Frank in Coronado, California, wondered about bailiwick after hearing an attorney say that something wasn’t his bailiwick. The word combines bailiff with wick, an old term for a farm or village. In Middle English, a bailiff was a public minister of a district working for the king, so a bailiwick originally meant the area under that bailiff’s jurisdiction. You can still spot wick in English place names. Gatwick means goat farm, and Greenwich, spelled with a final wich, meant green village. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Word “Bailiwick” Combines Middle English “Bailiff” with “Wick,” a Village, to Mean Jurisdiction”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Oh, hi.
Hi, who’s this?
This is Frank Spitzer from Coronado, California.
Frank, how you been?
Hi, Frank.
Excellent.
I’ve been looking forward to finding this out.
Yeah?
Bailiwick.
This is not my bailiwick.
This is not what…
I’m not strong-suited.
Something to that effect or expertise.
Right.
It’s not your bag.
It’s not your thing.
It’s not my thing, exactly.
And the funny thing about it, it was an attorney.
That told me that word.
And he said, well, that’s not my bailiwick.
And I wanted to find out, well, that’s a curious statement in and of itself.
And then what is the history?
How did that come to being?
You know, for the longest time when I was growing up,
I thought bailiwick was just one of those words like thingamajig or billy-doo
Or something like that.
It has an interesting history.
Bailiwick is a combination of a couple of different words.
And their older senses, one of which was bailiff and one of which was wick.
You know, when you think of a bailiff today, you think of somebody working in a courtroom, right?
The guy with the uniform.
But it used to be in Middle English that title was a little bit more lofty,
And it referred to the public minister of a district, you know, somebody working for the king.
So you have bailiff in the first part of the word, and then the second part of the word, wick,
Is also really interesting because it comes from an old term that refers to a kind of place like a
Farm or a village. You see this word in a lot of places like Gatwick in England.
Gatwick Airport.
Yeah, yeah. The place where the airport is, its name literally means goat farm, Gatwick.
And Greenwich, you know, is spelled with W-I-C-H at the end. And that was literally Green Village.
So the wick part refers to a place.
And so if you put those two together, the bailiff and the wick, back in the old days,
You got the county in which an English sheriff or bailiff exercises jurisdiction.
Over a goat farm?
Over the people or anything.
Gatwick alone means goat farm, but bailiff in general just is a place of jurisdiction.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
So in a succinct manner, these days, how did it get transferred from those two descriptions to what is normally where the word’s used in today’s language?
It became generic, basically.
It’s basically the way they say that that’s not my jurisdiction.
It’s like on cop shows, for example, it’s like the FBI and the sheriff and the city police are always arguing about who gets to control the crime scene at a murder if it happens on some questionable territory, right?
They are deciding whose bailiwick or whose domain it is.
Yeah.
Right?
There you go.
There you go.
So it’s just legally, the legal term became generalized, entered into language, and here we are.
That was pretty succinct.
I love it.
Jurisdiction of a goat farm.
Something like that, Frank.
There you go.
Frank, thanks for calling, buddy.
Take that back to your turn.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Call us with your questions about words and language.
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