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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

A reader, whose letter I have put somewhere safe, asks me whether I cannot blast the misuse of broker as a verb

A reader, whose letter I have put somewhere safe, asks me whether I cannot blast the misuse of broker as a verb. Indeed I should love to blast away, if it would stay still in the water. The usage annoys me as a cliché. It is generally a deal or settlement that is brokered, according to correspondents on radio and television. The cliché is not unconnected with the need for an ‘honest broker’. Yet there is a perfectly good word to broke, literally and metaphorically, which has served for hundreds of years.

Originally a broker was one who dealt in wine au broc, in other words from a broached barrel, as a tapster. Both broker and broach come from Latin broccus, via the unrecorded form brocca, ‘a spike’. (Most words from times transitional between Latin and its daughter languages do not survive in manuscript.) Brooch comes from the same source.

Brokers figure commonly in English prose from the 14th century onwards. Sometimes those of the pawnbroking or peddling kind were regarded as contemptuous figures. In matters of love, they might also come near to being panders.

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