fig

英文词源

fig

fig: English has two words fig. Fig the fruit [13] comes via Old French figue, Provençal figua, and Vulgar Latin *fica from Latin ficus. This, together with its Greek relative súkon (source of English sycamore and sycophant), came from a pre-Indo-European language of the Mediterranean area, possibly Semitic. Greek súkon was, and modern Italian fica (a relative of fico ‘fig’) still is, used for ‘cunt’, apparently in reference to the appearance of a ripe fig when opened.

English adopted the term in the 16th and 17th centuries as fig, fico, or figo, signifying an ‘indecent gesture made by putting the thumb between two fingers or into the mouth’ (‘The figo for thee then!’ says Pistol to the disguised king in Shakespeare’s Henry V 1599). The now little used fig ‘dress, array’ [19], as in ‘in full fig’, probably comes from an earlier, now obsolete feague, which in turn was very likely borrowed from German fegen ‘polish’.

This was a derivative of the same prehistoric Germanic base, *feg-, as produced English fake.
=> sycamore, sycophant; fake

fig (n.1)

early 13c., from Old French figue "fig" (12c.), from Old Provençal figa, from Vulgar Latin *fica, corresponding to Latin ficus "fig tree, fig," which, with Greek sykon, Armenian t'uz is "prob. fr. a common Mediterranean source" [Buck], possibly a Semitic one (compare Phoenician pagh "half-ripe fig"). A reborrowing of a word that had been taken directly from Latin as Old English fic "fig, fig-tree."

The insulting sense of the word in Shakespeare, etc. (A fig for ...) is 1570s (in 17c. sometimes in Italian form fico), in part from fig as "small, valueless thing," but also from Greek and Italian use of their versions of the word as slang for "vulva," apparently because of how a ripe fig looks when split open [Rawson, Weekley]. Giving the fig (Old French faire la figue, Spanish dar la higa) was an indecent gesture of ancient provenance, made by putting the thumb between two fingers or into the mouth, with the intended effect of the modern gesture of "flipping the bird" (see bird (n.3)). Also compare sycophant.

Use of fig leaf in figurative sense of "flimsy disguise" (1550s) is from Gen. iii:7. Fig-faun translates Latin faunus ficarius (Jer. l:39).

fig (n.2)

"dress, equipment," 1823, in phrase in full fig; hence "condition, state of preparedness" (1883). Said to be an abbreviation of figure (n.), perhaps from the abbreviation of that word in plate illustrations in books, etc. According to others, from the fig leaves of Adam and Eve. Related: Figgery.