Smarter about the allure

The Middle English period in the history of English had to be some hard times for the people of England.  The Danish clans had spent 500 years populating their new-found island and learning to live alongside each other.  Their clans had all come from an area that feuded,warred, and killed each other for about the same length of time.  But over the last 500 years in a new land full of opportunity, the clans finally learned to live together.  Their leaders were rough and rugged.  Their storytellers told of times when they had to conquer or be conquered.

Then their world changed.  The Anglo-Saxon clans had valiantly fought off Viking marauders for over 100 years, but an invasion and subsequent victory by the French allowed them the entrance to the throne in London.  From that point, all the royal names, events, and documents were written in a tongue quite foreign to the inhabitants.  However, the farther from London one went, the more resistance to French one found by the very traditional landowners of the countryside.  Near Scotland, the people said they would never learn the new language.

From this resistance, compromises were made with the language that resulted in a blend of French and English.  It could have been called Frish or Englench, but the people of the countryside were determined to retain the basic elements and name of their language.  So, English (after the Angles version of German) stuck as the name.  During the 500 years that followed, the blended language of French and English refined itself partly due to a very French idea.

The development of ecclesiastical authority and its associated language of Latin coexisted with the French invasion and subsequent blending of French with Anglo-Saxon.  So the word tempt came in simultaneously with the French idea.  But tempt was too benign for the French speakers (and so religious sounding).  They wanted to show all the intrigue, trickery, chicanery, and Machiavellian intent behind people's actions.  The French were such a devious lot after all.  They introduced the idea of tempting someone through great efforts at manipulation with the word allure.  So, the leaders of the nation began to allure the people into better ways of living to show a distinction between what they had been used to and what was possible under the new regime.  And it truly worked on several levels.  At one level, feudalism lost its grip first in England because of the allure of having more for their families.

The ploy worked of course on more than one level.  Allure came into the language as a verb (lurer=to entice, to seduce) but comes to us today in both verb and noun forms.  Over time, the noun form has supplanted the verb form as the most common use of the idea for allure, but that just means that we've become more passive and turned the action into the name of a sporting event (turning skill into a craft).  We know this because allurement is a noun form also found today.  The expansion of a noun into a second noun changes naming an action to the naming a general class of events (-ment).

From the rough and tumble world of the first English speakers to the more passive modern world we live in now, the action of "go and conquer" has evolved into the name of "come and see the benefits of the house that desire built."  I have to admit to falling prey to the allure of the American Dream.  But, that turned out to be just a dream.  I am now a whole lot more selective in what allures me - really only one thing.  But, I'm waiting for the noun to turn back into a verb.  That might be a while.  Reversion in language doesn't happen very often.