How do you disparage a member of the peerage? Perhaps you cast aspersions on their asparagus? Prejudge their pargeting? No – you merely say they married beneath them. Or, better, arrange for them to marry someone of inferior station.
Those at capstone of the class pile are not famous for gender egalitarianism, but in marriage, parity is paramount. This is why we got the term parage – a noun, etymologically ‘pairing’ and a doublet of peerage, that refers to equal social rank… but, to be precise, among those who are more equal than others. That is, equal with those of the top rank, for not to be equal is to be inferior. And so if you matched someone unequally – and, back in the medieval times, this typically meant matching a noble maid to a commoner – they were disparaged. (On the other hand, you could say that if they married equally, they were apparaged, but it seems this term was not really used in English, though apparagé did exist in French.)
We don’t use the word that way anymore. It’s not that princes William and Harry weren’t disparaged by some for marrying outside of the nobility – anyway, they’re princes royal and their station is quite secure, by dint of both royalty and maleness – it’s simply that it was not seen as disparagement. And even the daughter of a duke can match with a milkman and still retain her station, if not her social circle. In truth, it’s been at least two centuries since disparage was used in its original sense, and by that time its use had long since extended.
You can see how it got from there to where we are now, right? From lowering in status specifically by marriage, it came more broadly to mean lowering in esteem, credit, or honour by any of various means. If you did a disgraceful thing, you would disparage yourself and your family. And then from that it spread to taking someone down with words – not necessarily actually lowering their state, but speaking of them as lower. And now, of course, it’s not limited to persons: you can disparage asparagus, or pargeting, or any other thing. Disparaging is effectively a synonym for casting aspersions.
Which, by the way, is unrelated. All three are: asparagus (from Greek for the plant), pargeting (via French from Latin, probably the same ‘throwing’ root as in jet and reject), and aspersions (which comes from the same Latin root meaning ‘sprinkle’ that we see in disperse). But pair and peer (the noun, not the specular verb) and their derivatives are, as I have suggested, of the same esteemed stock as the heart of disparage. And now that we have come to a less stratified understanding of society, we are free to disparage the peerage and the very concept of status differences in marriage without seeming any the less for it.
Sesquiotica 