Saturday, April 19, 2014

A-to-Z Challenge: Quit

The best part of doing etymology as my theme? It’s really easy to come up with words for the hard letters. Well, mostly.


Today we have: quit.

Quit first showed up in the early thirteenth century, where it meant repay, like a debt. Quit has actually had a lot of meanings over the years. In the mid-thirteenth century, it meant to reward, while in the late fourteenth century it meant to take revenge or retort. Then in the fourteenth century, before we had acquit, quit meant to plead not guilty. Later on, in the fifteenth century, quit meant leave or depart (if you’ve ever read any Shakespeare, you’ve heard it used that way) and then mid-century, it also meant relinquish. It wasn’t until the middle of the seventeenth century that people started using it as “stop doing something”. There’s no real reason why quit changed definitions so many times, but most of the meanings had something to do with being free of something. That’s because quit comes from the Old French quiter, establish innocence or simply release. Quiter comes from another Old French word, quitte, which means free or clear. It comes from the Medieval Latin quitus and classical Latin quietus, which means quit, calm, or sleeping. And if you think that word looks and sounds an awful lot like quiet, there’s a reason.

Sources
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

9 comments:

  1. And the definitions don't quit there!
    Yeah, that word went through a lot of them. Not guilty? That's really different.

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  2. I have heard it used that way in Shakespeare, actually. I think in Twelfth Night.

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  3. I would love to quit on my debt. :)

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  4. I knew about the quit as to leave but I didn't know about the rest of the definitions.

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  5. I was thinking of Shakespeare while I was reading this, actually.

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  6. I guess it's such an easy word to say, it would be stupid to get rid of it entirely. Might as well have fluid meanings...

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  7. I love seeing the way words grow and change through time. This one has a particularly interesting journey.

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  8. What a varied bunch of meanings. Fascinating.

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  9. I'd heard of a 'Notice to Quit' in legal arenas, but some of the rest of this was new to me. I love learning about words. This is a fun theme!
    Visiting you from the A-to-Z Challenge! ~ Susan at Haiku Corner. :)

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