In a Word: Peculiarly Impecunious

Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

In ancient Roman times, perhaps the most important sign of personal wealth wasn’t gold or even land, but owning cattle. A big bunch of bovines could provide both meat and milk, along with fertilizer and muscle power to help cultivate crops on the farm. A Roman who had more cattle than they needed just for subsistence farming had goods to trade, that is, the wealth to enjoy some of life’s other pleasures.

I’ve pointed out before one way in which the link between cattle and finance shows up in Modern English. From the Latin capitalis pars “principal part,” we get the idea of capital as the initial amount of a business loan, which then expanded to encompass a company’s long-term assets. Among Old French speakers, this idea of capital as business property extended to property of all types, especially cows, giving us the word cattle (as well as chattel).

But this isn’t the only link between moo-makers and money. In Latin, the word for “cattle” is pecus. Cattle were an important commodity for trade in ancient times, so much so that other items were valued in terms of cattle. The related Latin word pecunia evolved to mean simply “money.” From the same place etymologically, if you have a lot of money — or a lot of cows — you are, in English, pecunious. Slightly more common, though, is its opposite, the word impecunious, meaning that you are bereft of bovines or simply short on cash.

But that’s not where the story ends.

Again, pecus means “cattle”; the herd that one owned was called his or her peculium — literally “property in cattle” — which, because cattle were so equated with wealth and ownership, came to mean more generally “private property.” From peculium came peculiaris, “of or relating to one’s private property.” Over time, the “private” aspect began to supersede the “property” one, so that when the word peculiar found its way into English, it could also refer to something that belonged exclusively to one person —not just physical property but a peculiar eye color, a peculiar sense of style, or a peculiar foot odor.

And of course the sense of peculiar didn’t just stop changing. It takes only small shifts to get from “unique” to “out of the ordinary” to “odd,” which is what peculiar usually means today.