An English soccer manager, interviewed on television recently after his team's poor performance, said that he had no alibi. I'm sure he meant excuse at all events, M.F. Gibson of Clontarf wants to know where alibi came from. The word umpire also bothers him.
Alibi is the Latin alibi, elsewhere, from alius, other, plus bi as in ubi, where. Hence the sense extension somewhere else - evidence introduced in court to show that the accused couldn't have done it, your Honour, because he was somewhere else at the time.
Excuse is from Latin, excusare, itself from ex, outside of plus cusare, from causa, accusation. Perhaps the soccer manager had no excuses to offer, but Mr Gibson surety deserve an explanation, a word in English law books since the 15th century. Explain is from Latin explanare. The planare bit means to flatten, from plan us, level.
Umpire is trickier. The word comes by mistaken division from a noumpere, from Old French nomper, not one of a pair. Nomper is made of nom, non, not, and per, equal, a relative of peer. Originally the ref in duelling.
Martin Holden, a Kilkenny man living in Sussex, was giving his thoughts lately to shires and counties. He wonders why we don't have shires in Ireland.
We don't have them because we didn't have a Saxon dynasty here. Shire is from Old English scir, office, from Old High German scira, business. This strip of land, this shire, was governed by an earl in the king's name in Saxon England.
After the Norman invasion the earl was replaced by a count, a title borrowed from the later Roman empire. Originally it meant companion - Latin comes. The earl's shire was now the count's county Latin comitatus. But as happens in the strange and often inexplicable fortune of words, the count has disappeared from the titles of the English nobility while the earl has recovered his position; and the countess is now the wife of an earl.
Martin lives in the Rape of Bramber, he tells me. He knows that rape was a Saxon division of some sort, just as our baronies were. Yes, there were Saxon hundreds, a group or settlement of one hundred free families of Saxon incomers, and Saxon rapes, districts in which twenty or more peasants maintained one poor person. The word, and the remarkable charity, are Scandinavian in origin. The Old, Icelandic was hreppr.