David asked about the word ascribe which literally means “to write.”

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He says “Why do we ‘write onto’ someone or something that the attribute is ascribed to? Did the word start out as a physically written description?”

In 1746 Samuel Johnson wrote out a plan for how he was going to produce his dictionary. He pointed out that some words carry with them a sense of good or bad; ascribe being one of these words.

He said “we usually ascribe good; but impute evil.”

What he means by that is when some work or action is ascribed to someone the word ascribe is chosen because we are happy about whatever the story entails.

But fraud artists and criminals don’t have their work ascribed to them. Instead the nastiness of their deeds are reflected in the word we attach blame with.

Though I don’t use the word impute too often its etymology is in some ways consistent with the answer to David’s question.

It isn’t the case that good things were necessarily written down, and that that caused a word with a “writing” etymology to come to mean an assignment of credit to someone’s good deeds.

The answer is more closely aligned to our natural tendency to keep score and add up the balance sheet.

In 1382 one of the meanings of ascribe was to write into an accounts book.

By 1603 to ascribe had taken on a metaphorical meaning; you were adding to the accumulation of brownie points that someone had accumulated.

Jumping back to Samuel Johnson’s word impute, its meaning was to subtract from that same metaphorical balance sheet. Imputere was from Latin and putere meant to settle up an account.