You have a hole in your soul, a hole in the sole of your sock, or a rend in your heart, and how do you mend it? How can comfort be yours on this cold mountain? Do you say “Mend? I can’t without your help” and become a mendicant – do you go begging, alms for what ails you, yearning for yarn or a salve for your salvation? Or do you say audaciously “Mend this little thing? I can even mend a city!” and choose mendacity – do you satisfy it with comforting myths, happy little lies, or perhaps the belief that tearing another person’s soul or sole or breaking their heart will heal yours? Or do you just fix a previous “fix”?
There are many ways to repair faults. Some say that the best way to mend is to add more – this suits with socks, but darn it, there’s always that tough patch. Others say that taking away is better: removing the fault you feel or the fault you inflict. At root, you may need to know how it all started.
And in the case of today’s words, it started with Latin menda ‘fault, defect’. That headed in three different directions.
It added the suffix -icus ‘pertaining to’ to give mendicus, literally ‘having fault’ or ‘faultlike’ but used to mean ‘needy, indigent, beggarly’. That has comes down to us as medicant, a beggar, someone who can’t mend their problem without your contribution.
It added the suffix -ax ‘having the tendency’ to give mendax, literally ‘faulty’ or ‘faultish’ but used to mean ‘unreal, false, deceptive, untruthful’. That has come down to us as mendacious ‘inclined to lying’ and mendacity ‘occasion or condition of lying’, that is, speech that has fault: in place of mending it gives audacity.
It added the prefix e- (trimmed from ex-) to give the verb emendo ‘I correct, I cure, I atone, I chastise, I repair’, which passed through Old French to become the Middle English amenden, which we now know as amend (and, separately, emend was taken directly from the Latin), but amend was trimmed down just a bit more to make mend. At long last the mend- root has been de-faulted – a fix that was accomplished by removal of affixes.
There are other mend words out there, of course. There is Mendocino, a derivative of Mendoza, which is a Spanish name of Basque origin, thought originally to mean ‘cold mountain’. And there is Mendelssohn, from Mendel, from the Yiddish personal name Mendl, a diminutive of man ‘man’ used as a pet form of Menachem, which comes from Hebrew for ‘comfort, console’. Neither is related to our mend – one can’t produce etymological relatives on demand – but both have meandered over time to far from where they started.
They need no mending; words change naturally. And sometimes the same word takes multiple paths. But if you seek comfort on the cold mountain and need to ease your mind, remember that the most direct route is not mendicancy or mendacity, but simply to mend.
Sesquiotica 