In a recent post I mentioned mortgages, at least in high-cost areas like my own, as a major cause of baby boomers’ inability to retire.

I thought you might enjoy a little factoid I came across years ago: the origins of the word “mortgage.” It is actually from Old French, and consists of two words: “mort,” meaning death, and “gage,” meaning pledge. A gage was a person’s glove, which was usually thrown to the ground as a pledge to duel with another person.

So our familiar word mortgage really means “death pledge.”

A comforting thought, and proof, once again, that my training as a medievalist is not totally wasted.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Assorted Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.