The other day my daughter came home with an etymology she’d learned at school.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

Sincere, she said, came from a way that people knew if a statue was a valuable antique or not.

Evidently people used wax to stick broken statues back together and since the Latin word for wax is cera, sans cera meant “without wax” and you knew your antique statue was the real McCoy.

I was a little dubious of this etymology at first, so I proceeded to my Oxford English Dictionary and low and behold, there it was.

One problem though.

There it was in the sentence “There is no probability in the old explanation from sine cera ‘without wax’.”

I’ll tell you the real etymology in a moment but to attempt to discover where this phony etymology came from I did a little searching.  There are other equally unlikely stories.

Workmen who’d been hired to build roman pillars were too lazy to polish the marble and so buffed it up with some wax, took their pay and vamoosed before the hot sun melted the wax.

Another alternative, that people making cheap pottery that seemed to crack before it was even sold, used wax to hide these defects and so quality potters took to stamping “no wax” or its equivalent on their workmanship, bringing a sense of “true quality” to the word sincere.

Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code used this folk etymology in his book Digital Fortress in which he has one of the characters sign his letters “without wax, David.”

Despite the popularity of Dan Brown’s books, he must have been perpetuating an already popular folk etymology as opposed to being its principal evangelist.  This is because Digital Fortress wasn’t published until 10 years after The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition in which this dissing of the “no wax” theory appears.

So what was the correct etymology you ask?

I said before that once I started looking into wine words I was amazed how often words seemed to be related to wine.

This word sincere is not in my Wine Words book, but listen to how it relates.

The true etymology of sincere is from the Latin sincerus meaning “clean,” or “pure” but thought to originate in Indo-European roots sem meaning “one” and ker meaning “growth.”

So something that is sincere is etymologically pure and uncontaminated by cross breeding.

In doing my book research I’ve become convinced that wine is the most highly engineered product that humanity has ever produced.  We have been tinkering with wine at the genetic level for at least 8000 years.

So I ask you, what agricultural product could it have been, for which ancient peoples cared enough about its quality to have come up with a phrase describing it in terms of its genetic purity?

I suggest wine.

Hey, the cru in Grand Cru and Premier Cru comes from the same source.