Clerk: menial drudge, or inheritor of
the service of God? Photograph: Guardian
As of today, the Culture Vulture will be a wordier, more verbose, not to say prolix place. Our resident logophile, Sean Clarke, is beginning a weekly word blog: each week he will take a word that's been in the news, explain its meaning and investigate its etymology. To kick things off, he has decided to stay close to home ...
A friend recently asked me, presumably expecting me to have some special insight on account of my surname, why clerical means both "to do with priests" and "to do with office work". I blithely responded that since churchmen were the only people who knew how to write in many instances in the middle ages, they necessarily ended up lumbered with most of the admin responsibilities.
This turns out to be true as far as it goes, but I had a niggle. As far as I knew, a priest in pre-Christian Rome was not referred to as a "clericus", but as a "pontifex" or "sacerdos" - where then did this new term come from? Collins tells the story briefly but intriguingly. Clericus, it says, comes from the Greek klerikos, based on kleros, an inheritance. This, it says parenthetically, is an allusion "to the Biblical Levites [Israel's priestly caste], whose inheritance was the Lord". Thus priests were the "inheritors" - of the service of God. The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology goes into a little more detail, saying kleros was used to translate Hebrew "nahalah", with the same meaning, in early Greek bibles.
This tale delighted me, not only because it gave me some spurious claim to being a Levy. It seems to me wonderful that clerk, a term which now suggests meniality and drudgery, derives from what was once an airy Byzantine euphemism: "My brother spends a lot of time at church. I'm worried he might be turning into a Levite." Better still, I can't think of the original Hebrew metaphor without supposing it must originally have been used with a bit of a cutting edge. "A: Is that bloke rich? B: Oh yes, his inheritance is the service of the Lord. A: But apart from that? B: Apart from that he hasn't two shekels to rub together, obviously."
All of which is by way of introduction to this feature, inspired by the curious stories behind even perfectly ordinary words. Ironically, it does not itself have a name - which is where you come in. If you'd be kind enough to post your suggested appellations below, we'll pick the best one and name the blog after it. And if that's not motivation enough, we'll also send the worthy winner a copy of Dr Johnson's Potpourri - a dictionary of 4,000 of the most "entertaining and historically stimulating" definitions from the great man's original.
I should admit though, that it wasn't "clerk" that gave us the idea. The first time we realised this might be fun was when we discovered that fornicate comes from "fornix", an arch. Since it happened that most brothels in ancient Rome were built under the arches (presumably of aqueducts or larger buildings, there being few railways), to "hang around under the arches" was to engage in lascivious activity. But we could hardly start with that.
