Retire

I was recently asked about the etymology of the English word “retire”(in connection with quitting work).  It comes from Old French “retirer”, compounded from “re” (meaning “back”, a prefix used in Latin) and the Old French verb “tirer” meaning something like “pull” (which comes from a Germanic language, not Latin, and is related to “tier”, but not apparently to “tire”).

Its earliest citations in the Oxford English Dictionary show meanings such as

• Pull back or retreat from the enemy.
• To move back for safety or storage (“they retired to their houses”).
• Leave office or work permanently.

All these meanings appear in print in the 16th century.

What good does it do to know this?  Not much.  You can’t explain the modern meaning of a word knowing the meaning of its ancient roots.

In the case of “retire”, I can make up a story of meanings changing using a chain of metaphors.

1. “Retirer” in French meant literally “pull back” in the physical sense, for example pulling on a dog’s leash to drag it back so it won’t get into a fight with another dog. This literal meaning has not survived in the English word “retire” (nor, I think, in the French word “retirer”).
2. In the 12th century (sez the OED without citation) the French word was used to refer to an army pulling back from a battle.  This is clearly a metaphor based on the literal meaning.  In a phrase such as “The Army retired from battle” it has become intransitive, but perhaps people once said things like “The General retired the Army from battle”.  Note that in modern English we could use the exact same metaphor with “pull back”: “The General pulled the Army back from battle”, although “withdrew” would be more common.
3. Now someone comes along and uses the metaphor “going to work is like being in a battle”, and says things like “He retired from his job”.   This happened in English before 1533 and the usage has survived to this day.  It is probably the commonest meaning of the word “retire” now.

Now all that is a story I made up.  It is plausible, but it might have happened in a different way.  It is not at all likely we will discover the workings of metaphors in the minds of people who lived 600 years ago.  (Conceivably someone could have written down their thoughts about the word “retire” and it will be discovered in an odd subcrypt of Durham Cathedral and some linguist would get very excited, but I could win the lottery, too).

That’s why knowing the original literal meaning of the roots of a modern English word really means nothing about the modern meaning.  There could have been many steps along the way where a metaphorical usage became the standard meaning, then someone took the standard meaning and used it in another metaphor, maybe many times.  And metaphors aren’t the only method.  Words can change meaning because of misunderstanding, specialization, generalization, use in secret languages that become public, and so on.

I didn’t include etymology in the Handbook, mainly for this reason.  But there are certain mathematical words where knowing the metaphor or even the literal meaning can be of help.  I’ll write about that in a separate article.

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