The creepy, dystopian, and weirdly wonderful TV series Severance offers a teachable moment in the form of a false etymology in a flaky self-help book by one of the characters. The book suggests that the word camaraderie derives from the type of a camera used to take photos, ideally photos of happy friends together. In reality, camaraderie goes back to the Latin word camera, or “room,” which gave rise to French camarade, “someone who shares a room,” and ultimately “a friend” or comrade. The English word for the photographic device, camera, is a shortening of an earlier Latin term, camera obscura, “literally, dark room,” the name for a kind of box with a lens that was used to project images on a wall for hundreds of years before photographs came along. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Let’s Untangle a Flaky Television Etymology”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Grant, have you been watching Severance on Apple TV?
I watched the first episode with my family, and I have to say, that is some of the most striking, I call it filmmaking or showmaking I have ever seen.
Yes, it is the weirdest show with an amazing cast.
I’ve been describing it to people as sort of Twin Peaks meets The Office meets 2001 A Space Odyssey.
It’s a fascinating program that raises the question of what if the person you are at work knows nothing about the person you are at home?
You don’t know who your friends and family are or what you do in your spare time.
And when you’re at home, you know nothing about who you are at work and what you do.
And as you know from that, just that first episode is sort of creepy and dystopian, but sometimes it’s laugh out loud funny.
And I keep wanting to talk about it, and now I have an excuse to, because it includes a teachable moment of etymology.
Oh boy, let’s hear it.
Yeah, once you get farther into it, there’s a book that claims to give the origin of the word camaraderie.
And it says, most linguists agree that it comes from the Latin camera, which means a device used to take a photograph.
And of course, the best photographs are not of individuals, but of groups of happy friends who love each other deeply.
Not exactly. That was actually a laugh out loud line for me because in Latin, the word camera means room.
And that eventually gave rise to the French word camarade, which means somebody who shares a room, a friend or a comrade.
And that gave us camaraderie. And when you’re talking about the modern photographic device called a camera, that’s a shortening of an earlier term.
As you know probably, Grant, from doing this in elementary school, people knew for centuries that you could use a black box with a lens at one end to project images of external objects.
And that box was called a camera obscura, literally a dark room in Latin.
And then later, when modern photographic technology came along, camera obscura was shortened to just camera.
And I have to say that in defense of Severance, the book that professes to have the etymology of this word is sort of this flaky self-help book to begin with.
But it gives me an excuse to talk about the show, which I can’t seem to stop doing.
It is funny how often on television, particularly, obviously not the nonfiction shows, but the etymologies are wrong, are off.
And it irritates me because I’m like, well, with a little bit of effort, they could have gotten that right.
And then all the people who watched this would have had the correct etymology.
Yeah, we’re available for consultation.
We absolutely are.
Within the universe of this weird, weird show.
Right. It fit because the book was junky and so maybe the etymology was junky too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, I’m going to go back and re-watch the whole thing, I think.
We’d love talking about etymology and word origins.
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