affair
affair
Old French
“To do was all the French phrase meant, before English loaded it with secrets.”
The word traces to Latin 'facere,' meaning 'to make' or 'to do,' one of the most generative roots in the language. Romans used 'facere' in everything from legal documents ('conficere,' to accomplish) to curses ('maleficere,' to do evil). Old French inherited it as 'faire,' and medieval speakers combined it with the preposition 'à' to form the phrase 'à faire,' meaning 'things to do' or 'business to attend to.' By 1200, Old French scribes had compacted this into a single noun: 'affaire.'
Anglo-Norman administrators brought 'affaire' into English in the thirteenth century, almost always in its plural form: 'affaires' meant a person's practical concerns, obligations outstanding in the world. The singular 'affaire' was still diplomatic rather than domestic in this period. Geoffrey Chaucer used related forms in the fourteenth century without any romantic coloring; the word still meant nothing more complicated than a piece of unfinished business.
The romantic sense developed slowly during the seventeenth century, helped by a Continental fashion for using the word with tactful vagueness. Samuel Pepys recorded 'an affair' in 1666 to describe an attachment too sensitive to name plainly. By 1700 the word had acquired what linguists call a euphemistic narrowing: the vague noun for 'any matter' had been borrowed for a specific kind of matter. The shift required nothing more than discretion and repetition.
Today the word maintains three simultaneous lives without apparent contradiction. 'State of affairs' and 'foreign affairs' preserve the oldest sense, business requiring attention. 'A grand affair' or 'a simple affair' names occasions and events with a slight air of ceremony. And the word's most loaded sense, the romantic secret, remains the one that requires no explanation at all. Three meanings from one French infinitive, each carrying a different kind of urgency.
Related Words
Today
The word 'affair' asks us to think about what we mean by doing. Its original sense was purely practical: tasks that needed completing, obligations that required fulfillment. That practicality never left the word entirely. When a politician speaks of the current state of affairs, the Latin infinitive beneath the phrase is still visible, still pointing toward things that need to be handled.
What happened over three centuries of use is that the word absorbed the particular discretion of people who did not want to say plainly what they were talking about. 'The affair' became shorthand for whatever a speaker preferred not to name. It is now among the most loaded nouns in English, capable of meaning routine business, a formal occasion, or something someone is trying to keep quiet. The same word means business and ruin.
Explore more words