Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

As the debate over gay marriage continues to rage, Blanche found herself wondering about the history of the words that describe the institution. Some defenders of the traditional heterosexual monopoly on marriage have claimed that the very meaning of the word marriage implies a relationship between a man and a woman.

But the words themselves have no necessary restrictions to heterosexual relationships. Of course, the institution of marriage was for centuries restricted to opposite-sex partnerships. Yet there is nothing inherent to the meaning of words for marriage that restricts it to "the union of one man and one woman," as some modern "defenders" of marriage have claimed.

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The English word marry is borrowed from French in the Middle Ages, and ultimately comes from Latin. The etymology of the Latin is not certain-- there may be a relationship with words referring to young men or women in a number of other Indo-European languages (for example, Sanskrit marya "young man" or Welsh merch "girl"). But so far as the etymology goes, there is nothing inherently heterosexual about marriage. (Though perhaps it reflects the old prejudice that marriage is something only for the young!)

The lack of a heterosexual etymology is even clearer with our word wed. Wed is the native Anglo-Saxon term, and it was used long before marry was borrowed from French. The Old English word was weddian, and this had a wide range of uses. It could mean simply "pledge, enter into an agreement with." For example, an Old English translation of the Bible from 1000 AD says ...him weddedon feoh to syllenne "they agreed to pay him the money," where weddedon is "they agreed."

Another related sense of wed is "bet, wager." A 1430 quote says "...that dare I my hedde wedde," meaning "that I dare to bet my head (life)." There is a clear relationship between betting and entering into an agreement with another-- both involve committing oneself to some future act. Weddian also meant "to marry," seeming to show that marriage was considered to be just one type of promise or agreement that people enter into. So a 1205 quote says this maiden he gon wedde and nom heo to his bedde "this maiden he went to wed and take to his bed."

Other possible ways to talk about marriage in English involve the root troth. For example, the two people

in a marriage are said to be betrothed to each other, and in the archaic words of the marriage ceremony, the partners traditionally said I plight thee my troth. Troth or betrothed are words derived from Old English treowth, which is the same root as the modern truth. So people in a wedding pledge to be true to each other in the vows they take. And there is nothing ex- clusively heterosexual about truth, no matter what Pat Robertson may say.

The meaning of a word is not the same as its history, of course. Words constantly change their meanings through time. So silly once meant something like "helpless, pitiable" and meat once referred to any kind of solid food (as opposed to drink). So even if words like marriage or wedding once referred only to relationships between opposite sex partners, there is no linguistic reason that the words could not broaden their meanings to include same sex partnerships as well.

Even the conservative Oxford English Dictionary says in its de- finition of marriage "The term is now sometimes used with reference to long-term relationships between partners of the same sex." Language reflects our social institutions-- when the institutions change their scope, the words change their meanings.

So there's no necessary heterosexual etymology in any of the English words for marriage. We can make our social institutions what we want them to be, and language will happily adapt to the changes. Language is no straitjacket of conservativism, but instead is flexible enough to adapt to whatever reality we create.