Q: News articles often say an issue is “on the table,” meaning being considered. But “tabling” the issue means putting it off. Can you shed light on these opposite meanings?
A: Both meanings of “table” ultimately come from tabula, classical Latin for a board used to write on, play on, hold sacred offerings, and so on.
When the word “table” first appeared in Old English as the noun tabul, the term referred to a tablet used for votive offerings.
The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an Old English translation (circa 900) of Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”), an eighth-century Latin church history by the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede:
“Hæfdan hio mid him gehalgude fatu, & gehalgadne tabul” (“They had with them consecrated vessels and a consecrated tablet”).
The noun “table” developed many other meanings in Middle English, including a piece of furniture to work or eat at, but we’ll skip ahead to the early Modern English of the 16th century when it took on a sense in British politics that the OED defines this way:
“The table which stands before the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons, on which the mace lies when the Speaker is in the chair, and at which the Clerk of the House and his or her assistants receive motions, questions to ministers, etc., and new members are sworn in. Hence: a similar table in the House of Lords or in other legislatures modelled on the British Parliament.”
The first Oxford citation for this sense is from a book on parliamentary procedure: “There is onely one Clark belonging to this house, his office is to sit next before the Speaker, at a Table vpon which he writeth and layeth his books” (The Order and Vsage of Keeping of the Parlements in England, c. 1572, by John Hooker).
The dictionary says that meaning of the noun “table” led to the use of the verb “table” in the sense of “to lay on the table of a legislative assembly or other deliberative meeting. Now frequently in extended use.” The term means “to present or submit formally for discussion or consideration” in the OED’s earliest example:
“Upon the presenting of a petition thereanent [concerning this], whereof at least a hundred, at several times were tabled: your wisdome remedied the plaintiff” (from Logopandecteision, or An Introduction to the Universal Language, Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 parody about an artificial language).
Oxford says this sense of the verb “table” is “common in English-speaking regions outside the United States.” But in the mid-19th century, the dictionary says, a new sense of the verb originated in the US and is chiefly seen in American English: “to postpone consideration of, esp. indefinitely; to shelve.”
The earliest OED example of the American usage is from 1849, published in Whig Almanac 1850: “Senator Westcott tried to table the bill, but failed: it became law.”
The dictionary doesn’t discuss why the American usage evolved. We think it may have developed from the idea of tabling something for future rather than present consideration.
As it turns out, the expression “on the table” has the same sense in both American and British English: “under consideration or discussion.” We’ll end with the first OED example for the expression:
“The facts are, so to speak, all upon the table, and I will merely touch upon the main heads of my case” (from Dawn, 1884, the first novel by the British writer H. Rider Haggard).
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