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

Called to the Bar

Barista, the chap who serves you your coffee, is a case of English lending a word to Italian and then taking it straight back again. A barista is nothing more than an Italian barman. The –ist suffix just means practitioner, as in a Marxist evangelist.

A bar, as any good dictionary will tell you, is a rod of wood or iron that can be used to fasten a gate. From this came the idea of a bar as any let or hindrance that can stop you going where you want to; specifically the bar in a pub or tavern is the barrier behind which is stored all the lovely intoxicating liquors that only the barman is allowed to lay his hands on without forking out.

We are all, at times, called to the bar, if only in order to pay the bill. But the bar to which barristers were called was a lot less alcoholic, even though it was in an inn.

Half a millennium ago, all English lawyers were required to train at the Inns of Court in London. These inns were not the pleasant inns that serve beer, they were merely lodging houses for students of the law, because inn, originally, just meant house.

The internal arrangement of the Inns of Court was as Byzantine and incomprehensible as one would expect from a building devoted to the law, but basically there were the Readers, who were clever folk and sat in an Inner Sanctum separated from the rest of the students by a big bar.

The lesser students would sit around reading and studying and dreaming of the great day when they would be called to the bar and allowed to plead a case like a proper lawyer. The situation was complicated by the fact that there used to be outer barristers and inner barristers who had a particular relationship with sheriffs at law, and you would probably have to study for a few years before you understood the bar system even partially, and it wouldn’t do you any good anyway, as just when you thought you’d got a grip on things, the meaning of bar was changed. That’s law for you.

In about 1600 the word bar started to be applied to a wooden railing that ran around every courtroom in England, at which prisoners had to stand while the judge ticked them off or sentenced them or fumbled with his black cap. The defendant’s barrister would stand next to him at the bar and plead his case.

Meanwhile, the prosecuting lawyer would insist that the prisoner was guilty and that he was ready to prove his case. If he insisted this in French he would say Culpable: prest d’averrer nostre bille, but that was a bit of a mouthful so it would be shortened to cul-prit.

Then the defendant’s fate would be handed over to a jury. If the jury couldn’t decide, then they would declare we don’t know, but they would declare it in Latin – and the Latin for we don’t know is ignoramus.

Ignoramus was thus a technical legal term until a writer called George Ruggle used it as the title for a play in 1615, the main character of which was a stupid lawyer called Ignoramus. The usage stuck and now an ignoramus is any old idiot.

This also means that the plural of ignoramus is definitely not ignorami.