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My walking partner is basically always right, because she listens to good sources and repeats them accurately. But every once in a while, something comes along that is wrong even in the good sources. Today, it was “diapers are called that because they had diamond shapes on them”. And I’m like, _no_ _not_ _ever_. W.T.F. But that’s okay, wait until I get home.
At home, I poke around at the usual suspects (wiktionary, wikipedia, etymonline) and get all kinds of useless garbage. Confusion everywhere!
So I defer to the OED. Here, it becomes clear what happened.
“Diaper” comes from “diaspora”. Diamond comes from adamant. So, definitely not related roots. The underlying assertion is totally wrong.
What seems to have happened is this. Diaspre (fuck you, autocorrect) was used to refer to fabric that was from somewhere else and, obviously quite nice and expensive otherwise why would you be moving it around. This is the diaper that appears in Shakespeare (in that particular case, probably a towel or a napkin, suitable for wiping off after morning ablutions, but conceivably an undergarment to put on after morning ablutions in rose water), and medieval romances both contemporaneous and later. It is associated with things worn close to the skin, felt nice, mmmmm. Soft.
Some of this fabric from somewhere else has a diamond / rhomboid / diagonalized pattern, and the pattern came to be associated with the term, and was borrowed by heraldry, and thus used there to refer to that kind of pattern in heraldry. Here is the wikipedia entry on diapering in heraldry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diapering It has some pictures. A google images search on Byzantine fabrics is pretty evocative, and you can see where the heraldic ornamentation came from.
Considerably later, I would imagine that someone decided to market soft, cotton layette towels / cloths / napkins / diapers / what have you for babies, and called them “diapers” to evoke the aforementioned medievaloid romances popular with that audience (so we’re talking early to mid 19th century here at the latest). No diagonal pattern involved. The “someone” in question would be a High Street or Bond Street kind of shop, selling to a tiny fraction of the public.
But this whole diamond patterns on baby diapers thing, um, no. No. Also, more no.
(Also, the etymology on the Diapering page for heraldry is hysterical. No citation, altho it mentions the OED. Incorrectly, if you actually pull out your OED and check, I mean, because you have one, right? Otherwise, why are we even having this conversation.)
I’ve left out of this a whole secondary discussion on how diaper for babies isn’t conserved anywhere at all (nappies in English, for example). R. was trying to tell me what it was in French, but he managed to lose the “u” in couche, and so was trying to convince me it was “coche”, um, NO, that’s a vehicle. At this point, I’m in the French part of wiktionary reading various definitions to him in English off the French, which honestly, if you are going to try to tell me the word for diaper in French is “coche” you really _ought_ to be able to read and summarize in English. Right?!?
See the subject line of this article. Whenever I have this kind of conversation, I just want to go take more antihistamine, because honestly, having this kind of no, that’s not right, and no, it isn’t that either conversation and having to pull out paper reference books just gives me hives.
At home, I poke around at the usual suspects (wiktionary, wikipedia, etymonline) and get all kinds of useless garbage. Confusion everywhere!
So I defer to the OED. Here, it becomes clear what happened.
“Diaper” comes from “diaspora”. Diamond comes from adamant. So, definitely not related roots. The underlying assertion is totally wrong.
What seems to have happened is this. Diaspre (fuck you, autocorrect) was used to refer to fabric that was from somewhere else and, obviously quite nice and expensive otherwise why would you be moving it around. This is the diaper that appears in Shakespeare (in that particular case, probably a towel or a napkin, suitable for wiping off after morning ablutions, but conceivably an undergarment to put on after morning ablutions in rose water), and medieval romances both contemporaneous and later. It is associated with things worn close to the skin, felt nice, mmmmm. Soft.
Some of this fabric from somewhere else has a diamond / rhomboid / diagonalized pattern, and the pattern came to be associated with the term, and was borrowed by heraldry, and thus used there to refer to that kind of pattern in heraldry. Here is the wikipedia entry on diapering in heraldry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diapering It has some pictures. A google images search on Byzantine fabrics is pretty evocative, and you can see where the heraldic ornamentation came from.
Considerably later, I would imagine that someone decided to market soft, cotton layette towels / cloths / napkins / diapers / what have you for babies, and called them “diapers” to evoke the aforementioned medievaloid romances popular with that audience (so we’re talking early to mid 19th century here at the latest). No diagonal pattern involved. The “someone” in question would be a High Street or Bond Street kind of shop, selling to a tiny fraction of the public.
But this whole diamond patterns on baby diapers thing, um, no. No. Also, more no.
(Also, the etymology on the Diapering page for heraldry is hysterical. No citation, altho it mentions the OED. Incorrectly, if you actually pull out your OED and check, I mean, because you have one, right? Otherwise, why are we even having this conversation.)
I’ve left out of this a whole secondary discussion on how diaper for babies isn’t conserved anywhere at all (nappies in English, for example). R. was trying to tell me what it was in French, but he managed to lose the “u” in couche, and so was trying to convince me it was “coche”, um, NO, that’s a vehicle. At this point, I’m in the French part of wiktionary reading various definitions to him in English off the French, which honestly, if you are going to try to tell me the word for diaper in French is “coche” you really _ought_ to be able to read and summarize in English. Right?!?
See the subject line of this article. Whenever I have this kind of conversation, I just want to go take more antihistamine, because honestly, having this kind of no, that’s not right, and no, it isn’t that either conversation and having to pull out paper reference books just gives me hives.