The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Death-pledges

Anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage will be unsurprised to learn that it is, literally, a death-pledge. However, it’s the sort of thing you would only usually notice if you were taking out a mortgage on a mortuary. Mort is death, and mortal man has nothing else waiting for him. Nothing is certain in this life except death and mortgages.

The reason a mortgage is called a death-pledge is that it can die in two ways. You can pay off the whole thing, in which case the deal dies and you own your house. However, that happy ending is far from certain in these troubled and impoverished times. The other possibility is that you fail to make a payment, the deal dies, and your house is repossessed. The whole thing was spelt out in mortifying terms in the Institutes and Laws of England in 1628:

There are a lot of hidden deaths in English. Many people will have noticed the similarity between the words executive and executioner, but what have the two got in common? Is it that an executioner is just somebody who executes the sentence, just as an undertaker is someone who undertakes to bury you? No. The original legal term for execution was execute to death, from the French exécuter à mort. So you execute the sentence until they die.

Another hidden mort comes in the word caput. Monks used to remind themselves of their own mortality by contemplating a skull. This was called a death’s head or caput mortuum, and the original owner of a caput mortuum was definitely caput. It’s enough to make you scream blue murder, which is a direct translation of the French phrase mort bleu, which itself is a non-blasphemous form of mort dieu, or death of God.

The gage in mortgage is much more cheerful. It means pledge and is exactly the same gage that you find when you fall in love and get engaged. It’s also very closely related to waging war.