A woman in Eureka, California, is curious about the term bailiwick. It comes from a Middle English word for bailiff, and wik, a Middle English word that means dwelling and is related to several English place names, such as Gatwick and Norwich. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Bailiwick”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Ginger Casanova from Eureka, California.
Hey, Ginger, how you doing?
What’s going on, Ginger?
My husband has a word that he uses sometimes when I’m doing something and I’m like, no, I can do it, I can do it. And he goes, I’m not getting involved, that’s your bailiwick. I said, where did that come from? He goes, I don’t know, it’s really old. You know, I’ve used it for a long time. And he’s from Portugal. He came over here when he was 11. And so I didn’t know if that was something to do with that, but I was just curious. And so my daughter and I had, you know, kind of looked it up with our phones and stuff. But, you know, it gives me parts of Bailey and then part of WIC. But I thought, well, this is really cool. I’ll call you guys and see what you come up with.
And we’re glad you did, Ginger. Where did your husband learn his English? He learned it when he came over here to the United States. He was 11 when they came over here. That’s interesting that he knew the term and you didn’t.
Yeah. I’ve never heard it before. I said, what is that? -huh. -huh.
So if you did some digging, then you may know that a bailiwick is in law. It’s the district or jurisdiction of an official who used to be called either a bailey or a bailiff. That’s what we found on their phones was something to do with bailiff.
Yeah, the term bailiff used to refer to a much larger area of responsibility. Today we think of a bailiff as somebody who’s uniformed and in a courtroom and escorting people in and out and that kind of thing. But a couple hundred years ago it used to be that a bailie or a bailiff’s realm of responsibility was much bigger. It’s a sort of municipal administrator or government official. So if you’re saying that something is not in my bailiwick, then it’s not in the area over which I have responsibility, basically.
I love the wick part of this word because you see that word in a lot of other words. It’s an old word that has to do with a dwelling place or a location. It goes all the way back to Latin for the Latin word vicus, which means a group of dwellings or a village or something like that. And you see that wick in other words, like Gatwick, the name of the town with the airport in Britain, or the witch in Greenwich. So it’s a really cool element. The bailey and the wick are two separate elements of that word, the bailey being the official and the wick being the area.
I see what you mean. Oh, my gosh. That’s so interesting. Well, we’re glad you called to share it with us. Thanks so much.
Thank you. I appreciate it. Okay. Take care, Ginger. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
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