“The standard etymology is that placebo is the first person future indicative of the Latin word placeo, I please—that is, placebo=I shall please. But I don‘t think it’s as simple as that.
The word first entered the English language through its erroneous use in a Latin translation of verse 9 of Psalm 116, which in Hebrew transliteration is “et‘halekh liphnay adonai b‘artzot hakhayim.” This is correctly translated in the King James version as “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living,” but the Latin version in the Vulgate of St Jerome is “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum.” This (“I shall please the Lord in the land of the living”) is not a correct translation of the Hebrew, but perhaps Jerome reasoned that anyone who walked before (or as the Revised English Bible has it “in the presence of”) the Lord would please Him, and used the word placebo for the sake of euphony or metre (the Latin line happens to be a dactylic pentameter, like the dactylic hexameters used in Greek and Latin epic verse, such as Virgil’s Aeneid).
Because the verse was used in the Vespers of the Office for the Dead, the word placebo, with which it began, became in the thirteenth century the name of that service. And because some people attended the service and sang the Placebo, hoping to be rewarded by a dead person’s relatives, the word came to mean a sycophant. As Chaucer wrote in The Parson’s Tale: “Flatterers are the Devil’s chaplains, always singing Placebo.”
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December 18, 2011, 10:32pm
