“So the piece of string,” Maury said to the table, “having been turned away from the bar twice because ‘they don’t allow his kind in there,’ got angry. He hurled himself against a wall and bashed himself up until he was all at loose ends. And then he got twisted – literally, he twisted himself around himself. And he went back to the bar and sat down. The bartender looked at him and said, ‘Are you a piece of string?!’ And he said” – pause for effect – “‘I’m a frayed knot!’”
General chuckling. Montgomery Starling-Byrd, who was in town and with whom we were dining at a local Michelin-starred restaurant, said, “Oh, that’s frightfully good.”
“Oh,” said Elisa, laughing, “frightfully, afraid – same word!”
“If I may enter the fray,” I said, “the two are, oddly, unrelated.”
“What, fright and afraid?” Elisa said.
“I’m afraid it’s true,” Maury said. “And what’s worse, neither is related to fear.”
“Oh, that’s just wrong,” Elisa said.
“And yet,” I said, “it is, alas, so. But afraid is related to fray… but not the fray as in ‘at loose ends’, so to speak. The other one.”
“The one you get at a football match,” Montgomery said. “And yet I seem to recall that both have to do with getting a beating.”
“You are, of course, right,” I said. “Fray in the string sense comes via French from Latin fricare, ‘rub’, source also of friction; fray in the melee sense – and afraid too – comes from affraien, ‘attack, fight, frighten’, and so on, which comes from Vulgar Latin exfridare, and that comes from a Frankish word *friþu for ‘peace’. So… out of peace.”
“Whereas fear,” Maury said, “comes from a different root, the same one that became peril, and fright from yet another root, which somehow has not been traced to a common ancestor with the others.”
“Oh, for—” Elisa said, and did not say a rest of the sentence.
“It’s rather freighted,” Montgomery said. And then he added, “Freighted is also unrelated.” Then he refrained from conversing for a moment and turned to speak to the waiter.
“So there are two frays,” Elisa said. “Yes?”
“You could phrase it that way,” I said. “Or you could say there are three, because there’s also a verb fray, which means ‘frighten’ and is from the same root as the fray meaning ‘fight’.”
“And then there’s another,” said Maury, “but seen only in a prefixed form. It comes via French frais – as in sans frais, ‘free of charge’ – from Latin fractum, which is the same root as fraction. The English word—” he broke off and looked at Montgomery. “Did you just give him your credit card?”
“Yes,” Montgomery said, with a small smile, “I’m afraid I’ve paid for dinner. I felt it would be simpler than breaking down the bill – to avoid the friction of fractions, as it were. To come to your word, Maury, I had reserved some spare funds to defray the expense. Perhaps it was knotty of me to string you along. But now” – he glanced at his watch – “I think I must, as the youth say, peace out.”
Sesquiotica 