What should you call someone you are dating, the USA Today asked recently. “Boyfriend” or “girlfriend” might sound silly for an adult, “significant other” too stilted, “companion” not quite right, it added.
Well, once upon a time “husband” and “wife” did not necessarily mean married. “Wife” meant just a woman and “husband” the male head of the household. That’s right. “Wife” comes from “wif”, Old Norse for a woman, and “husband” from the Old Norse “husbandi”, formed by joining the two words,”hus” (house) and “bindi”(occupier and tiller of the soil), according to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
I checked.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that my wife went back to Calcutta (Kolkata) three days ago after spending more than three weeks with me in Singapore. That’s why I wasn’t blogging all this time. We had so much to catch up on, blogging was out of the question. Now her college is about to reopen after the summer holidays. So here I am again.
The funny thing is Bengali, my mother tongue, has lots in common with English. “Stree”, the Bengali word for “wife”, also means a woman. “Swami” and “pati”, two Bengali words for “husband”, can mean a man and lord and master respectively.
But back to “husband” and “wife”. If the words did not originally mean a married couple, what were they called? After all, couples exchanged vows to stay true to one another even then. That’s what “wedding” means: a pledge. I got that too from the Concise Oxford.
The Romans had a specific word to describe married couples. We use it too: Spouse. According to the Concise Oxford, it comes from the Old French “spous(e)”, a variation of “espouse”, which comes from the Latin “sponsus” (masculine) and”sponsa”(female), past participles of “spondere”, which means “betroth”.
Note the verb, “espouse”, please. We espouse — support — beliefs and causes. But you could be espoused — engaged — to your sweetheart, too, though we hardly use the word in that sense today. That expression has become archaic, as the Concise Oxford says.
I must confess I can’t think of my wife as my “spouse”. The word is hard to visualise unlike “husband” and “wife”, which make you think of a man and a woman. And what is marriage without sex?
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@ this statement: “And what is marriage without sex?” — it reminded me of Gandhi’s book, “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”. In it he explains his views on celibacy and he made the case that his marriage was eventually better off by being celibate.