Five French words whose origin you will not suspect

Who would suspect, by pronouncing the word

, that he originally designated a

?

Or that when we qualify a friend as

, it is because etymologically, he inspires us with fear, fear ...?

We think we know the meaning of these innocuous words, which we use every day.

However, some of them did not have the same meaning at all in the past.

The editorial staff offers you an anthology of these words with astonishing etymology.

● A "madman" and a ball

The

seemingly innocuous

word

did not mean quite the same thing a few centuries ago.

From classical Latin

, it designates ... a balloon.

According to the Trésor de la langue française, it was originally used as a synonym for

, or

or

.

Meanings far removed from that which we give to the term

today, which designates a person with an altered mind, with troubled behavior.

It was not until the late Latin era that its meaning changed to

.

● The "Gentiles" and the Jewish religion

This is a term that did not have the same meaning in the past. What connection can there be between a sympathetic and delicate person, meaning that we give him today, and someone

? If we refer to the thesaurus,

, from the Christian Latin

, designates, in the Old and New Testaments, the

, as opposed to the people of Israel, to the people of God. The

were those who belonged

, then those who were

. It was not until Christian times that the word became synonymous with

. The evolution of

is made at the same time as that of the word

, which first designated the clan, the family, the nation, then in the imperial period, the nations foreign to the Roman people.

● "Delirium" and the furrow of the earth

The first definition of the verb

is very far from ours. It is borrowed from classical Latin

, which means:

.

has been attested in French since the 16th century. Le Littré notes that in

,

(

) is a metaphor for laborers. Our word is therefore indeed linked to the work of the fields.

becomes figuratively a synonym of

, then

. Note that figuratively, the phrase

means

● Being “embarrassed” and confession under torture

“I'm embarrassed,”

we sometimes admit when faced with an embarrassing situation. But do we know that by using this word we are

, according to the first definition of the word? The verb

appears in the 14th century in the form

He turns into a

, or

, notes the Treasury of the French language. In the middle of the XVIth century, it means

, before transforming itself into

, which approaches our current meaning:

. It is found at Ronsard in 1565 in the sense

, and finally in the 18th century in the form of

,

.

● The sinister “left”

We are not sure of its origin, but the word

may have replaced the word

(originally

). Among the Greeks, the left was a bad sign, recalls Jaqueline de Romilly in

. In the proper and material sense, the left was thus endowed with a pejorative meaning, the same as one finds in the expression

. It turns out that the left, among the Greeks, was a bad sign. It was the side which, in Latin, was called

. There is also an old popular expression which said:

.

It means that the groom, noble and of superior condition to the bride,

, underlines the Littré.

However, left-handers be reassured, this unfavorable meaning was quickly replaced by the Greek

, which means:

.