lackey/laquey

You'll have to bear with me if there are a few nods to The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett in the next few posts. The language of the book, which was published in 1771, is surprisingly modern and easy to read, but you do get the occasional variant spelling or antiquated word.

One word that, unsurprisingly, comes up a few times is 'lackey'. However, Smollett spells it 'laquey'. This got me thinking about where this word came from. I think we all have heard it enough to have a general sense of the meaning. A lackey would be a servant, but one at the low end of the pecking order. A dogsbody, and someone who doesn't have much say over his work. Not the head butler, at any rate.

The word lackey has an overtone of slacking, of lacking, and even of blackness. But the variant spelling lacquey shines a new light on it. I am going to go way out on a limb and guess that it is a borrowed word from another language, and I'll even hypothesize that it comes from some Indian caste system. If it's not a caste, it's probably a tribe.

Okay, let's see  how far I got with this.

*** 

There are apparently many possibilities of where the word lackey came from, but India is not one of them.

A lackey may now have the reputation of being something of a toady, or at least fawning and servile, but originally it merely meant someone in uniform, a liveried servant. It came to English from the French, predictably. The Middle French was laquais, and could mean foot soldier as easily as footman or servant. You can see where Smollett got the -qu- spelling before the British rejected the French ideas and turned it into something more, well, British. (No offense, French people. I really have no idea why they did it.)

It's all a bit dicey going backward from there, though. Some say the word comes from Old Provençal, where lacai was related to words meaning glutton and covetous, and these in turn go back to lecar--"to lick". As in, "Lick my boots, lackey!"?

Another guess is that the French got it from the Catalan alacay, which comes from the Arabic al-qadi--"the judge". Which frankly doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

But Skeat tells us that there were a certain class of soldiers, mainly crossbowmen, who were called alagues, alacays or lacays, so who knows?

Then others take it back through the Spanish lacayo all the way back to the Turkish ulak, which means runner or courier. The short answer is, nobody knows. But everybody seems to know it wasn't from India.

"Lackey" wasn't a pejorative in English when it first came on the written scene at around 1520, but by 1570, the 'servile' tinge had already taken hold. It's funny really, that it became part of Communist rhetoric in 1939. It's an old-fashioned word, and certainly not very suited to what must at the time have been regarded as "new thinking".

The best get out of all this web roaming, though, has nothing to do with etymology at all, but with the lackey caterpillar. This creature is not servile at all, but is instead named on account of its 'livery'.