Speaking of Words: Celebrating Your Campaign with Champagne?

Speaking of Words
By Michael Ferber

Tired of campaigning, or watching campaign ads?  Here, for a little relief, I thought I would write about the word campaign itself, and about the many other words that are related to it, including the champagne you hope to pour to celebrate after the election.

Campaign, when English borrowed it from French around 1590, meant “flat, open country, or field.”  In modern French campagne still means “open country.”  Then it came to mean in English what it had also come to mean in French, that is, what people did in the country: namely, make war.  In other words, the field of conflict became the conflict itself, or a phase of it: armies “went on campaign.”  By about 1750 the term was extended to political or electoral operations of the sort we are sick of in alternate Novembers.  But even Gandhi and Martin Luther King used military metaphors to describe their nonviolent campaigns.

A variant or doublet of campaign for a while was champaign, also taken from French.  Shakespeare uses that form in King Lear, where Lear is describing a third of his land: “With shadowy forests, and with champains riched.”  The campaign/champaign pair suggests that the c-form came from Norman French, the language of William the Conqueror, and the ch-form came central or Parisian French.  That is why we have catch and chase, and castle and chateau.  But that division may be complicated by the presence of Italian campania, also borrowed for a while into English, with the same range of meanings (“field” to “battle”).

The now obsolete champaign, of course, reminds us of the region of northeast France called Champagne, so named because it was largely flat and excellent for military manoeuvers.  Like much of France it produces excellent wine.  Italian campania, or campagna, originally referred to the flat countryside near Rome, now the Campagna di Roma.  

All of these words go back to Latin campus, meaning “field.”  Farther back than that it is difficult to see.  Similar words in Greek, such as kampto, “bend, curve,” or Welsh, such as cam, “crooked,” don’t seem very apt.  In any case, American universities, back in the days when all students had to study Latin, took the Latin word campus directly to refer to their grounds.  The French also took it, somewhat earlier, as camp, a place where armies temporally bivouacked (now there’s a word) in tents, and passed it on to English, where it now can mean not only a temporary encampment but a permanent military site, not to mention campsites where civilian campers go camping for fun.

Before French reached back to Latin for camp, it already had the regular inherited form champ, which still exists.  We all know about the Champs-Élysées, the famous boulevard in Paris, which means “Elysian Fields,” where some ancient Greek heroes went when they died; today the avenue sports statues of Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, Simon Bolivar, LaFayette, and Balzac, among many others.  From champ Old French made champiun, paralleled by late Latin campionem, which meant a “combatant in the field,” or a particularly good one.  Passed into English around 1225 champion came to mean a fighter distinguished for skill and bravery, and then a century later it could mean a soldier who fought on behalf of another person or cause.  A champion of a cause today might well campaign for it.  Champion had a doublet in English, campion, from northern, perhaps Norman, French; defunct as a common noun it remains as a surname, as in Jane Campion, the New Zealand film director.  There is also a cultivated plant family called campion, such as rose campion, but why it is called that is a puzzle.

On a French restaurant menu you may find champignons, “mushrooms,” which may come from a champ, but the ending of the word is not well understood.  Who cares?  The French know how to cook them.

In most Italian cities, such as Venice, you will see a campanile, a bell tower, often separate from its church.  It comes from campana, meaning “bell.”  What has that to do with “field”?  It seems campana meant “something made in Campania,” which referred to the region in southern Italy near Naples, where they made very good bells.  

And then there is Campobello, the island in New Brunswick just across from Maine, where Franklin Roosevelt and his family made their summer home.  The name means “beautiful field” in Italian, and it was the brainchild of Captain William Owen, who was granted it by the governor of Nova Scotia, Lord William Campbell.  Just add an o to each syllable and you turn a Scottish surname into an Italian placename.  The trouble is, Campbell comes from Gaelic cam, which as in Welsh means “crooked,” and beul, which means “mouth.”  I don’t know how it is that the Campbell clan acquired that unflattering name.  Perhaps they were too fond of campaigning.

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: [email protected].

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.

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