Today I was given a demonstration of a rescue sled for injured skiers. The rescue team had the whole kit; oxygen bottle, defibrillator, the works.

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They were equipped to save people in serious trouble; but they admitted to me that usually they are helping out people who are suffering from a broken ski binding or an inability to read a map.

The Oxford Dictionary of English says that rescue means to save someone from a dangerous or difficult situation. They give the example of firefighters rescuing a man from a river.

So today it is appropriate to call what these folks do rescue but before 700 years ago, when rescue came into English, its Latin parent had a slightly different meaning.

The Indo-European root kwet meant “to shake.”

This word made its way eventually into Latin as quatere also meaning “to shake.”

One of the descendents of this Latin word made it into English as excuss which is probably a word you aren’t familiar with.

Just as new words are being brought into English all the time, some words become less and less popular until they are obsolete. Excuss is one of those words.

Around Shakespeare’s time you might come home from a shopping trip and excuss your purchases from your shopping bag; excuss meant to “shake out.”

You can see the ex meaning “out” while the cuss comes from that Latin quatere root.

As well as meaning “shake out,” excuss meant “shake off” or “get rid of.”

Although excuss died the death of an unpopular word, its daughter word rescue survived.

Just as Latin built excuss out of two parent words, they also built rescue by sticking together re meaning “again” and the predecessor of excuss the Latin excutere meaning “get rid of.”

Thus rescue literally means “shake off again” or “get rid of again.”

How might getting rid of something relate to being saved from a dangerous situation like a burning building?

At first the dangerous situation that this word referred to was being attacked by someone or held prisoner by them. So to be rescued was to get rid of the attacker; to shake them off again.

By the time the Latin word made it into English through French in the 14^th century it had already expanded to include most of the meanings we now recognize.