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

Robots

Once upon a time in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which ruled much of central Europe, there were lords and peasants. The lords owned all the land but peasants were granted portions of it to work for themselves. The peasant would then work his own little plot and the lord’s. The bigger the peasant’s plot, the longer he had to work the fields of the lord who had granted it to him.

This system, abolished by Emperor Josef II in 1848, was called robot.

The system was abolished, but the word, of course, survived. Seventy-two years later, in 1920, a Czech fellow called Karel Čapek was writing a play. It was a rather spooky, futuristic piece about a factory that produced willing servants out of biological matter. Mr Čapek decided to use the Latin root labor (that gives us labour) and call these manufactured servants labori.

And that would have been that, were it not for Karel’s brother, Josef, who suggested calling them robots instead. Karel took the suggestion and made the changes. The play was performed under the title RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots and was such a success that the word arrived in English two years later.

Of course, robot had cropped up in English before, but only in references to European politics that seem rather odd to the modern reader. Take this complaint of 1854 by an Austrian aristocrat who believes that socialism has gone quite mad:

The English-speaking equivalent of robot was indentured labour, whereby a fellow signed a contract that made him a slave for a limited period. There are no extant records of indentured dentists, which is a shame because they both involve teeth.

In fact, lots of things involve teeth. Tridents have three teeth; al dente food is cooked for the teeth; and dandelions are lions’ teeth, or dents de lions in French. But I digress. For the moment, we must stick to indentations, which are, etymologically, bite marks.

Medieval contract law was a sorry affair, largely because very few people could read. This meant that contracts could be signed left, right and centre, but few could tell which one was which. Most of us already have enough trouble finding some important piece of paper that we know we put somewhere safe; imagine how much harder it is for the illiterate.

There are two solutions to this problem, but as one of them involved learning to read, there was really only one solution, and it involved scissors.

A contract would be written out by a priest, signed or sealed by both parties (probably with an X) and then cut in half. This would not, though, be a straight cut. Instead, the contract would be cut up in a thoroughly wonky zig-zag. Each party would then keep one half of the contract and, if they ever needed to prove whose it was, they would simply put the two pieces of paper together to show that the indentations matched. Thus indentured servants were indentured until the contract was terminated by a terminator.