Today's Word "Fetching"
Published in Vocabulary
fetching \FE-ching\ (adjective) - Alluring, fascinating, pleasant.
"He cut an even more fetching figure in the candlelight than he did on the sunlit deck of the sloop."
Middle English "fecchen" from Old English "fetian." If the Old English word reminds you of "feet," you are right on track. The original sense of "fetch" is to "foot it" after something. This word began as Proto-Indo-European *pod-/*ped- "foot" but in English, PIE [p] regularly became [f] (e.g. Latin "pater" vs. English "father") giving us Old English "fot," plural "foti." Then the [i] in "foti" and (probable) "fotian" turned one into "feet" and the other into "fetian," which later became today's word. So, Latin pes, pedis "foot" (souce of "pedal" and "pedestrian") and pous, pod- in Greek (origin of "tripod" and "podiatry") came from the same root as English "foot" and "fetch." What about "pajamas?" you quite naturally ask. Hindi paijama "loose-fitting trousers" was borrowed from Persian pai "leg" + jamah "garment"more linguistic debt English owes its distant cousins, Hindi and Persian. You guessed it: "pai" shares its origin with English "foot"
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