Anarcheologos

The word bashful came to mind recently and I realized that, while I understood its meaning, I didn’t understand how the meaning was arrived at.  In short, I realized that I had no idea what “bash” meant.

When I looked into it, I was surprised to find that “bash” actually comes from a French root, “abaissier”, which means “to humiliate” or “to bring low”.  In this case, the word seems to have been adopted into English and altered to sound, and be used, like an English word.

The meaning has changed slightly in English to mean shy or timid rather than humiliated.  Bashful, then, means to be full of shyness.  What I find interesting is the way that the French word was absorbed and modified until it reached a point where it looks and sounds like a native English word.  This seems not to be the case very often.

For instance, a word like office is incongruous because it involves pronouncing the letter “c” in a way that is not natural in English.  In other words, office is obviously a foreign loan word, while bashful masquerades successfully as a Anglo-Saxon.