For some years I taught a seminar for first-year students called “Crime and Punishment” (we read the Dostoyevsky novel, among other things).  At the first meeting I did a vocabulary exercise, trying to demonstrate how different activities of life have evolved different ethical systems and therefore different terms for wrongdoing and redress.  In the criminal justice system the standard terms are “crime” and “punishment,” but what about the world of teaching and learning, I would ask.  What would the terms be there?  The students would respond (eventually) “error” and “correction.”   In contemporary psychology?  “Inappropriate behavior” and “behavior modification.”  In religion?  “Sin” and “penance.”  In sports?  “Foul” and “penalty,” and here I would throw in the memorable slang term for the penalty box where a misbehaving hockey player has to sit: “the sin bin.”  And finally, I would ask, what about the situation where your maiden aunt sends you a big, nicely bound (see Buckram) dictionary “for you to use in your college classes,” and you neglect to send her a thank-you letter.  What do we call that?  Someone would answer a “faux pas,” which is to be redressed, at least if you want to stay on good terms with the aunt, by an “apology.”  As for the ethical system to which both these terms belong, it is “etiquette.”

It doesn’t seem surprising that both “faux pas” and “etiquette” are French in origin, since Anglo-Saxons have long regarded France as leading the world in politesse, the cultivation of the graces, social niceties.  “Faux pas” hints at a source in that most cultivated (and rule-bound) of social activities, the dance: your “false step” isn’t criminal or sinful, it’s just out of step with what everyone else is doing, or it’s inelegantly executed.  Perhaps your do-si-do (from French dos à dos, “back to back”) is so clumsy that it requires you to apologize to your partner.   “Etiquette” is a little more complicated.  Its original meaning in French is “label,” and ultimately it comes from the Old Germanic verb for “stick,” as in “stick something on” (our word “ticket” has essentially the same origin).   But how do we get from the sense “label” to the sense “a code of polite behavior”?

The answer, lexicographers think, is that during the Renaissance certain European courts—perhaps the notoriously formalities-obsessed Spanish court—put up a placard specifying the code of behavior courtiers were to follow.  In essence, the courts labeled themselves as to social correctness, and in short order the word for the label became the word for the correctness.   Curiously, something like the same development, from label to set of principles, occurred with the words “protocol” and “diplomacy.”  “Protocol,” which is essentially the kind of etiquette practiced in diplomacy, comes from Greek words meaning “first glued,” i.e., a sheet glued on to the start of a roll of papyrus, hence an introduction or title page, hence an official formula at the start of a document, hence a record of diplomatic negotiations, hence “the procedure governing diplomatic occasions, affairs of state, etc.,” as the OED says.  “Diplomacy,” meanwhile, comes from Greek words meaning “twice folded,” which is what important documents were, especially the official documents involved in international relations, and from that it was an easy transition to the meaning “management of international relations,” that is, what diplomats do.  “Diploma,” what you get on graduation day at a high school or a college, to the delight or relief of that dictionary-donating aunt, also originates in the twice-folded, official-document sense.

Back to “etiquette.”  English has kept only the “polite behavior” meaning of the word, whereas French has preserved both that meaning and the “label” sense.   The Germans have invented a clever disambiguation: das Etikett means “label” and die Etikette means “etiquette.”  In German, foreign loan words usually keep the grammatical gender of the language from which they come, so the feminine French etiquette becomes the feminine die Etikette.  Would it be naïve (or sexist, or undiplomatic) to suspect there’s a deeper appropriateness to the gender here?  That, historically, we have associated etiquette—notions of good behavior, politeness, and courtesy—more with women than with men?