Host, hostage, hostility
They're related, but why?
Some words appear to share an connection but don’t. The noun coward and the verbs to cow and to cower, for example, all suggest “fear,” so you’d assume they’re related, right? Wrong! (But to cow may be connected to the animal cow — no one is really sure — because a person who’s easily cowed is “easily herded.” Or so says the OED.)
Then there are words like the trio in the title, whose meanings don’t seem related at all. The host of a party or a restaurant entertains guests in a genial and welcoming manner. A hostage is “a person taken by force to secure the taker's demands” (Merriam-Webster). And hostility is “deep-seated usually mutual ill will” (M-W again).
Yet two of the words — host and hostility — have a common root. And hostage, a word in many headlines this week, may be related to them as well.
The shared root is Latin hospit-em, a form of hospes, which could mean all of these things: host, guest, stranger, and foreigner. (Confusing? Hang on; I’ll get to that.) Latin begat French — hoste, hostilité, ostage — which eventually traveled into Anglo-Norman English. Even further back, there’s a speculated Proto-Indo-European root: *ghost-ti-, which could have meant both guest and host. (That was eons before the contemporary sense of “guest host,” as on a talk show.)
One theory about hostage is that it also comes to us from hospit-em, "kindness, hospitality; residence, dwelling; rent, tribute; compensation; guarantee, pledge, bail; person given as security or hostage" (Etymonline). The OED seems more convinced that hostage has a different Latin source, obstāticum — “the condition of being held in security” — and that it gained its initial h through association with host and hostility. Still, an association is an association, paradoxical as it seems.
As long as we’re talking about hostages, real and metaphorical, a hostage to fortune is “an act, commitment, or remark which is regarded as unwise because it invites trouble or could prove difficult to live up to” (Oxford Reference). Francis Bacon coined the term in his Essays (1625), and since then it’s become a popular idiom and an extremely popular book title. I counted more than a dozen Hostage to Fortune books, fiction and nonfiction, currently in circulation.
English inherited or developed even more hospit-em/hospes words: guest (as previously noted), hospital, hostel, and even host in the sense of “multitude,” which originally meant “an army.” What didn’t this Latin root give us? Ghost, for one. It may resemble guest and host, but it goes back to Old English and is connected to words meaning “trembling” and “fear.” (It really should be related to cow, cower, and coward, but no luck. For more on ghost, see my Halloween newsletter.) Human host is also unrelated to religious host (often capitalized), the sanctified wafer used in the Christian Communion ritual: This host is related to a Latin root meaning “sacrifice.”
So how do we derive words with such divergent meanings as host, guest, and hostility — and maybe hostage as well — from a single Latin source? It goes back to that Proto-Indo-European root: A ghost-ti, says Etymonline, was “someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality,” representing “a mutual exchange relationship highly important to ancient Indo-European society.” But “the word has a forked path” because “strangers are potential enemies as well as guests.”
In many ways, we haven’t evolved far beyond that ancient suspicion.
TIL: hostage to fortune is “an act, commitment, or remark which is regarded as unwise because it invites trouble or could prove difficult to live up to” -- Brings to mind a certain sink-carrying billionaire...