Business and Bizness and Bidness, Oh My!

There are some words that students always, always, always misspell, and “business” is one of them.
It shouldn’t really be hard, because business is busy-ness, the state of being busy. But somehow it usually comes out as “buisness,” which I guess is the students’ way of trying to smooth over the troubling fact that “busy” doesn’t sound like “buzzy” but “bizzy.”

The word “bank” goes back, as everyone should know by now, to the Renaissance, when Italian moneychangers had their offices on benches. The word for “bank” in Italian is “banca” and the word for “bench” is “banco,” showing their close relationship. When a moneychanger went out of business, the “bank” was “broken”--”ruptured,” -- hence the term “bankrupt.”

However, I didn’t know until consulting Funk (see previous posts) that banking originated in temples. Of course, I knew that Jesus had thrown the moneylenders out of the temple and broken their benches, but I didn’t know that even in Babylonia of 4500 years ago, priests were moneylenders, so it was not unusual at all for there to be money-changers and lenders in the temple.

What about the terms used in banking? One is “usury,” the practice of charging interest on a loan. This word goes back simply to Latin “usus,” or use, meaning that interest is charged for the “use” of the money. Myself, I think most moneylending is usurious (excessive, it means now) in the extreme, but that could have something to do with the amount on my credit-card bills every month.

And “money”? Money comes from the Latin “moneo,” “I warn.” Why? (That is, apart from the fact that any fool with money should be careful lest he be parted from it.) Well, that also goes back to a temple--Juno’s temple. In Roman mythology, Juno was among other things the goddess of warning and guarding. In her temple on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the grateful citizens (grateful for what, we want to know) put up a temple to Juno, referring to her in that guise as Juno Moneta. And in the temple they put a mint for moneymaking, which she duly guarded. And there you have it. “Mint,” by the way, has nothing to do with juleps in this context. It also is derived from “moneta” -- still the word for “small change” in Italian” -- through Anglo-Saxon “mynet,” the place where money is made.

Who knew?

Oh, yes, about the title: “business” is the word, “bizness” is how you pronounce it, and “bidness” is what Cousin Nathan over in middle Tennessee (and old-fashioned people throughout the American South) call it.