Words, words, they're all we have to go on

The City of Ladies is doing what it can to aid BlueJ in her search for accomodation. Pretty much everyone is mining the property guides and sending on likely prospects to her. Actually, of all of us, its Christine who isn't pulling her weight. De Pizan says that it is the perogative of all good ladies (and in my view BlueJ is it personified) that they live in the City of Ladies with the great women of history. But it turns out, disappointly, that there are limits to allegory.

BlueJ is going to need a flat literally as well as literarily.

So I've spent a lot of quality time in the last few weeks getting to know the landlords and landladies of this city - not the City; I already knew Christine. And this has left me with a language problem. (It left BlueJ with a splitting headache.) Obviously, this is a much more serious problem if you speak a gendered language, but I refuse to say 'landlords and landladies' everytime I need to refer to this group. So I have taken to calling them 'landpeople', which, as BlueJ pointed out, sounds a bit Stolypin's reform-esque.

So this, in turn, has led me to reflect on the etymology of the words. A caveat first; etymologists are liars. That might sound like a vast generalization but, as Viola pointed out, we're all liars anyway. (I'm pretty sure two vast generalizations cancel each other out.) Language is too complicated and is spoken by too many people, for there ever really to be right answers in etymology. Because there's always a chinese whispers aspect to the way language moves, there is usually more than one origin anyway. The Chinese Whispers Principle operates both popularly and academically; the origins of words have, as often as not, been obscured by etymologists. Hopkins, for example, noted endless and entirely fictional etymologies in his diaries. Privately (though a lot less privately now) I think that etymology is one of the bastians of a kind of Victorian desire to make set in concrete correctness things which are infinitely in flux. But as a Victorian myself, I have to fess to loving etymology.

The word 'people' comes from the Latin 'populus', which means exactly what you think it does. Both 'lord' and 'lady', on the other hand, come from the Old English word for 'bread'. 'Lord' is literally 'loaf-guard', which is great - 'Touch the bread and you'll feel the sting of my sword, scoundrel!' 'Lady' is 'loaf-kneader', which is very woman's-work-is-never-done-ish. Anglo-Saxons like to name things through concrete particularities, kennings, so both these words are meant to express metonymically the role of lords and ladies as head of the house-hold, the ones with the dough. My point is, perhaps I should abandon my fledgling word 'landpeople'. However populous this exponentially-expanding class of people is, 'landlord' and 'landlady' actually do seem pretty etymologically apt.