand fans, umbrellas, and a bunch of other old-timey accessory words that I had to look up in the nineteenth-century dictionary because the regular dictionary was of no use (the word ruche, for instance, means “beehive” in regular French, but in nineteenth-century fashion French, it meant “a pleated band of tulle or lace that is an adornment, usually for a bonnet or a hat”). They thought of everything!
Mourning became more and more rigidly codified over the course of the century, especially for widows, though it was never as strict in France as it became in Victorian England. The etiquette guidebooks I was reading basically had charts of what it was acceptable to wear for the first six months after your husband kicked it, whether winter or summer, and then the next three, the three after that, and then the final six weeks (you could lash out and wear grey or violet!).
In my research, I also stumbled across this archive of the correspondence of several generations of a family, spanning 1780 to 1889. You can get all up in their business! For almost a whole century! The private correspondence of regular people doesn’t often get preserved like this, so it’s cool to have an example. Also: think about all your emails and text messages being preserved and read by somebody a century from now. They’re gonna have to scroll through so many “sorry im late” and “lol” messages, lol.
Also also: think about the order of magnitude increase in the volume of written correspondence in the world since 1780 or 1889. Instead of working in “the Renaissance” or “early modern,” future historians are gonna specialize in like, Tweets from United States users on the Morning of Wednesday, November 20, 2019, 8:00AM EST to 10:30AM EST. (Or whatever time Gordon Sondland finished naming names.)
The archive of familial correspondence is hosted by an academic institution, but most of my other research texts—the ad quoted above, the etiquette handbooks—were from Gallica, the digital wing of the French National Library, which is available to the public all over the world. The site itself is translated into English, in case you want to take a look and don’t speak French. They have a ton of image collections, and the one that’s been of the most use to me is images of Paris. You can filter it by historical event. Here, for instance, is a photo of the destroyed Hôtel de Ville after the fighting in the Paris Commune in 1871, which I am sharing just because I can:
Source: gallica.bnf.fr
Some day I’m gonna have to read some non-fiction about the Commune and report back, but anyway for now my point is that I really, really love Gallica.
It’s jaw-dropping to me how unfettered and easily searchable their site is—you don’t need an account! any ol rando can look at the illuminated manuscripts! or share old photographs in her newsletter!—and how much of their material they’ve digitized. Every time I use it, it’s a thrill. And I use it a lot, so I can assure you: the thrill is not gone from yesterday’s search.
In this age where I sometimes feel like the internet is poisoning civilization as a whole, it’s nice to have at least one obvious counterexample. Libraries are one of the very best things that humans can make with our collective power, and I love this one.
This week, before I talk about what I read in small-r romance, I just wanted to say that publishing is fucked up. Whether it’s giant publishers like Macmillan embargoing libraries or small independent presses like Dreamspinner owing their authors thousands of dollars in unpaid royalties, or people protecting sexual predators, or gatekeeping so the industry remains extremely white, or, you know, Jeff Bezos hoarding an unconscionable amount of money, mistreating his employees, and never paying corporate taxes, there’s fuckery at all levels.
It’s hard to keep track, and sometimes I get my books from the wrong places. Most of the money I make from my own books comes from Amazon, too. I’ve been working on this—making my work available through other vendors and buying books from the right places, whenever possible—but it’s not easy.
But like I said above, libraries are great. A library is always the right place to get a book, and they don’t tell nobody nothin. If you read your library ebooks in Libby, the app doesn’t report your personal data to Jeff Bezos. So that’s cool! It’s a very nicely designed app and I’ve started reading in it whenever possible. (Also, if you read a print book from your library, there’s no reading-speed or highlighted-passages data to sell! But I am a gremlin who reads in the dark while my beloved is trying to sleep.)
Anyway, if you wanna tell Macmillan to fuck off with this bullshit library embargo, here’s the petition.
And now, at last, here is some short fiction that I read this week!
“Études” (f/f, both cis and lesbian (?), contemporary) by Sionna Fox. This packs a lot of characterization—and music-based sexual innuendo—into a short story about a composer, a concert pianist, and a piano bench. Content warnings: sex.
“Miss Dominguez’s Christmas Kiss” (bi f/lesbian f, both cis, historical) by Lydia San Andres. I’ve been on the hunt for queer holiday romances, since I’m scheduled to be a guest on an episode of RomBkPod: Inclusively Yours on that subject in December. This short story is adorable and I can’t wait to talk about it on the podcast. (Also, this story is available for free on the author’s site.)
Caroline’s Heart (m/f, both bi and trans, historical, fantasy, novella) by Austin Chant. Cecily is a witch who practices a medical kind of magic, crafting prosthetics and once, a clockwork heart for her lost love Caroline. When ranch hand Roy Jones takes a bullet meant for Cecily, she saves his life by giving him Caroline’s heart. The prose in this is just gorgeous, bringing to life a magic-infused American Wild West. I’m amazed at the depth of characterization and worldbuilding in this compact, elegant novella. Content warnings: death by gunshot, (magical) surgery, mild gore, grief, sex.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read and loved Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter “paying for civilization,” about how much she loves paying taxes for libraries and schools and parks and trail maintenance, which feels topical for this newsletter. We’ve all been taught to hate and complain about taxes, but taxes pay for lots of things I like. See libraries, above. Love a good paved public road. Love a public park. Love to live in a mostly literate society because of public schools. Living in civilization is fucking great.
Meanwhile, living in civilization as it falls apart because of the rising (literal) tides and the rising (metaphorical) tides of bigotry is not fucking great, but this short story “Self Care” by Julian K. Jarboe is. Funny and blazingly angry, the whole story is narrated like this:
I called BULLSHIT. It was not exactly my first time dealing with priests. I look like the exact type of person who gets excommunicated, and I enumerated my MANY good reasons to be suspicious and how I ran away from Sunday School and became a gay transsexual WITCH.
It’s amazing and I highly recommend it.
Speaking of civilization falling apart, this article by Alex Pareene in The New Republic about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson and its parallels to our era also feels topical for this newsletter, since just last week I was writing about the US Civil War and Reconstruction and Alyssa Cole’s brilliant historical romance An Unconditional Freedom.
And on the subject of good, inclusive historical romance—a frequent topic in this newsletter, as it is near and dear to my heart—here’s Jennifer Prokop writing about the genre in Kirkus Reviews.
Okay, that’s it for this week. I finished a draft of a novella in the middle of the night last night, which is the only time I ever finish anything, and accordingly, I feel the only way I ever feel about finishing a manuscript: excited, relieved, very sleepy.
I wish you all a good week! If you encounter any interesting words in the wild, please tell me about them, and if you know anybody who would enjoy this mishmash of etymology and romance novels and whatever else I like, please tell them about me.
