Here’s a test. Touch your own neck.

Did you touch the front, the side or the back?

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I’ll lay odds that most people touched the side of their neck and almost no one touched the front.

They’d have touched the front if I’d said “throat.”

When the word neck first appeared in English it referred specifically to the back of the neck and wasn’t the usual word that people used when referring to that part of our bodies that keeps our heads from falling off. The usual words were halse and swire.

Etymologists don’t really know where this word neck came from but some speculate that it may be related to and Indo-European root knok meaning “a rise” or “high point.”

The real reason I chose the word neck today though was as an excuse to tell you about something once called the neck verse.

Centuries ago as the legal system was working itself out in medieval England there were two parallel court systems. One was administered by the king’s officials and the other was administered by the church.

The king’s justice tended to involve more hangings, beheadings and burnings at the stake. Church justice was a little more forgiving.

For your average criminal then it was much wiser if you could have your trial in the church court system but to qualify you had to be a member of the clergy.

Back then it was a little less clear who was a member of the clergy and who was not. Actually it was a lot less clear.

As a boy if you were lucky enough to have been educated and could read this often included the ability to read Latin. Since so much of the Latin reading material was church reading material it was a pretty safe bet that you were pursuing some kind of religious education.

So let’s imagine you’ve been caught red handed stealing a silver spoon worth 13 pence.

I have no idea what the cost of silver spoons was back then but I do know that any theft over 12 pence called for the death penalty according to the king’s justice.

If you were caught with that spoon in your pocket the first thing you’d do was to claim what was called the benefit of clergy which allowed you to be tried by the church instead of the hanging judge.

“Prove it” would be the response and the way you’d prove that you really were a member of the clergy just pretending to be a thief was that you’d read a passage of scripture in Latin.

Since not all the king’s officials were necessarily all that literate one particular Latin verse emerged as a favorite passage to be read to prove you were a man of God.

Problem was that word got around and so people learned to read that particular Latin verse even if they could read no other Latin.

There is a fine line between being able to read only one particular verse in Latin and having just memorized one particular verse in Latin so many people who actually couldn’t read a word of anything saved their necks by reciting this verse. And that’s why it became called the neck verse.