Have you ever looked up the etymology of the word sewer? It’s a strange, sad journey through the history of language, and it provides ample evidence that the French language is not a language at all, but rather a dumpster fire posing as one.

Seriously, the stuff it does to words is unforgiveable. Hold on to your hubcaps, because I’m about to go on an entirely unwarranted tirade.

Etymology of Sewer

If you look at sewer, you’d think it might mean “a thing that sews.”

But that can’t be right because we’re already using sew for something that has absolutely nothing to do with sewage.

A quick search on Google won’t get you very much as far as its etymology goes. You’ll get the Old French word seuwiere and a couple Latin roots ex (“out of”) and aqua (“water”). The actual history is a bit more involved than that.

Thankfully, Etymonline has a good entry on it. We’ll be using that to create a timeline for sewer.

PIE

It all starts with what we call Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which is considered to be the root of most languages in the western world. The word we get from PIE is akwa, which means “water.” Go figure.

Latin

Latin, having evolved from PIE, naturally reflects this in the word aqua, which also means “water.” From that, we get the Latin word aquaria, the feminine form of aquarius, which simply means “pertaining to water.”

Gallo-Roman

When the Romans invaded and conquered Gaul, they brought their language with them. The Gauls adopted a great deal of it, including the term exaquaria, which maintains its perfectly sensible roots. However, disaster lay in store.

Middle French and Old North French

See, it got Frenched. Exaquaria became esseveur in Middle French and sewiere in Old North French.

What. The. Heck. Happened.

Changing ex- to ess- I can see. They’re pretty close to each other as far as pronunciation is concerned, with the latter being a little lazier than the former. Additionally, the last bit eveur changes the a to an e (understandable) and converts the u to a v (which were practically the same letter in Latin anyway).

But it dropped the q, probably because (as is the way of French), people were too lazy to actually pronounce it.

So it got dropped, and what was once only the first half of a diphthong (the u in –ua) became an important consonant in the word.

Then in Old North French they couldn’t even be bothered with the first e and just shortened it to sewiere. Seriously, this language sheds whole syllables like a cat sheds fur.

Anglo-French

Then in Anglo-French it became sewere, from which we get sewer. Had it not been for the shenanigans in earlier centuries, we’d probably have something like exaquary or esaquary, which in my opinion sounds infinitely cooler.

French Is a Dumpster Fire

So what do we take from this? The lesson here is that French is not really a language. It’s a dumpster fire. It’s a disease that corrupts everything it touches, including the once-sensible English language.

You ever notice how French words are hardly pronounced the way they’re spelled? Have you seen how many vowels, consonants, and whole syllables are just dropped from pronunciation as if they don’t exist? Over time, the language just sloughs them off as random debris, leaving its speakers with the malformed puddles of goo it uses instead of real words.

If it weren’t for the standardization of spelling that became popular in recent centuries, we wouldn’t even see those unpronounced remnants in their verbiage. They’d just be gone from their so-called words, which would all pull from only a handful of different spellings among them.

And the real catastrophe is how much influence it has been allowed to have over other languages, particularly English.

English Is Ruined Forever

Whenever you encounter an English word that has a bizarre spelling that doesn’t really match with its pronunciation, you can probably blame the French “language.” Prior to AD 1066, this wasn’t a problem. Had it not been for the loss at the Battle of Hastings, English would have kept to its sensible Germanic roots, and we’d probably all be a lot happier.

But no. King Harold II lost that battle, and now we have these open lesions in our language all thanks to French influence.

People often talk about how English steals words and grammar from other languages. That isn’t the case with French. We didn’t steal words from the French. They just left their sloughed-off detritus in our back yards and refused to pick it up.

French is a blight upon humanity, and if you happen to speak it, you have my condolences.

Comments? Commendations? Incriminations? Let me know in the comments! Also, share this with all your friends. All proceeds go toward cleaning up after that one language that keeps shedding bits of syllables everywhere. Really.