海角大神

The first thing to know about the etymology of thanksgiving is that it鈥檚 all in your mind. The English verb thank is thought to be rooted in an ancient word meaning 鈥渢hink.鈥�

Thank goes back to an Old English verb meaning to thank, to give thanks, or to reward. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces this, in turn, to a Proto-
Indo-European tong meaning 鈥渢o think, feel.鈥澛�

Proto-Indo-European roots are words or parts of words that linguists believe are ancestors of words in today鈥檚 languages. The quest for these roots is a little bit like the way paleontologists figure out what dinosaurs must have looked like, except that the linguists don鈥檛 have actual bones to work with.

At Thanksgiving we are grateful for our blessings, and that word comes from the Latin-derived vocabulary of English.

The original word was simply grate, meaning 鈥減leasing to the mind,鈥� but also 鈥渇ull of gratitude, disposed to repay favors bestowed.鈥� The (redundant) ful was tacked on later. The Online Etymology Dictionary quotes a source calling this a 鈥渕ost unusual formation,鈥� and wonders, 鈥淚s there another case where English uses -ful to make an adjective from an adjective?鈥澛�

The Latin gratia was a semantic cornucopia of positive meanings: 鈥渇avor, esteem, regard; pleasing quality, good will, gratitude.鈥� It led to grace, as an English verb meaning 鈥渢o thank鈥� (1200), later 鈥渢o show favor鈥� (mid-15th century), and then 鈥渢o lend or add grace to something,鈥� as in 鈥済race us with your presence,鈥� as the dictionary further explains. Hence the grace notes of music, meant to add a little something extra, a 鈥渇avor鈥� or bonus.听

Gratia is the source of grazie and gracias, the usual way of saying 鈥渢hanks鈥� in Italian and Spanish, respectively.听

French has the preposition gr芒ce 脿, meaning 鈥渢hrough鈥� or 鈥渂y means of.鈥� It鈥檚 equivalent to the English 鈥渢hanks to,鈥� often used with distinctly ungrateful irony: 鈥淭hanks to the rush-hour traffic, we missed curtain time.鈥�

But if you know even five words of French, you know that the unironic 鈥渢hank you鈥� in that language comes not from gratia, but rather is merci.听

That French word can be traced back to the Latin merx, meaning wares or merchandise, a root that shows up in English in commerce, merchant, and even market.听

When the French merci slipped over into English, though, it seems to have lost the transactional sense. Somewhat loftier meanings were attached to it, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED): 鈥減ity, (secular or divine) grace, discretionary judgement, mercy.鈥�

Modern French has settled on merci as the ordinary word for 鈥渢hanks.鈥� But the English meaning evolved along a different path, as in this OED definition of a sense going back to around 1225: 鈥淐lemency and compassion shown to a person who is in a position of powerlessness or subjection, or to a person with no right or claim to receive kindness.鈥�

May you have a thoughtfully thankful holiday!