If you find yourself musing about something, are you in thrall of the Muses of ancient Greece? Is that where music comes from, which we can use for amusement and which, in some forms, we might find bemusing?
Well…no. It’s more complicated than that. Although some of the words above are related, others aren’t. The key here is that there’s a noun “muse” and a verb “muse” and they are different words with different derivations.
“Muse” the noun is used as a symbol of inspiration, as in “Whom shall the Muse from out the shining Throng Select to heighten and adorn her Song?” This one does come from Greek mythology. The original Muses — there were nine of them — were the daughters of the gods Zeus (the CEO) and Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory). Being an efficient CEO, even if he was a god, Zeus assigned roles to each daughter. Each one was responsible for stimulating a particular area of human creativity. Calliope was in charge of epic poetry, but left love poems to Erato and sacred poetry to Polyhymnia. Thalia ran the pastoral poetry shop, as well as comedy (“comedy” in those days didn’t mean quite the same thing as it does now, but never mind). There were also sisters who didn’t do any poetry at all: Euterpe was in charge of music and Terpsichore had dancing. Melpomene was responsible for tragedy (which again has a somewhat different meaning today) and the last two were in charge of things we don’t necessarily think of as needing a creative Muse at all; Clio worked on history and Urania did astronomy.
The English word “muse” comes not from the Greek word for the Muses themselves, but from the related “mousikḕ” (the art of the Muses), which was formed from “Mousikḕ” (Muse) and “-ikos” (pertaining to). Thus in ancient Greece they also said something very close to “music,” but it meant any art that had a Muse. And not all arts had one. The Ancient Greeks were pretty good at sculpture too, for example, but they managed without having any assigned Muse at all.
If you think about it, if you’re working on some area of art or activity that’s guided by a Muse, you probably wouldn’t need to go around musing about it; you’d just, I dunno, send a memo or something, right? It’s a good thing “musing” wasn’t required, because the verb “to muse” didn’t even exist before about the 1300s. It came from the Old French “muser”, which meant to ponder something as well as to gape at or sniff. Why “sniff”? Because “muser” came from root words meaning an animal’s snout or muzzle, and “sniff” was its original meaning.
Both “amuse” and “bemuse” are derived from the verb “muse,” and the prefixes “a-” and “be-” don’t so much change meaning as they intensify. “Amuse,” which first entered use around the 1500s, originally meant staring blankly at something. Then a century or so later if you tried to “amuse” someone, what you were doing was to distract them in order to cheat or steal from them (think pickpockets). By the late 1700s, “amusing” had left behind its criminal past and taken on the meaning it still has today; to divert someone’s attention with something cheerful.
“Bemuse” is newer than “amuse;” it didn’t show up until the late 1700s, and meant “to confuse someone,” particularly by getting them drunk. This is a quote from 1880: “A Prussian was regarded in England as a dull beer-bemused creature.” If you’re “bemused” today you’re probably not considered drunk; you’re just mildly puzzled, or possibly amazed. “Amazed” isn’t related at all, by the way. Its original meaning, when it was the Old English word “amasian,” was very similar: “to render witless; to stun.” By the 1500s its meaning had shifted to “astound,” which is how Shakespeare used it in “Christall eine, Whose full perfection all the world amazes,” and also to “create fear” as in “the sight of any shadow amazes the fish” (1653). Nowadays “amaze” implies a sense of wonder as well. That’s a relatively new addition, probably acquired around the mid 1800s. See? The things you can discover by sniffing around are often amusing — and occasionally you’re bemused and even amazed!
