By MICHAEL FERBER

            I have a thing about thing.  It is a really interesting word, with a surprising history.  Today it mainly means “object” or “entity,” and it is so common that it has been grammaticalized till it is more or less a suffix in anything, something, everything, and nothing.  By itself it is almost a pronoun, useful for when we don’t know the name of, well, something: “What’s that thing on the back porch?”  It’s true that there are some puzzling uses of it, as in “Do your own thing” and “Is that a thing?” (meaning something like “new custom” or “meme”), but by and large it has a very simple and general meaning.  No need to look it up in a dictionary.

            But if you do, you will learn something surprising: the oldest recorded sense of the word, as Old English thing, meant “meeting, assembly, court, or council.”  It had this sense in all our fellow Germanic languages, and in some of them it still has it. 

            The Old Norse word thing lives on in the Storthing, the Norwegian Parliament (stor- means “great”); in the Folketing, the Danish Parliament; and in the Allthing, the Icelandic Parliament.  It also survives in English hustings, a plural noun with a singular sense, until recently the name of the court in some English cities, now a platform on which political speeches are given or any act of political campaigning takes place.  It comes from Old Norse husthing which ishus “house” plus thing.

            From the sense of “meeting” or “assembly” grew derivative meanings in all or most of the Germanic languages: “lawsuit, conflict,” then “cause, motive,” then “event, affair, case, deed,” then “property, object, matter.”  These all have legal senses, and one can see them unwind from each other: one might “go to court” or “bring a suit” and “plead a case” over one’s “property,” all using thing.  (The Old English verb thingian meant “beg, ask, harangue.”)  The modern primary sense of “thing” seems to emerge from “property” (we still say “pack your things” and the like) and from “object,” originally closer to the sense “objective” in a legal case.

            Old High German ding lives on in the Modern German Ding in the sense “affair” or “matter,” though Ding also has widened its sense to the same degree that English thing has.  The adjective dinglich still has a mainly legal sense; dinglichberechtigt means “holding interests in rem” (we will return to this Latin phrase, which means something like “to one’s advantage” or “in one’s interests”).  The surname Dingman (German and Dutch) must have meant “councilor” or the like.  Icelandic has thingmenn with a similar sense.  I haven’t seen the equivalent in Old English dictionaries, but it probably existed.

Here is another interesting twist.  The German word for “Tuesday” is Dienstag.  Our word “Tuesday” comes from Old English Tiwes, the genitive case of Tiw, the god of war and the sky (like Old Norse Tyr), corresponding to Mars.  Tuesday is Tiw’s day.   (Tuesday corresponds to Latin Martis dies, Mars’s day, whence Italian martedi, French mardi, and Spanish martes.)  But German Dienst- has a different origin, coming from a different god.  “Tuesday” in Middle Low German is dingesdach, and in Middle Dutch dinxendach.  The god of this day must be the one that shows up on a third-century Latin inscription in Frisia, Mars Thinxus, or “Mars the Protector of the Thing,” that is, the gathering of the people.  There may have been a god named Thinxus, distinct from Tiw or Tyr, whom the Romans also identified with Mars.

If the evolution in meaning of thing from “assembly of the people” to “object” or “entity” seems weird and arbitrary, a very similar semantic path was taken by several other unrelated words.

Take the words for “thing” in the Romance languages.  French chose can mean “thing” but also “case, business, affair, chattel, property.”  A chose jugée is a case that has been decided.  Italian cosa and Spanish cosa have similar ranges.  Eso es mia cosa is Spanish for “That’s my business” or “my affair.”   Italian cosa nostra is “our thing.”

These words descend from Latin causa, from which we get (via legal French) cause.  The Latin ranged in meaning from “reason, motive” to “case, lawsuit, claim.”  It is the root of several legal verbs: accusare “bring a lawsuit against,” excusare “absolve of blame,” and recusare “take exception” or “refuse.”  The origin of causa itself is unknown.

The Latin for “thing” (as “entity”) is res, but that too can mean “lawsuit, business affair, interest, property.”  The legal phrase in re means “in the matter of”; note in rem above in the paragraph about German Ding.  (From res we get real, reality, realty, reify, rebus.)  The res publica is the state or commonwealth, the “people’s thing” or “republic.”   (French chose publique and Italian cosa pubblica mean “commonwealth.”)  The res Romana is the Roman state.

A touch of this semantic evolution is visible in matter, used in legal phrases such as “in the matter of.”  The word comes from Latin materia “material” (especially wood) and is derived from mater “mother.”  (There’s a topic for a later time.)  Latin materia could mean “occasion” or “cause.”  When we ask “What’s the matter?” we are not talking about material things.

Finally there is the interesting word sake, meaning “purpose” or “good,” used mainly in phrases such as “for the sake of argument” or “for heaven’s sake.”  Old English saecc or sacu meant “strife, conflict” and “trial, lawsuit”; saca meant “opponent” or “foe.”  The Middle English phrase “without sake” meant sine causa, i.e., “without good reason” or “without blame.”  Old Norse sok and Old Saxon saka meant “crime, accusation, action at law.”  Modern German Sache has a legal sense: in Sachen A gegen B means “in the matter of A versus B.”  But the most common sense of Sache today is (surprise!) “thing.”

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.

Website: : https://www.michaelkferber.com/

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.