Q: I say “fetch” when I want my Lab, Gracie, to retrieve something, but “fetching” may refer to her good looks as well as her retrieving. Am I right to assume the two senses are related?
A: Yes, both the retrieving and the attractive senses of “fetching” are derived from the verb “fetch,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The story begins in Old English, when “fetch” (originally feccan) meant to go on a quest for someone or something and bring the quarry back.
The verb ultimately comes from ped, the prehistoric Indo-European root for “foot” and “walk,” says The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.
The OED’s first citation, which refers to fetching a person, is from Ælfric’s translation of Genesis 42:34 in the late 10th century: “Þæt ge þisne eowerne broþur feccon” (“that you should fetch this brother of yours”).
Around the same time, the verb was used in reference to fetching an object, as in an OED example from Matthew 24:17 in the West Saxon Gospels.
In the passage, Jesus tells his followers that when the apocalypse approaches, a righteous person should flee to the mountains and not go home to fetch anything:
“Ne ga he nyðyr þat he ænig þing on his huse fecce” (“Let him not go down to fetch anything in his house”).
As far as we can tell, the use of “fetch” in the canine sense first appeared in The Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting (1575), by George Turberville. Here he describes the training of spaniels:
“Also it is a good thing to teach them to fetche, and to learne them to mouth a thing gently: for if they teare the fowle, or the thing which they shall fetche, it is a great fault in them.”
Soon afterward, the verb was used in reference to the ability of spaniels to retrieve not only waterfowl but bolts (crossbow projectiles) and arrows that had gone astray.
This example is from Of Englishe Dogges, Abraham Fleming’s 1576 translation of De Canibus Britannicis, a 1570 Latin treatise by John Caius:
“With these dogges also we fetche out of the water such fowle” and “we vse them also to bring vs our boultes & arrowes out of the water (missing our marcke).”
The earliest example we’ve seen for “fetch” used as a command is from Hunger’s Prevention: Or, the Whole Art of Fowling by Water and Land (1655), by Gervase Markham.
In explaining how to teach a dog to retrieve, Markham says one should use a glove to play with the dog, “then cast it further from you and say Fetch.” And if “he doe bring it you make exceeding much of him and reward him either with Bread, or Meate.”
As for “fetching,” it can be a present participle (as in “Gracie is fetching well today”), a gerund (“Her fetching has been at its best lately”), or an adjective (“She looks especially fetching after being groomed”).
When the adjective first appeared in the 16th century, the OED says, it described someone who “contrives, plans, schemes”—that is, a “crafty, designing” person.
The earliest Oxford example is from Actes and Monumentes, John Foxe’s history of Protestant persecution by Roman Catholics (1570 revised ed.): “What can not the fetchyng practise of the Romishe Prelates bryng aboute?”
That sense is now obsolete, but in the late 19th century the adjective took on the modern attractive sense, which Oxford defines as “alluring, fascinating, pleasing.”
The first OED citation, which we’ve expanded to fill an ellipsis, is from Roy and Viola (1880), a Victorian-era novel by “Mrs. Forrester” (pseudonym of Emily Feake Bridges): “there is nothing in the world so fetching as a beautiful voice?”
How, you’re probably wondering, did “fetching,” an adjective derived from the verb “fetch,” come to mean “crafty” and later “alluring”?
The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology suggests that the verb’s original meaning of to pursue and bring back inspired the later “idea of taking or catching one’s attention.”
In fact, the adjective “taking” has meant “appealing, engaging, pleasing, charming, captivating” since the 17th century, the OED says, though that sense is “now somewhat dated.”
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