Sunday, May 6, 2012

cohort


I recently started thinking about the words 'cohort' and 'cohorts', possibly even on this blog, and now of course I see them everywhere. I suppose cohorts must be part of a cohort, but I don't really think of them together. I think even I have on some rare occasion said, 'my cohorts' but it's only in reading that I see a cohort of _____ used. A cohort is some sort of group, obviously. The 'co-' must mean with, but the 'hort'? I can only guess that it is related to hours, or possibly 'orts'--those  scraps of food that turn up fairly often in crossword puzzles. And something makes me think cohort is military, maybe some some segment of a squadron, or a legion.

Yeah, I'm grasping at straws here. Let's get on with it.

***

Man, I really was going to guess it went back to the Roman Legion, but I thought I was going to far out on a limb. But in fact the meaning of cohort does go back to that time, when a century was a hundred men, a corhort was six such centuries, and ten cohorts equaled a legion. (Although somewhat confusingly, the numbers needed to comprise these units changed over time, until a century typically had only 80 men, and so on. More detail (a little more detail than I personally really need)  is here and here.) The Latin was cohors, and came to us throught that by now quite familiar route of  Old French, Middle French and then English.

There are a couple of things that interest me about all this. The '-hort' is not related to hours or orts, but in fact to gardens. Think horticulture. The early sense comes from the Latin for enclosure, and sharing the hypothesized  ProtoIndoEuropean root *gher, to grasp or enclose, connects it to a whole lot of other words you might not have thought had any relation, like yard, garden, and even the sense of 'to gird". The military sense was an extension of the meaning, being something like an enclosed group.

The other thing that interests me is a change of usage in English. Apparently, many critics say that a cohort would never refer to and individual, but always to this group noun. But gradually, the usage shifted, so that cohort to mean an individual person has now become the dominant usage. According to the Free Online Dictionary:

"Seventy-one percent of the Usage Panel accepts the sentence The cashiered dictator and his cohorts have all written their memoirs, while only 43 percent accepts The gangster walked into the room surrounded by his cohort."

I have to admit that I do not know what the Usage Panel is, nor whether their findings are valid. I wonder, for example, if this is more of an American usage, as Latin had a longer and more tenacious hold on British English than ours. But I think that these go along more or less with the way I hear the word used, so for now My cohorts and I will provisionally accept its pronouncements. 

11 comments:

  1. I think the Usage Panel is a rotating..."cohort" of experts!

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  2. I am now seeing them on a carousel, Kathleen.

    It's interesting that the criminal sense of the word is very recent. According to the Online Etymology dictionary, the sense that guided my picture choice, that of an accomplice is first recorded in 1952 in American English. I wonder if it's the same way 'my associates' came to take on a sinister meaning in some gangster movies.

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  3. Oddly enough, I remember "cohort" in the sense of "colleague" from the comics of my early youth. For years I regarded the "group" meaning as pretentious. Now, however, the earlier meaning grates on my ear.

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  4. Usage trumps all in the end, I suppose, Peter, however maddening that may be.

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  5. I have just chosen not to use the word -- passive resistance, you might say.

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  6. No, you should use it and campaign for your own usage that way.

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  7. In that case, you're in my cohort.

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  8. Ok, you're my cohort, I'm you're cohort, together we constitute a cohort.

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  9. Heh heh. I admit it's one of my favorite terms, and one I already used (probably improperly) on one of your other sites. But as the master sez, "No petty family squabbles Up There nor homemade hurricanes in our Cohortyard...".

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  10. Nice find, Steve. And glad to find you drifting over this way.

    And as Peter points out, you probably would have to try hard to use it improperly.

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