So in my research for my thesis, I learned a thing, and it’s not useful for my thesis so I’m posting it here instead.
Okay, so, everyone knows that the words canon and cannon are not synonyms, and if you’re like me it kind of makes your teeth grind when people talk about firing the canons or historical cannon. BUT HERE’S THE THING. The word canon is a direct lift from Latin, and it means law or rule. And so when heavy metal guns were developed and needed to be called something other than ‘that big murder machine over there’, the word cannon developed directly out of canon in the sense of “to lay down the law,” the same way Samuel Colt’s gun got called the Peacemaker. Likewise, ordnance comes directly from the Latin ordinance, which also got transferred directly into English as another synonym for ‘rule.’
And that is your totally useless historical fun fact of the day.
Hmmm, do we have a source for this? Because according to Etymonline, cannon is related to cane, roughly means “tube”, and goes back to Latin canna (reed).
Etymology is a vast and complex field, and it’s of course possible that Etymonline is only reporting one of several purported derivations, but he’s usually really good at listing various theories and I’ve never heard this one before soo….
(similarly, ordinance as in weaponry seems to come from the notion of organising it in an armoury)
Yes I do, but the page presenting the theories (although well-cited and reputable to the best of my research, and as this thesis is what’s going to dictate whether I get a BA I’m being rather choosy) is about three hours of reading. It’s about halfway through, and if you want to Ctrl-F it you can just search ‘Peacemaker’. I suppose a better way to phrase it would be that, yeah, cannon is related to canna for ‘reed’ but was introduced with significantly strong associations to bind it to the word canon on an implicit level. This is, generally speaking, why I don’t write posts while distracted late at night–ADHD doesn’t play well with those things if I’m trying to be coherent and weird connections start to appear. And now that it’s a respectable hour I’m kind of wondering how I even managed grammatical sentences.
