When your surname is your destiny

I caught sight of this baker's delivery van as I was on my way to the subway the other day and thought, "Wow, how appropriate is that?" "Baxter" is an occupational name derived from the Anglo-Saxon word bæcestre meaning "a female baker".

In Anglo-Saxon, most masculine agent nouns (nouns denoting someone or something that performs the action of a verb) had an -ere ending, which has evolved into our -er suffix. Feminine agent nouns, on the other hand, had an -estre ending. Thus, 

a woman who sang was a

sangestre

a woman who sewed was a

séamestre

I particularly love, and feel we should revive, the word for a female dancer: a

hoppestre 

Anglo-Saxon apparently also felt the need for a word meaning "female poisoner or witch":

lybbestre

 

Most of these have died out, but some have survived as surnames, because they were common occupations, and ones typically filled by women in Anglo-Saxon times. 

Thus we have

Webster (a weaver)

Brewster (a brewer)

Dexter (a dyer)

and the above-mentioned

Baxter (a baker)

In the north of England, though, men started taking over trades like weaving, baking, and tailoring, and the -ster ending started to be used in a gender-neutral way. Thus we see a "person who judges", based on the Anglo-Saxon word "deem"  (overtaken by the French word "judge"), is a

Dempster (a judge)

  

One -ster word that has, just barely, survived, is 

spinster (originally "a woman who spins") 

but not as a family name for obvious reasons, once it came to mean "an unmarried woman". We won't be sad to see that one go.

Once -ster had become a gender-neutral ending, though, the language still felt the need for a specifically feminine ending, and fortunately the French had brought one with them: -ess, derived from Latin -issa. In our lovely "let's have a language mishmash" way, we just tacked that on and ended up transforming

sangestre into "songstress" and

séamestre into "seamstress" (with its now obsolete variant "sempstress")

By the 16th century all associations of -ster with feminine gender had been lost, paving the way for

gamester, jokester, punster, trickster  

and even words formed from adjectives, as in 

youngster 

and the more recent  

oldster

Although I might qualify as both a spinster and an oldster, I would warn you not to use those words of me in my presence! 

At your service

Spring has finally arrived here in southern Ontario, and among the many trees bursting into bloom is the serviceberry. I snapped the one above outside my local library a few days ago.

It got me wondering, why is it called a serviceberry? Of service to whom?

Turns out that it has nothing at all to do with the common word "service", which is derived from the Latin servus (slave).

The tree in question, Amelanchier to give it its botanical name, is very common in North America, and when English-speaking settlers arrived, they noticed a similarity between its fruit and the fruit of a tree they knew back home, a relative of the pear.

Way back in Anglo-Saxon times, that tree, Pyrus domestica, and its fruit, had been called a syrfe. By the 1400s, syrfe had morphed into serve and the plural had become servys. But after another century, people, possibly confused by the arrival of the other "service" from French, forgot that servys was already a plural and started to talk about eating "services" and to call the tree a "service tree". A similar evolution happened with the word "quince".

This was just in time for English speakers to migrate to North America and discover the Amelanchier, whose fruit looked like the berries of the service tree. As was the case with much flora and fauna (e.g. "robin", which is a red-breasted wren in England and a much larger red-breasted thrush in North America), it was just easier to apply a name for a similar European species than to think up a new name. So the North American shrub was baptized "serviceberry".

But in Western Canada, Amelanchier goes by a different name altogether: saskatoon.

This name is derived from Cree misâskwatômina. I am grateful to Cree scholar Arok Wolvengrey for the following explanations:

One interpretation of this could be "the tree with many branches", constituted from /mis-/ "big, much, plenty" + /-âskwatw/ "branch". (If you look at my picture of my local serviceberry, this is a very apt description of the tree's growth habit.) 

Another interpretation is that the compound word should be analysed as coming from /mis-/ "big, much, plenty" + /-âskw-/ "wood" + /atw-/ "arrow". The branches of the saskatoon bush were much prized for their suitability for making arrows. It is, therefore, the "shrub/bush that produces a lot of arrow wood".

It's very common in the Prairies to find pies, jams, syrups, and so on made from saskatoons, which look like blueberries and have a somewhat similar taste. I haven't seen any serviceberry products in Ontario, though. Perhaps I should go berry picking later this summer on a visit to my library.


For the stories behind names of other plants you might find in your garden, please click here:
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2016/06/gardening-related-wordlady-posts.html