November is the month English spends saying thank you. To the cook. To the host. To the cousin who brought the rolls still in the bag.
Most of the words for it started out as something else. Thinking. Wages. Being tied up. Setting a price.
Thank and think, the same word twice
Thank comes from the Old English þancian, “give thanks; to recompense, to reward.” The noun behind it, þanc, meant a thought first and gratitude second. Both go back to the same root that gave us think and thought. The Online Etymology Dictionary, Etymonline, says thank is related to think the way song is related to sing.
So to thank someone, at the start, was to think of them. Plenty of thank-you notes still don’t.
English got to the sarcastic version early. Thank in the ironic sense, meaning to blame, turns up in the 1550s. To thank someone for nothing is on record by 1703.
Thanksgiving, which took its time
The noun thanksgiving shows up in the 1530s. Before that, English got by with thanking, from the late 1200s. Wycliffe’s Bible, the Middle English translation from around 1400 that carries John Wycliffe’s name, has “doinge of thankes.”
The sense of a public celebration arrives in the 1630s. Thanksgiving Day isn’t on record until the 1670s.
There was also a verb, thanksgive, from the 1630s.
Grateful, built wrong on purpose
Grateful dates to the 1550s, from an old adjective, grate, meaning agreeable or pleasant. That’s from the Latin gratus, pleasing.
English normally adds -ful to a noun: hope, hopeful. Grateful adds it to an adjective, which makes it, at the root, pleasantful. The etymologist Ernest Weekley called it “a most unusual formation.” Etymonline can find one other case, maybe: direful.
The old Century Dictionary split the two words this way. Thankful is the acknowledgment, in words, right away. Grateful is the feeling, and the readiness to act on it, even a long time after the favor. Thankful is the note. Grateful is showing up when they move.
Grace, gratis and the rest of the gratus family
Gratus had a big family, and a lot of it moved to English.
Grace comes from the Latin gratia, which covered favor, goodwill and gratitude. The short prayer before a meal has been grace since the early 1200s, and until the 1500s it was usually graces, plural. As a verb, around 1200, to grace someone meant to thank them.
Gratis is a contraction of the Latin gratiis, “for thanks.” Something done gratis was done with no payment but thanks. Freelance writers know the rate.
Gratuity meant graciousness in the 1520s. By the 1530s it meant money handed over for service.
Gratuitous started out in the 1650s meaning freely given. By the 1690s it meant uncalled for. Forty years from a gift to an unwanted one.
Ingrate, from the 1670s, is a person who repays a favor with hostility or treachery. Ingrateful, which Milton used, was once a variant of ungrateful.
Mercy, merci and gramercy, which all started as pay
Mercy comes from the Latin merces: reward, wages, pay, hire. That goes back to merx, merchandise, the same root as market. In Medieval Latin it had come around to mean thanks.
French mostly handed the forgiveness sense to another word, miséricorde. Merci stayed on as thank you.
Gramercy, around 1300, is the Old French grant merci, great thanks. The modern French merci is a shortened gramercy.
New York’s Gramercy Park didn’t get its name from anybody’s thanks. It’s named for Gramercy Farm, and the farm’s name was an 18th-century reshaping of Crommeshie Fly, a marsh or shallow pond nearby. That came from a Dutch name that meant either “little crooked swamp” or “little crooked knife.” So a park in Manhattan is named, by way of a farm, for a marsh or a pond.
Much obliged, and beholden
Oblige comes from the Latin obligare, to bind, to bind up, to bandage. The modern sense, to make someone indebted by doing them a kindness, dates to the 1560s.
So “much obliged” means, at the root, tied up tight.
Beholden, from the 1300s, means bound in gratitude. It’s an old past participle of behold, and it keeps the original past participle of hold. Being beholden is being held.
Appreciate, with the price tag still on
Appreciate comes from the Late Latin appretiare, to set a price on, from pretium, price. It meant to value highly in the 1650s and to rise in value by 1787. The sense of being fully aware of something waited until 1833.
So when someone says they appreciate the fruitcake, they have appraised it.
Kudos, of which there is no kudo
Kudos comes from the Greek kydos, glory, especially in battle. The Century Dictionary called it a poetic word found mostly in the Iliad and the Odyssey. It came into English in 1799, probably as university slang.
It’s singular. The s is part of the word. Kudo, made by dropping the s, turns up by 1936, and Etymonline calls it “barbarous.” One kudos. Two kudos. No kudo.
The table
In Boontling, the Anderson Valley lingo, good food is bahl gorms. That’s from the Anderson Valley Historical Society’s list of words you might see or hear in the valley.
Turkey started out as the English name for the guinea fowl, in the 1540s, because it came by way of Turkey. In the 1550s the name moved over to the North American bird, which the Aztecs had domesticated. The two birds were told apart later, and the American one kept the name anyway. In Turkish, the bird is hindi, “Indian.” In French it’s dinde, from poulet d’Inde, chicken from India. It’s named for the wrong country in at least three languages.
Show business started calling a flop a turkey in 1927.
Cranberry, from the 1640s, is apparently an American adaptation of the Low German kraanbere, crane berry. Nobody knows why the crane. One guess is that the flower parts look like a crane’s beak. In England the European berries were marshwort or fenberries.
Gravy goes back to the Old French gravé, a seasoned broth or sauce. The drippings sense seems to have started with fish. Gravy as a sauce made from meat drippings shows up in the 1670s, the gravy boat in 1827 and the gravy train by 1899, said to be railroad slang for a short run that paid well. A 19th-century theory held that gravé was a scribe’s misreading of another word. It traces to the French lexicographer Frédéric Godefroy, who, Etymonline notes, adjusted the spellings in his citations to fit the theory.
Stuffing in the kitchen sense dates to the 1530s. Before that, the filling was stuff.
Leftovers, the food, is from 1878. Old English had its own word for it, metelaf.
The wishbone got its name in 1860. Pulling it apart goes back to the early 1600s, when the bone was called the merrythought.
The bottom line, such as it is
Thank began as a thought. Mercy began as wages. Gratis meant paid in thanks, oblige meant tied up, appreciate meant priced. A good share of the words for gratitude started out as words for owing.
On Nov. 26, 1896, the Mudge Mercantile Co. ran an ad in the Eskridge Star, published in Eskridge, Kansas. The store would close from 11 o’clock to 2 o’clock that Thursday “in order to have a short spell of thanx ourselves.”
Word Junkie is a column for people who own too many dictionaries and are not sorry.