A canape, in either English or French, is a sofa, a couch, and also a piece of toast topped with some savoury food. Writing from the Law Library, Clare Greally asks why we, and the French, have the same word for a sofa and a cocktail snack.
Well, it all started in ancient Greece. Troubled by that pernicious little nuisance, the mosquito, which they called a konops, they designed a couch hung with nets made of gauze. This couch was called a konopeion. The Romans, fed up, one of them said, with being bitten on their couches at times of intimacy by swarms of mosquitos, borrowed the idea, and gave the mosquito-proof couch the name conopeum, which in Medieval Latin became canopeum. The word travelled with the Legions to France, where it became canape. It moved to England with the Conqueror, and in Middle English took the form canope. Of course, the English had very little use for mosquito-proof couches, but they retained the word, now canopy, for an ornamental awning above a bed. The French, in the meantime, regarded the bed or couch itself as the canape.
It seems that the savoury food got its name because the French thought that the little delicacies resembled a couch. And the rest of us, bowing towards the high priests of great cooking, welcomed canape to our vocabulary.
Just because one word resembles another does not mean that they are related. Take pest and pester. In our day, a pest is a person who makes a nuisance of himself. In the time of Elizabeth 1, English borrowed the word peste from French, which had borrowed it from Latin pestis. This was a very serious pest indeed, the bubonic plague. In time, as the fear of the plague receded, any troublesome person or thing was called a pest.
But then take the verb pester. This comes, not from Latin pestis, plague, but from Latin pastor, shepherd. The French got to work on the word in the Middle Ages. Their word empestrer meant to spancel an animal, as shepherds sometimes do, and so to impede. It comes by way of pastoria, found in the Latin of early Germanic law: a spancel for a horse. Empestrer was borrowed into English in the 16th century as pester. First it meant to impede; but very soon, because people thought it must be related to pest, it acquired the meaning nuisance.
A tricky business, this etymology.