I went looking for quotes using the word courage—it seems like a word that would generate a good number of quotes.

I was interested to see that there were an unusually high number of presidential quotes on the subject of courage. Now I wonder why that might be.

George W. Bush is quoted quoting Franklin Roosevelt. But it was non-president Bobby Kennedy who said that for every ten men brave in battle there was only one with moral courage.

That gives bravery as a rough synonym for courage; which lines up with how courage is understood today.

But it wasn’t always that way.

The word was carried across the English channel in 1066 by those brave Normans who planned to take over with William as a new king, deposing Harold II.

They did it too, installing courage as a new word taking over from an Old English word ellen.

This new French interloper word arrived with more meanings than just “bravery”—the one we give it now.

The root of the word courage is cour the French word for “heart.” The idea that our emotions originate in our hearts goes back at least 2500 years and one of the earliest books to make this connection was something called On The Sacred Disease about epilepsy written by followers of Hippocrates.

At first in English the word courage had meanings extending to all sorts of feelings one might attribute to one’s heart: thoughts, feelings desires and passions; gentle, sexual, and violent. It was in the 1300s that courage began to make it into print as an English word and it did so with those many different senses of emotion. Over the centuries all those other meanings fell away.

Before French, courage came from Latin and before that the cour part points back to an Indo-European kerd meaning “heart.” There is still enough similarity between this Indo-European kerden and the Old English heorte that you can see that the Indo-European root actually did percolate up into both Latin and Germanic languages.

While it’s true that Dutch is a Germanic language the phrase Dutch courage has little to do with etymology. Dutch courage doesn’t mean courage at all but means liquor; or more specifically the courage one feels after a few drinks.

Most sources interpret this phrase to be a slur against the Dutch but it is also true that the Dutch were the leading middlemen for the shipment of wine, brandy and gin to England between 300 and 400 years ago. However, the phrase Dutch courage doesn’t appear in the written record until 1826 according to the Oxford English Dictionary so that more benign “booze merchants” origin likely doesn’t apply. It likely was an insult against the Dutch.

That OED citation for Dutch courage is from Sir Walter Scott and it actually reminds us something about the OED itself. But I’ll talk about that tomorrow when I cover the word Dutch.

Before I go I’d like to thank some kind soul who stumbled podictionary. Stumble-upon is one of those networking sites that recommends things of common interest to its members. Whoever stumbled podictionary brought me double the number of web visitors for a day.

Problem is that stumble-upon automatically tags websites with categories, and their automatic software didn’t know what to make of podictionary because it categorized it as “unknown.” This even though there are categories for

• Etymology
• Words
• History
• Language
• Linguistics and
• Reference.

So, if anyone else out there feels so inclined, and wishes to stumble podictionary again. Could they please add some of these tags. Here’s a weblink to Stumble-Upon. You can also stumble individual posts by using the “share this” button.

Stumble It!