Today we found ourselves in the Pontic Mountains—the ones above the Black Sea, which the ancient Greeks called Pontos Euxeinos, the Hospitable Sea, on the diplomatic principle that a sea one is frightened of should be flattered rather than insulted.
And standing there on the pass, breathing cloud, a thought arrives: is there any connection between this Pontus and the verb to pontificate—to hold forth from a height, to talk down, to give oneself airs?
There is. And it is a good deal more direct than one has any right to expect.
The road, the sea and the bridge
Greek πόντος goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *pent-, meaning “path, passage, way across.” The sea, to a people who had to get over it, was not a body of water but a route.
From that same root:
- Germanic *finþan, “to find”—that is, to come upon the way—and English path;
- Latin pons, “bridge,” with its whole Romance progeny;
- and, in Slavonic, the ordinary Russian word for a road, put’.
And from pons comes the pontifex, the “bridge-builder”—the title of the Roman college of priests, inherited by the Pope, who is Pontifex Maximus to this day. Whether the bridge in question was over the Tiber or between men and gods, the Romans were pleased not to specify.
So when somebody pontificates at you, he is, etymologically, doing what a bridge-builder does: standing on the crossing and telling everyone else how to get over. The Black Sea and the pompous bore are relatives.
But the gambler is not
There is a second English word in the same shape, and it belongs to a quite different family. To punt—to lay a bet—came in from the French gaming tables, from ponte, ponter, the player who stakes against the bank.
That one descends from Latin punctus, “a prick, a point,” meaning a point on the score; and punctus from the verb pungō, “to prick, to pierce.” Whence point, puncture, punctual, punctuation and every other sharp word in the drawer.
Behind that lies the Proto-Indo-European *pewǵ-, “to prick, to jab.” Latin took it to mean a fist—pugnus—and gave us pugnacious, pugilist and impugn. It may also, on one theory, be behind a certain Anglo-Saxon monosyllable of which polite society disapproves.
Two fists, or one?
Here the family tree gets interesting, because nobody is quite sure how to draw it.
English fist, German Faust and the Russian pyast’, the metacarpus, look as though they ought to belong with Latin pugnus. Ferdinand de Saussure, back in 1892, argued that they do not: he linked them instead to *penkʷe-, “five”—the fist being, quite simply, the five fingers gathered up. It is a tidy idea, and the standard English etymological dictionaries follow it.
The objection is that in neither Germanic nor Slavonic does the word ever mean plain “hand.” It means fist from the outset, occasionally “handful.” And coining a word for “fist” directly out of “five fingers” is not the most obvious move a language ever made.
Which is why Kluge and Seebold’s German etymological dictionary prefers to bring it back to *pewǵ- after all. The clinching detail is the nasal: Indo-European formed presents by slipping an -n- into the root, giving *pung-—which is exactly how Latin got pungere from pewǵ-. The same nasal would account neatly for the -n- buried in Germanic *funhstiz.
So the Indo-Europeans named the fist either for how many of it there are or for what it does to you, and two centuries of scholarship have not settled which. Choose according to temperament.
In summary
The connection I went looking for turned out to be real, and to run through a bridge. The one I did not expect turned out to run through a needle.
And we have contrived to mention the Pope, a boxer and an obscenity in a single post, which for a mountain pass is not a bad afternoon’s work.
