The Latin that came to be spoken their slowly diverged from the other dialects of latin, eventually turning into Old French, but while it was still mutually intelligible with other dialects of Latin the phrase “romanice scribere” was coined, which literally ment something like “to write in the style of rome,” but basically came to mean “to write in a language descended from latin.” From then on, words descended from the word “Rome” would refer to what we now call the “Romance” languages. For a few hundred years after people had stopped speaking classical Latin, they kept on writing in it out of habit and tradition. Eventually, though, during the middle ages, people finally started writing down various poems and epics written in the Old French that people had actually started speaking. Because of all this kind of literature written in the vernacular dialect, the phrase “romanice scribere,” evolved into the phrase “romanz,” which basically just ment “poem.” This word survives today in the modern French word for “novel.” Eventually, the English picked up the phrase from the French in basically the form it’s in today, “romance.” Unlike in France, where it could refer to pretty much any poem written in French, in England it gained more specific connotations, but not the kind we have today.
It referred to the kind of epic tale of the exploits of a hero that was so popular in France at the time. By the 1600s, people were starting to associate the word with love, and with, like, how love should ideally be, because love tended to feature so prominently in these stories, but it’s primary usage still referred to a literary genre that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with love. It would kind of be like if today we talked about how our boyfriend can could be so action-movie, or how that date we wend on was really anime.
This status of sometimes referring to love but mostly just referring to really dramatic stuff is the meaning that the word had in the 1800s, when the artistic movement known as “romanticism” flourished. To these painters and writers and composers, something being “romantic” didn’t mean necessarily mean it had to do with love, although it frequently did, but rather they used it to call back to the medieval poems and stories that they idealized and tried to emulate. To them, things that were “romantic” emphasized the importance and legitimacy of irrational emotion, spontaneity and individualism. As time went on and the Romantic movement faded away, the word became more and more associated with things that we think of today when we hear the word “romantic,” and by around the 1960s it came to refer exclusively to things having to do with love, and not just any kind of love either, but, well, you know, romantic stuff! Deeply emotional relationships that have some sort of sexual or physical aspect but also might not but AARG you know what I mean.
Today if anyone uses the term romance or romantic they are specifically saying “this thing has something to do with romantic love,” but this is just the most recent usage of a word that’s historically referred to all kinds of things, from cities, to languages, to literature, to genres, to artistic movements, and finally, to what today I can’t find any alternative word for besides “romance.” Do you have a specific word or group of words that have interesting histories? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see you next time. .
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