Bush is one of those words that gets weirder the more I look
at it. If you look at a forest, there’s probably going to be some bushes there.
But if you’re really tired, you’re also bushed. So if a bush is tired, it’s a
bushed bush.
Words! There’s a reason I call these posts “Language of
Confusion”.
Bush, the plant, comes from the Old English bysc and further back, the West Germanic busk, which had the same meaning. There are similar words in other
languages (Old French had busch, which meant wood, while
Medieval Latin had busca), but it seems that West Germanic
was the one that started using the word first and it permeated through other
European languages. It’s worth noting that the modern French word for wood is
bois, which was passed along to
French Canada as boisé, which is where
the capital of Idaho comes from.
As for why it also means tired, the only real guess is that it’s from the sense
of being lost in the woods.
I guess that would make anyone tired.
Is that all? No, you don’t get off that easily. There’s also the word
ambush. It first showed up in the early fourteenth century from the Old French embuscher. As I
mentioned, busch means wood, and the em- prefix means in,
so it means “in woods”. Which is a good place for an ambush. Seriously, that’s
why ambush is ambush.
Sources
Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English
