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My main use of the word immaculate has to do with cleanliness. I ask my kids to pick up their rooms until they are immaculate.

This rarely happens.

The other occurrence is immaculate as part of a name of a school or something and relating to the immaculate conception of Christ.

I can see how the two meanings relate; a physically clean room and the concept of moral cleanliness.

It seems to me that the meaning of the word immaculate has sort of moved back and forth between these two senses like a slow pendulum.  The Latin root of immaculate means “not maculate.”

But what does maculate mean I hear you asking.

Actually this is a Latin word I came across while I was writing my book about the words we use for our bodies.

Inside your eye are all those rods and cones specialized to pick up colored light during the day and greyer shades when it’s dark.  Obviously we can see better during the day and so it makes sense to crowd the cone cells that can pick up color in the part of the eye where things actually come into focus.  Out around the rest of the sphere of your eyeball rod cells are more common which is why peripheral vision is often good at night.

The crowding of the cone cells at the back of the eye where the image forms has a consequence that when the eye doctor looks into your eye, the part where the cone cells are most dense looks a little more yellow.

About 150 years ago, or maybe a little longer, physicians gave this yellow spot a name.

They called it yellow spot;

But in the Latin they liked to use that came out as macula lutea.

All of this being a very longwinded way of telling you that immaculate literally means “spotless” because macula meant “spot.”

But spots and eyes have gone together for more than 150 years.  Scars in people’s eyes and other spots have been called macula in England as far back as William the Conqueror, which is more like 1000 years.  So this root clearly arrived with the French of the Normans.

Immaculate doesn’t show up in English until 1430 but of course it was in use even back in classical Latin.

The pendulum swing I mentioned was that initially the meaning was a literal one so that something without spot was just clean.  By the time the word arrived in English it was a metaphor and meant without stain of character.

In most of our modern uses I think we’ve moved back to immaculate having to do with soap and elbow grease.  I checked with an English language corpus and this seems mostly true, but not entirely; there are still citations for such things as “immaculate performances.”

One side track that runs off this word root like some kind of spur line is the word mail.

By that I mean chainmail as dwarves might wear to complement their battle axes.

As I said, back in Latin macula meant “spot,” but it also meant “net,” as in “fishing net.”  Expert etymologists aren’t sure exactly why but I can imagine the knot in the string where the netting ties to its next strand looking like a spot and so gaining this name.

Whatever the reason, this name for a netting later evolved into the name of a netting of metal rings worn to protect against enemy battle axes.

Hence macula became mail.

Although dwarves and chainmail have an Old English feel to them chainmail couldn’t have been called chainmail in Old English since it’s a Middle English word. In Old English the garment was called here-burne.