957. We trace the linguistic history behind "house" and "mansion" to uncover how these two humble words for dwellings grew apart, with "mansion" gaining airs — all because of the Norman invasion. Plus, we look at why someone might ask if a potential suitor "gave you any house."
957. We trace the linguistic history behind "house" and "mansion" to uncover how these two humble words for dwellings grew apart, with "mansion" gaining airs — all because of the Norman invasion. Plus, we look at why someone might ask if a potential suitor "gave you any house."
The "house" versus "mansion" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/house-mansion/transcript
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by Valerie Fridland
As the holiday travel season descends, many of us go back to spend a bit of time in the houses of our childhood. While they might have seemed like mansions in the eyes of a little kid, we rarely find them quite so grand when we're squished together in the dining room between Aunt Kate and all the cousins. But what exactly does it take to change a house into a mansion? Not much, it turns out, beyond a little French charm. At least if we consider the history of the words we use to refer to the places we reside.
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Stick around because after we talk about the origin of words like "house" and "mansion," I have a familect that also includes the word "house," and I try to get to the bottom of its origin.
The word "house" is a native English word, meaning we got it from the Germanic languages that developed into Old English after the Angles, Saxons and Jutes settled on the British Isles in the fifth century. The ancient Germanic word for "house" was "khusan," but by the time it made it into English, the "k" sound had dropped off, leaving us with just "hus."
This type of sound loss was not unusual – in fact, the ancient word for "heart" also originally started with a "k" — it was "ker" — which explains why "cardiac" and "heart" refer to the same vital organ but sound so different. "Cardiac" was borrowed into English from the Latin word for heart, "cor," where it never dropped the original "k" sound at the beginning. The word "heart," on the other hand, came to English from Germanic origins where its "k" had long been left behind and only a puff of air, otherwise known as an "h," remained.
But the most interesting thing about the origin of the word "house" is that it's etymologically related to the verb "to hide," probably because, way back in human history, a house was a covering or shelter that allowed people to hide from the elements and danger. The same root also gave us the modern word "hut," also meaning a place of shelter, though one a bit less sturdy sounding than the shelter of a house. The relationship between "house" and "hut" is much easier to imagine when you see that the original spelling of the word "house" in Old English was h-u-s. The modern English spelling with "ou" comes from the influence of French writing conventions that were used for English vowels during the late Middle Ages.
And since we brought up French, it’s time to get to the question of how some houses turned into mansions, or at least when we start talking about big expensive ones. To see how everyday houses and fabulous mansions aren't all that different, we have to travel back quite a few centuries to the time when the French speaking William of Normandy invaded England in 1066, in what became known as the Norman conquest.
Since William and the new ruling class of England spoke a dialect of French known as Anglo-French, the influence of French on English over the next several centuries was vast. Many French words were borrowed into English, including the French word for house, "maison," and the Classical Latin word "mansion" from which the French word had developed. Both of these words came from the Latin verb "manēre," which meant "to dwell" or "to stay," and, originally, they both pretty much just meant a place you dwelt — in other words, a house.
It wasn’t until the 14th century that a size and status divide grew between a mansion and a house. English was just starting to come out from the shadows of more well-respected languages that had longer histories and greater literary traditions, so anything associated with French or Latin still tended to have higher status.
One problem was that a lot of words that had been borrowed into English from French were in competition with native English words (meaning words that were Germanic in origin). And linguists have noticed that it bugs people to have words that mean exactly the same thing, so when that happens, we usually eventually end up using them in slightly different ways or we create subtle differences in meaning.
As a result, the words that were borrowed from French tended to be "fancified" in that they were used to refer to slightly more bougie or fancy things than the native English words. This is because French had historically been associated with the ruling aristocrats, and so people associated the words borrowed from French with more wealth and clout. In the same vein, English speakers tended not to be very highborn, so their words were a bit less highbrow. As a result, mansions referred to the houses that lords lived in, while those who were less well-off lived in houses.
The same separation in the way people saw French and English words developed between many other English and French word pairs, too, like the following pairs, in which the first word is the native word, and you'll notice it always comes off as more informal than the second word, which came from French: "ask"/"enquire," "love"/"amor," "smell"/"odor," "drink"/"beverage," "green"/"verdant," and "buy"/"purchase."
Likewise, a lot of the dual words we have for animals versus meat, like "deer" versus "venison" or "cow" versus "beef" are because the animals were raised, killed, and cooked by English speaking farmers and servants, and then served on a platter to the Anglo French, where they were called by their French names (such as "le boeuf").
In the end, what this means is that there really is very little difference between a mansion and a house, at least from the perspective of what the words originally meant. Of course, that feels like small consolation to those of us whose houses are not quite considered the stuff of caviar dreams.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
References
Merriam Webster. "How English Got Frenchified." Accessed November 15, 2023. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/norman-conquest-new-english-words
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "house, n.¹ & int.", September 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3413887183
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "hut, n.¹", July 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2833983825
Next I have two familects from Melanie.
Hi Grammar Girl, it's Melanie from Arizona. I have two familects to ask you about. One I hope is a legitimate word and the other is, I'm sure, made up. First the made up one. I used to work with a person who had a familect for something that tasted so delicious that was beyond words. The word was "laripin", like that cheesecake was a "laripin." I never knew how to spell it, but I always imagined it being L-A-R-I-P-I-N. So even though my family never adopted the word, I still find myself thinking of it when something is over-the-top delicious. So here's the other familect and it's a word my mom would say a lot when my sisters and I were growing up: It's the word "house," and she would use it this way: "Did that boy give you any house at school today?" meaning did he give you any attention? She would use that quite a bit, and I always thought it was a regular word, but I recently looked it up, and I can't find that meaning other than, of course, the regular meaning of "house." So what do you think? Is it a long-forgotten word from the 1930s or '40s when my mom was young? Unfortunately, she's no longer with us, otherwise I would ask her its origin. Thanks, Grammar Girl.
Thanks, Melanie! This was the perfect question to go with our first segment, and it led me down the interesting path of different uses of the word "house," including some slang. Nobody I asked had heard any variation of "did he give you any house?" to mean giving a girl attention, so I'd say it's very likely you're right that it's a familect, or something just your mom or maybe a small group of people said. But I have some ideas of where she may have gotten it.
First, there's a phrase about withholding attention or consideration that talks about not giving "houseroom." And that's one word, "houseroom." For example, you could say something like, "Nobody wants walnuts in the brownies, Josephine. Why are you even giving that idea houseroom?" or you could say, "That man is no good for you, Dorothy. Stop giving him houseroom." The Oxford English Dictionary has it going all the way back to the 1500s, and it's still in use today, but The Free Dictionary labels it as "old-fashioned." So it likely would have been more popular in your mother's time.
One problem though is that the saying appears to be more common in British English than American English, and I presume your mother wasn't British.
But a commenter on the Grammar Girl Facebook page who appeared to be American, seemed to use "house" in a similar way, for example, saying, "I don't house that," to refer to behavior she wouldn't put up with. So I wouldn't rule it out completely.
A different line of reasoning that I think is more likely comes from the way we call a venue — like a bar or a concert hall— the house. That use goes all the way back to Old English. Think of a bar being called a public house or an ale house or someone saying a full theater has a full house. By extension, the audience itself can be called the house, as in the phrase "to bring down the house," which means to get a lot of applause. The Oxford English Dictionary has that going back to the 1770s.
And in a related more colloquial use, people who know more about musicians than I do tell me that when a performer gets a lot of applause, it can be called simply "getting house." (And you can also find that definition in the Urban Dictionary.)
Getting applause is a lot like getting attention, so my best guess is that maybe your mom was somehow involved with musicians and was thinking of a boy giving you attention at school as being similar to an audience lavishing a performer with applause.
And here's a final aside that didn't really fit in with the story but that I still thought was interesting: According to multiple sources, house music, which is a type of dance music, probably gets its name from The Warehouse, a club in Chicago where it was first popularized around 1985.
Thanks for the call and interesting question, Melanie. I thoroughly enjoyed researching the possible origin.
If you want to share the story of your familect, your family dialect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect because that’s always the best part.
And I also want to mention that I have a kind of new book out that makes a super gift. My publisher let me update my book THE GRAMMAR DEVOTIONAL, which came out way back in 2009. I got rid of the old pop-culture references (RIP TiVo), I made 1,000 tiny copy edits to make it better, and updated all the entries that needed updating because if you're a long-time listener, you know that style guidelines change more than most people realize. And it has a new name. It's now called THE GRAMMAR DAILY to emphasize that it is a year's worth of tips, puzzles, cartoons, and quizzes. It's like a tip-a-day calendar you can keep forever, and just like a tip-a-day calendar, it makes a great gift for the language lovers in your life. Again, it's called THE GRAMMAR DAILY.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to audio engineer, Nathan Semes; marketing associate, Davina Tomlin; marketing assistant, Kamryn Lacey; ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson; digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings; and director of podcasts, Brannan Goetschius, whose guilty pleasure is professional wrestling.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.