A Roman knapsack, salt and sour wine: What the words used in the Budget originally meant

Or if we have an interest in the origin of words, we might like to consider the etymology of some of those we will be unable to escape on Budget Day. ‘Budget’ itself, for instance, is from the Old French bougette, a diminutive form of an older word bouge, meaning ‘a leather bag’, itself a borrowing of the Latin bulga ‘bag’ or ‘knapsack’ in which the Roman soldiers carried their meagre provisions as they marched off to conquer distant lands. We can’t be sure what it looked like, but it would certainly have been unrecognisable as the distant forebear of our Chancellor’s famous red box.

Money bag

A similar sort of idea lies behind the politicians’ much-vaunted concept of keeping to the fiscal rules. The Latin word fiscus originally meant a ‘wicker basket’ and probably served as a convenient receptacle for a Roman citizen’s odd coins and other bits and pieces. Over time, the little basket was used more specifically as a ‘money bag’ and then acquired the grander, metaphorical definition of the state treasury. By the 1560s, the adjective ‘fiscal’ had filtered through into English meaning ‘relating to the public purse’.

But when we consider our reliance on Latin for the words we use every day in connection with our finances, there is even more. The very word ‘finance’, for instance, derives from the Latin finis – ‘end’ or ‘finish’ – which was used in ancient Rome to denote the final settlement made to pay off a debt. Its modern application to money in general dates from the 18th century.

And then there are words like ‘salary’ and ‘pay’, both with origins which might come as a bit of a surprise. The first has come down to us from the Latin sal, meaning ‘salt’, as it was originally the money given to Roman soldiers to allow them to buy their daily ration of salt. Pay, a descendant of the Latin pax meaning ‘peace’, was first used in England in the 14th century and referred to the pennies doled out to labourers in order to ‘pacify’ them!

Chess and the Chancellor

The term ‘Chancellor of the Exchequer’ appeared in England during the reign of Henry III, who reigned from 1216 to 1272. The first part of the title, Chancellor, was borrowed directly from Latin. In ancient Rome, the clerk whose job it was to keep a record of law court proceedings was known as a cancellarius, simply because he sat behind the cancelli, a lattice work screen, out of sight of the general public. Over time, cancellarius morphed into our ‘chancellor’.

Perhaps surprisingly, ‘exchequer’ is directly related to the board game we know as ‘chess’. The term was borrowed from the Old French échecs, ‘chess’, and the associated échequier ‘chess board’, the connection being with the medieval custom of keeping accounts by moving counters around a chequered board.

Behind all these fascinating facts, of course, lies ‘money,’ a word which has come down to us from Rome’s Capitoline Hill. This is where the Roman goddess Juno, who oversaw and protected all the Romans’ finances, had her temple and where the Romans minted their coins. The part of the temple set aside for the production of coins was the moneta, the origin of both ‘mint’ and ‘money’ in English.

But moneta was also one of the epithets applied to Juno, from the Latin verb monere ‘to warn’, making her ‘Juno, the one who warns’. Tradition has it that she warned against earthquakes and this begs the question: did the Romans choose her temple as the site for their mint because they thought she might also warn against looming financial crises in time for them to make alternative arrangements with their cash?

Getting the house in order

Of course, the politician whose job it is to decide how much tax (from the Latin taxare ‘to assess’) we will all be paying for the foreseeable future is responsible for the economy as a whole. He or she has a duty to make sure the country’s finances are sound and that, like any citizen, he or she has to do whatever is necessary to put one’s house in order. And this is a clue to the origin of the word ‘economy’; it comprises two Greek words, oikos meaning ‘house’ and nomos meaning ‘order’, so that, strictly speaking, an economist’s main task is to make sure a house is run in an orderly fashion.

But sometimes it all goes wrong. Sometimes the financial situation of a humble household or the country as a whole goes haywire; drastic measures are called for which are almost always guaranteed to prove unpopular. Spending has to be cut; luxuries have to be abandoned and that extra bottle of wine has to be left on the supermarket shelf.

Austerity now becomes the order of the day and the etymological association with the surrendered bottle of wine is closer than we might suspect. Austeros was a Greek adjective meaning ‘bitter’ or ‘sour’ and was applied particularly to wines which were too sour to drink or left a nasty taste in the mouth.

Let’s hope Château Reeves premier cru is not as offensive to the palate as we have been led to expect.

Alexander Tulloch is the author of several books on the derivation of words, including It’s All Greek and Just the Job, both published by The Bodleian, Oxford University