Some familiar words have etymologies right in front of us yet apt to stay hidden. Breakfast breaks a fast, the vowels disguising it well. Remorse is ‘biting back’, your conscience gnawing at you. Semicolon is a folk etymology of samey colon, on account of its resemblance to the other mark.
OK, I made that one up.
I read a nice account of another such etymology in Geoffrey Hughes’s Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanities in English (1991). The book packs considerable detail, scholarly insight and amusing lists into its 280 pages, so I’ll follow its lead and keep this post short.1
In a section on ‘numinous words: charms, spells and runes’, Hughes writes:
One of the most dramatic instances of the use of a malign spell in Anglo-Saxon literature is wrought by the monster Grendel [in Beowulf].2 Described as one of the evil tribe of Cain and an enemy of the Lord, he puts a spell on the weapons of his victims, the Scyldings. The key verb in the text at this point is, fascinatingly, forsworen, literally ‘forsworn’, indicating that the verb forswerian could mean ‘to hinder by swearing; to render powerless by incantation; to make useless by magic’.
Hughes goes on to relate other examples of such word-magic from the Life of St Wilfrid and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Then he quotes from The Battle of Maldon and picks up the -swear- thread again:
A word of importance to our theme which is buried in this passage is answer, which is today an unremarkable, mundane term. As the example of forswerian, just discussed, suggests, the term has greater potency and acquires increasingly serious implications as one goes back in time. This earlier notion of ‘answer’ is vitally related, in the Maldon context and elsewhere, to its etymology, since Anglo-Saxon andswarian means literally ‘to swear against’, to make a formal, legal reply to a charge. Indeed, the dominant early meaning of the word was legal, a sense we are still aware of in the phrases ‘to be answerable for something’ and ‘to answer to a charge’.
The OED notes that this semantic development parallels that in Latin with respond: re-spondēre from re- ‘back, undoing’ + spondēre ‘pledge oneself, undertake a liability, hence to rebut a liability or legal obligation’.
Using answer every day, with silent w and posterior schwa, it’s easy to overlook the swear in its tail – but not once you’ve seen it.
[P.S. Hughes’s book appeared in a book spine poem here last year: ‘Broken words spoken here‘.]
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1 For a still shorter version of the etymology of answer, see this tweet.
2 The etymology of Beowulf is uncertain, but Henry Sweet proposed, pleasingly, that it comes from ‘bee wolf’ as a kenning or code for bear. Hughes says this is possible ‘given the totemistic aura of the animal among the Germanic people’.
Sentence first 
The etymology is fascinating, I’ll keep an eye out for the book.
It’s excellent, especially for anyone interested in language or social history and the nature of taboo.
The KJV, despite its relatively late date, still has some of that archaic force in its use of answer. Looking at the Gospel of Mark only, “Jesus said” is the normal tag for quotations, but when Jesus is responding more forcefully it’s “Jesus answered and said”, as if saying and answering were somehow two different things. On one occasion it is simply “Jesus answered”, and on another it’s “Jesus answering them began to say”. But the truly emphatic replies are “Jesus answering said/saith”, as in 11:21-22:
[21] And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.
[22] And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.
For me, /answer/ means speaking to the point raised, which is what delivers the emphasis. Not speaking to said point perverts what answering is s’poz’d to do and brings condemnation as an evasive or non-answer. In regard to answer + say, compare the present-day “In answer to your point, one might/ought/must say that …” (etc.).
Or when someone says, ‘That’s not an answer!’ to reject an ‘answer’ that evades the point.
That’s a nice example, John. Browsing the subsenses in the OED, it’s also interesting to note all the financial uses: answering a debt, and so on.
This is so fascinating to me, especially that I’m not a native English speaker, so the more things I don’t know the more interesting it becomes.
Glad you found it interesting, Moaz. It fascinates me too.
great