I love it when a plan comes together
People have been planning and scheming for a very long time, and for just as long there have been events, circumstances, and other people who have been thwarting those plans. “Thwart” is an extremely old word — one way to tell is that you find versions of the word in languages from German all the way to Sanskrit. That’s generally a pretty good clue that it comes from Proto-Indo-European. Nobody in those days called it “Proto-Indo-European” — just as nobody today has any idea what the Proto-Indo-Europeans (the “PIEs”) did call their language, if they called it anything at all.
The PIEs, according to archaeology and more recently achaeogenetics, probably lived somewhere around southeastern Europe — maybe in what is today Turkey (maybe closer to what is now Greece, maybe closer to modern-day Iran), and the closest anybody can come to guessing just when that might have been is from somewhere between six and ten thousand years ago. They didn’t leave very many clues lying around. It was the late stone age, an era when most people didn’t have any clues to leave. It seems Neolithic people were generally (ahem) clueless. In fact the primary guesses that exist about the PIEs come from the similarities in languages from places as diverse as Greece, northern Europe, Central Asia, Siberia, and more.
For all those centuries, and in all those places, there’s been a word like “thwart.” In Old Norse it’s “thverr.” In Sanskrit it’s “tarkuh.” In Old Church Slavonic it’s “traku.” In Old English it’s “thweorh.” (Old Church Slavonic, by the way, is the oldest Slavic language that anybody knows much about, mostly because it’s the first written Slavic language).
“Thwart” has generally had three main meanings: “across” (you still find this meaning in the increasingly obscure word “athwart,” as in “he sat athwart his horse”), “turn” (some of the Germanic derivatives of the word mean things like “turning on a lathe”), and “contrary” or “perverse.”
By the time “thwart” entered English, around the 1200s, it meant both “across” and “contrary,” but the “turn” meaning turned back when the word migrated from its Germanic roots. The “contrary” meaning gradually became something closer to “oppose” or “prevent,” and that’s where the “thwarted the plan” comes from. But usage of “thwart” to mean “across” persisted and although it’s now nearly obsolete, a seat that goes across a boat (think of the seat in a rowboat or canoe) is still sometimes called a “thwart.”
And what about these “plans” that get thwarted? “Plan” comes from the Latin word “planus” (level and flat), and seems to be based on the idea that you’d make a drawing on a flat surface. Very ancient folks might have used a stick to draw in the dirt an idea for laying out a new field. In French and Italian, the similar words “planter” and “planta” mean precisely that; planting and a ground plan.
“Plan” didn’t enter English until quite recently, at least compared to “thwart” — it was the 1700s before it appeared. Before English-speakers had plans, they relied on “schemes”, which came into English usage in the 1500s. Where “plan” has Latin roots, “scheme” comes from the Greek “skhema” (appearance or nature of a thing), and that also goes back to Proto-Indo-European, where it comes from “segh”, which mean “to hold” or “to have.” Nowadays a “scheme” has a bit of a negative connotation; if you’re “scheming” it implies that you might be a bit devious. That overtone didn’t show up until the 1700s, and probably comes from the usage of “scheme” to mean not just a plan, but a secret plot. Which, of course, was often being put together by the bad guys, only to be thwarted by the hero!
