What does baking have in common with creating a story? At first glance, they might seem unrelated activities, calling for totally different approaches and skill sets. But people in the past thought differently—or so etymology tells us.
In my last post, I wrote that etymology, the study of the origins of words, reveals profound truths and forgotten insights hidden within the history of words. Etymology is all about discovering connections: connections between both words and ideas.
The word fiction provides a great example of the way unsuspected and surprising connections between words opens up new perspectives and new ideas. We get the word fiction from the Latin fictiō, fictiōnem—to put it another way, fiction is not a native English word, but imported from Latin. Although people often assert that English comes from Latin—that Latin is the direct ancestor of English—this is not the case. Instead, Latin and English are more like cousins in the great Indo-European language family, and fiction is one of the many words English has adopted from this “cousin.”
But this is where things get interesting. If fiction is a Latin word, and Latin and English are linguistic cousins, both coming from the same ancient source, then what word is the native English version of fiction? What word in English is the “cousin” of the Latinate term fiction?
The answer, believe it or not, is dough. Dough is the English linguistic equivalent of fiction. In other words, both the English word dough and the Latin word fiction came from the same ancient Indo-European root word.
But how did that ancient root word come out as both fiction and dough? How do you get, from a single linguistic root, a word meaning an invented narrative on the one hand, and a word signifying the thick, malleable mixture of flour and liquid on the other? Like I said, this is where things get interesting! After all, the etymological fact that dough and fiction come from the same linguistic root invites the suggestion that they had something to do with one another.
The answer can be seen in the verbs. In Latin and in Old English, the verb forms of both fiction and dough meant “to form, to shape, to knead.” Whether you are developing a story and filling it with characters and situations of your own invention, or baking a loaf of bread, the situation is very much the same: either way you are forming something, giving it shape and substance where it had previously had none.
Writers have to “knead” their stories no less than bakers their dough; and bakers have to shape and form their dough no less than writers their stories. And storytellers and bakers share this in common too: what they labor to give shape and form to may then be received with gratitude and delight by others. Bakers and storytellers alike not only make, but provide.
And so it’s no surprise that dough and fiction are cousin-words—it turns out they have a great deal in common after all. God bless the bakers, and God bless the storytellers!