The Fugger Family and the History of Pettifogging
Hello,
Despite writing this blog since 2009 I still find words I want to write about and am stunned to discover I haven’t already covered them. Such a one is pettifogging. Collins Dictionary tells me “You can describe an action or situation as pettifogging when you think that unnecessary attention is being paid to unimportant, boring details.”
Pettifogging is not a word I use everyday but sometimes it’s just perfect.
Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with fog.
Pettifogging pettifoggers have been with use since the dawn of time, I suspect, but the word for them arrived in the 1560s when it described an inferior lawyer (attorney). In the 1580s there was also a pettifactor who was a legal agent who undertook small cases. As both are so close in meaning and spelling their origins may be entangled.
The word is formed from two words (and in the past was sometimes hyphenated) – petty and fogger.
Petty had been in English since the late 1300s (original spelling peti) to mean small or minor. It had been borrowed from the Old French adjective petit (small) which is still used in Modern French. Petty wasn’t originally a negative adjective as we can see in petty cash (small sums of money) since the 1800s and petty officer (a minor military officer since the 1500s). However the use of petty evolved in the 1500s. By the 1520s petty could mean of small importance and by the 1580s it described somebody as being small-minded. Both of these extra meanings feed into pettifogging.
A fogger is a term used nowadays in specific trades – disinfection and pest control – but a fogger in the 1500s was a very different thing. A fogger was a cheat. It may have arrived in English from the now obsolete Dutch word focker (from the Flemish verb to cheat) or the Middle English word fugger.
Both the Dutch and the Middle English terms are believed to come from a famous merchant and banking family of the 1400 and 1500s in Augsburg, Germany. Books have been written about their family history and there’s a dedicated website if you want to dive deeper. For the purposes of language history it’s enough to know that in German, Flemish, and Dutch their name became a term for a money-lending monopolist.
To be a fogger then was to be a financial trader. To be a pettifogger was to be the small version of that – somebody who would try sharp moves on a smaller scale to turn a profit. The association with lawyers, well I wouldn’t want to cast shade on a noble profession. Presumably the more recent association with attention to tiny details was because lawyers do like to attend to details in their contracts and often turn a good profit along the way.
Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
