The endpoint of my “au-” excursion is a word that can mean anything and it can mean nothing, which sounds like something Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau might say.
The word is “aught,” which can be “anything whatever” (as in “for aught I know”) or “a zero.”
The zero connection came from the faulty separation of “a naught” into “an aught.” “Naught” is a spelling variation of the first zero in this family, “nought.”
By the way, the adjective “naughty,” also part of this family, used to mean “wicked; bad; evil.” Then it became not behaving properly, especially as applied to children.
The idea of “naughty” as “showing lack of decorum” and “improper, indelicate or obscene” is the most recent one, from the late 19th century, according to “The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories.”
The other use of “aught,” for “anything,” is in keeping with its true origin, which is the Old English “awiht,” a combination of “a” — “ever” — and “wiht” — “a creature.”
It sprang from an Indo-European base for “thing,” which also gave rise to “wight” and “whit.” A “whit” is “the least bit; jot; iota” and usually appears in negative constructions — “She cares not a whit for him.”
The word “wight” is considered either obsolete for “a living thing” or archaic for “a human being,” but is “sometimes used in a patronizing or commiserating sense.”
There’s another “wight” that’s chiefly a dialectical term for “strong, brisk, active, brave, etc.” It came from an Indo-European base meaning “vigorous or hostile display of force.” So, in those days, wight made might.
And there’s the Isle of Wight in the English Channel, where we might spend the summers in a cottage “if it’s not too dear … when I’m 64.”
That was charming and amusing when I first heard it on the Sgt. Pepper’s album. Now 64 is just a year away.
