Loyalty is living by the dictates of the lawgiver

Legal problems continue to dominate the pages of our newspapers. 

If the adjective penal and the noun penalty come from the Latin substantive poena, we find – in the judicial process – at least one term in which the word poena (“punishment”) remains as it is, that is to say, without any change of form.

Any court of justice can issue something called a subpoena. Pronounced sub-peenah or even suppeenah, this writ obliges the recipient – even the president – to appear in that court and testify. 

For the term subpoena literally means “under penalty”. That is to say that the recipient who fails to obey the summons faces some punishment. 

In other words, you can ignore a subpoena only on pain of a jail sentence or a stiff fine.

That, I warn, is what the law says. The word “law” itself came from the Old English "lagu". 

It may have been introduced into English – after the Norman conquest of England in 1066 – influenced by the French loi (pronounced lwa), itself a derivative of the Latin lex, which means “law”.

The lagu-law pair is an example of the tendency by the hard “g” in certain words to “soften” into a “w” when the words passed from a Latin language to a Teutonic one. Thus, guerrum (Latin) and guerre (French) became war (English); garantie (French) became warranty (English) – though English also acquired guarantee through another route; Gaul became Wales; Guglielmo (Italian) and Guillaume (French) became William (English), Wilhelm (German) and Willem (Dutch).

Certainly, lagu reminds one of legalis, the adjectival form of the Latin noun lex, which went into French as loi, whose adjectival form is loyal or (feminine) loyale, both pronounced lwa-yahl and both meaning “law”. 

Loyal probably came into English through the activities of Guillaume le Conquerant (William the Conqueror) after he – at the head of a daunting French Norman force – had defeated England’s Harold II at the Battle of Hastings.

The Normans were called so because they had invaded France as Norsemen or North-men or Norwegians or Vikings.

Strictly speaking, then, the adjective loyal – which came into English without any change except in pronunciation – did not mean what it now means, that is, “faithful to”. No, it meant only “law-abiding”, “obedient”.

But, of course, as far as the powers-that-be are concerned, it comes to the same thing. To the extent that we observe the law, we live by the dictates of the lawgiver, namely, of whoever is for the time being our Draco, Hammurabi, Jefferson, Lycurgus, Moses, Napoleon, Solon or Stalin.

Whenever we say that we are loyal to the president, what we are really, saying is that we are obedient to him or, more literally, that we observe his laws and he can subpoena us to account for our activities.

The writer is a veteran journalist.