caerimonia

Latin caerimonia meant 'holiness, sacredness, religious rite.' Its etymology was already obscure in Roman times. Cicero connected it to the Etruscan town of Caere, whose inhabitants allegedly preserved Roman sacred objects during the Gallic invasion of 390 BCE. Modern linguists are not convinced. The word may be Etruscan in origin, pre-Indo-European, or derived from an unknown source. It is, fittingly, a mystery.

Roman caerimonia was not ceremony in the modern sense of empty ritual. It was the actual presence of the sacred — the quality that made a place, an object, or an action holy. The difference between a ceremony and an ordinary act was that the ceremony had caerimonia. Without it, the gestures were just gestures.

English borrowed ceremony from Old French ceremonie in the 1300s. The word gradually shifted from denoting genuine sacredness to describing the formal, ritualized performance of important events — weddings, graduations, inaugurations, funerals. The sacred drained away; the form remained. By the 1600s, 'standing on ceremony' meant insisting on formality for its own sake.

The phrase 'master of ceremonies' dates to the 1660s. The MC (or emcee) was originally a court official who managed the sequence and protocol of royal events. The role migrated from court to church to theater to hip-hop. An MC at a wedding and an MC at a nightclub share a title that traces back to Roman holiness. The sacred became the formal became the entertaining.