Here is a scene that’s ironic in a way that’s not obvious. “The general surveyed the wide, grassy plain where his army had just won the final battle in a long series. He sipped a glass of champagne in relief and celebration.”
The question is, what’s ironic about that? Is it the general’s relief? Is it celebrating an event that must have been horrific? Nope. It’s that he’s looking at a wide plain, thinking about a long series of battles, and sipping bubbly wine — and all three of those things have been called by the exact same word: “campaign.”
The earliest instance of “campaign” was in Latin, where it was “campania” which means an open field or plain. There’s a huge stretch of that kind of terrain in eastern France, and that area acquired the name. Around the 1300s the word entered English, where its earliest incarnation was “champaign,” where it meant the same thing — but it was pronounced with stress on the first syllable, like “CAMpayne” (in the 1300s “ch” probably had a “k” sound).
In that era, wars had certain constraints. The idea was that you were supposed to amass your armies at a particular time and place, and then they’d fight it out. In order to do that, while also making sure your army had all the support it needed, like food for humans and horses, water, shelter, and the like, everybody would just stay home all winter and only go on the march when the weather was reasonable. Not only that, but you needed a good place for your battle. A “battle field”, in other words. Trying to arrange a big fight in the middle of the mountains was just too much hassle. Because one word for a big field was “campaign,” by the 1700s “campaign” was used to mean any ongoing military operation.
It was also in the early 1700s that “champagne,” which is the same word but with a French spelling, started to be applied to the wine from the region of France that was named “Champagne” because it was one big “champagne” where numerous military “champagnes” had been conducted over the centuries. At that point, at least in English, different spellings were used to emphasize that no, really these are different words now; they don’t mean the same thing at all. Please stop complaining and…oh here, drink this and shut up, won’t you.
