Word of the day: pawn
As his hogs were off in the woods munching on pawn, Farmer Smith decided he was tired of just being used as a pawn by the moneylenders in town, so he made sure his prize pawn with its lovely feathers was safely penned up, then walked into town. He visited the pawn shop, which was located in the pawn, and to raise the money he needed, he pawned his valuable golden pawn.
It turns out that there are a bunch of different meanings for “pawn” in English, and some of them are completely separate words with their own derivations. The familiar “pawn” that’s the chess piece comes from the Middle French word “peon”, which, appropriately enough, meant “foot-soldier” — which is the role the pawn plays in chess. The word showed up in English around the 1400s, and at first was applied to actual foot-soldiers rather than game pieces. “Peon,” rather obviously, came from the same source, and so did “pioneer,” probably on the basis that most pioneering in those days was done on foot — maybe even by foot-soldiers, for that matter.
But a “pawn” can also be a peacock. Originally from the Latin “pavo” (peacock), it appears to be a different word with the same sound and spelling. Although it originally meant a real peacock, this version of “pawn” also shifted from a living thing to a representation; nowadays it means a symbolic peacock in heraldry; coats of arms. This word wasn’t always spelled “pawn;” it appears in the 1553 “Accounts of the Scottish Treasurer” as “povin” (“For the feding of ij crannis and the povins in the castell of Striveling.”). You can also find it in the 1378 “Piers Plowman” as “po” (“By þe po feet is vnderstande..Executours, false frendes”).
There’s kind of “pawn” that’s something hogs might eat in the woods. It’s an obsolete word that hasn’t been used for the past few centuries, but it was described in “Cowell’s Interpreter,” from 1672: “Which is that Food that the Swine feed on in the Woods, as Mast of Beech, Acorns, &c. which some have called Pawnes.” Not much is known about this version of “pawn,” but it was more commonly known back then as “pannage,” which was directly borrowed from French as early as the 1100s. Both “pannage” and “pawn” seem to refer to a mixture of acorns, chestnuts, mushrooms — whatever your hogs might enjoy eating when you let them into the forest.
Another version of “pawn” that’s fallen out of use is the one that means a gallery or covered walkway in a market (where a pawn shop might be located). This word is from the Dutch “pand” (cloister or building). One of the earliest appearance in English was in “Wills Doctors Commons” in 1575: “The bildings called the Royall Exchange, and all pawnes and shopes adjoyninge.” But this version of “pawn” stayed current for much longer than the one about the acorns; it appeared in print as recently as 1908, in the “Daily Chronicle:” “The shops in the ‘pawns,’ or covered walks, had been let with difficulty at reduced rents…”
The verb “to pawn” dates from the 1500s. It’s based on the Old French “pander”, and originally meant to pledge. Shakespeare used it in Henry VI in 1595: “I hold it cowardise, To rest mistrustfull where a noble hart, Hath pawnde an open hand in signe of loue.”
The person you take your expensive watch to when you need some cash is a “pawnbroker;” that word appeared about a century after “pawn” became a verb. And like clockwork, it took another century for the pawnbrokers of England to situate themselves in permanent buildings. “Pawnshop” first appeared in the mid 1700s. Its first appearance, in fact, was in the 1749 novel “Tom Jones” by Henry Fielding: “My fine Clothes being often on my Back in the Evening, and at the Pawnshop the next Morning.”
There’s another sense of the verb “pawn:” “to pawn off,” which means to pass something unwanted to someone else, often by trickery or cheating. This usage dates from the late 1700s. It appeared in the “Lectures in Rhetoric & Belles Lettres” in 1763: “The teller of wonderful or lamentable stories is disagreeable because he endeavours to pawn them upon us for true ones.” But that whole usage might be just a mistake; it very likely meant “…palm them upon us…”. With so many version of “pawn” floating around, it’s not really surprising that somebody palmed one and snuck it into a different context altogether.
