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task - podictionary 728 - November 18, 2008 -

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Here’s a quote from Samuel Johnson himself:

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Here’s the Merriam Webster definition of task:

a specific piece or amount of work usually assigned by another and often required or expected to be finished within a certain time

I think all of us these days would include tasks that we imposed on ourselves in that definition. The first citation for this meaning is from someone I haven’t cited in a while, but you’ll remember his name; William Shakespeare. From Richard II:

Alas poore Duke, the taske he vndertakes Is numbring sands, and drinking Oceans drie.

This carries the sense also of difficulty and burden that task used to have; a somewhat more onerous meaning than we give task these days.

Something similar to our current meaning appeared about 400 years ago, but the word is older than that. 700 years ago the word applied to the work you had to do to for your lord. That might be as a soldier for your baron or tending crops on his land for him.

William the Conqueror Although the written evidence turns up a little later, 600 years ago, the thinking is that the earliest meaning of the word task in English was in fact “tax.” So not only could your social superior demand a task of you in time and labor, but a task could be something you paid in cash.

And there’s a reason that a task meant a “tax.” Both words sprung from the same root.

The new French government that was put in place after the Norman Conquest a thousand years ago made a priority of figuring out what taxes they could extract from England. You’ve heard of the Doomsday Book. It was actually a taxable property inventory that the Normans undertook almost as soon as their feet hit English turf. The Old Norman French word tasque was actually just a mixing up of the sounds of the earlier Latin taxa.

So to recap with the information I talked about yesterday in the episode on the word tax: