While we’ve taken a look at artificial here on the blog before, I apparently haven’t actually looked more deeply at the history of that root word, art. So…let’s!

I suppose it’s not surprising that the idea of art goes back to the origins of humanity. We are, after all, creative beings. But I always find it fascinating to learn which words date back to the earliest recorded human language. Well, art is definitely one of them. The word is used in English from the 1200s onward, coming to us from the Old French art, dating from the 900s, which in turn came from Latin artem, which is from the proto-indo-european areti. All of these words get at the same meaning: “craft, skill, work of art, something prepared.”

Interestingly, weaponry–arms, or the Latin arma–is from the same root, being things that are crafted and fitted together.

In Middle English around the year 1300, art began to be applied to “skill in learning,” which is where we get educational words like “liberal arts” and “bachelor of arts.” Later that same century, art began to be used to indicate “human workmanship” as opposed to what occurs naturally.

It wasn’t until the 1600s that the word began to be used specifically of the creative arts like painting, sculpture, and so on.

Word Nerds Merch!

Did you know that human means “of the earth”? Yep!

The word traces its roots most immediately back to Latin, in which humanus had the same meaning it does today: “pertaining to man.” (Human entered English in the mid-1400s with that same meaning.) But the word also implies those things we add an -e to the word for (humane): “learned, refined, civilized, philanthropic.”

But in the case of this word, even the Latin has roots that go further back, all the way to the first recorded languages, that give us (dh)ghomon — literally “of the earth, earth-being,” in opposition to the gods, who are of the heavens. We see a similar relationship in the Hebrew between adam (“man”) and adamah (“earth”).

Human rights has been a phrase since 1650; human being since about 1670. Human interests is from 1779, and human resources is from 1907–though at the time, it was used by Christians in the same way we use natural resources. Using it for the name of a personnel management division didn’t follow until the late 1970s.

Word Nerds Merch!

Did you know that plastic did NOT mean a material when the word was first coined?

Instead, plastic, when it debuted in English around 1640, referred to a PROPERTY of material, namely something “capable of shaping or molding matter.” It comes to English from the Greek plastikos, meaning “fit for molding.” So clay would be plastic, as an example. In fact, the Greeks often used the word in reference to the arts, particularly sculpture, with plastos, meaning “molded.” Look familiar? It’s also where plaster comes from!

Because plastic things were moldable, they were also remoldable, and by 1791, the word was used for things “capable of changing or receiving a new direction.”

And then, because of this ability to change the structure of something, the word was applied to medical procedures that required creating or remedied a structure that was deficient, hence plastic surgery.

So when did it come to mean a particular material? Not until the early 1900s! As the material we call plastic was invented, it was given that name because it had that property, and cultural slang soon picked it up. By 1909, plastic meant “something made of a plastic material,” and it soon became so well known that by the 1960s, plastic came to mean “fake, superficial” because it was manmade material often used for cheap imitations.

Word Nerds Merch!