No grils allowed.
Dear Word Detective: I have come upon the word “denizens” a couple times lately, used (as usual) as if it meant “resident of.” But why should it? If a citizen is someone who lives in a city, shouldn’t a denizen be someone who lives in a den? And does that mean you could use a word like “homizen” or “hoodizen” to mean “someone who lives around here, in the hood”? — Jeff, Toronto, Canada.
“Hoodizen”? I like it. In fact, I hereby deputize you to get out there on the streets of Toronto and popularize it. Speaking of “dens,” while you’re on your mission, can you ask around and see if you can locate the person who popularized the term “man cave”? It’s fairly recent term for a little den (usually furnished with a bar, TV, video games, action figures, etc.) set up in a basement or garage as a “boys only” sanctuary by a married (though probably not for long) man. Or should that be “boy-man”? I just can’t keep up with our cultural infantilization. Anyway, I have a banana cream pie I’d like to present to the inventor of that term.
A “denizen” is not, as you noted, a person who lives in a “den.” The American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of “den,” however, follows an interesting progression: “1. The shelter or retreat of a wild animal; a lair. 2. A cave or hollow used as a refuge or hiding place. 3. A hidden or squalid dwelling place: ‘a den of thieves.’ 4. A secluded room for study or relaxation. 5. A unit of about eight to ten Cub Scouts.”
“Den” comes from the Old English “denn,” which meant “a wild animal’s lair,” from Germanic roots that meant “a flat area,” the connection possibly being vegetation, etc., flattened by a sleeping animal. “Den” today is also used in the phrase “den mother,” originally meaning a woman who leads a “den” of Cub Scouts, but now applied figuratively to any person playing a caretaking role to a group (”… Linda McCartney, den mother to the Beatles,” 1976).
As cool as the word “den” is, there is, sadly, no connection between “den” and “denizen.” Although we use “denizen” today to mean simply “an inhabitant or habitual occupant of a place” (”The new Hello Kitty Beer was not a hit with the denizens of Bob’s Biker Bar”), the original meaning of “denizen” when it first appeared in English in the 15th century was a bit more specific. A “denizen” of a country was someone who lived inside a country; a resident, as opposed to a foreigner. The root of “denizen” was the Old French word “deinz,” meaning “inside,” derived from the Latin phrase “de intus,” meaning “from inside.” There even was a verb “to denize” in the 16th century, now long obsolete, that meant “to naturalize, to give the rights of a citizen to.”
“Citizen” doesn’t exactly come from the word “city,” but they do share an ancestor, the Latin “civis,” meaning “citizen.” This “civis” spawned “civitas,” meaning “community, city state,” from which we eventually got “city.” Meanwhile, in Old French, the related form “citeain” meant “citizen,” and was taken into Anglo-Norman in the form “citezein,” which became our English “citizen” in the 14th century. The sudden appearance of that “z” is probably due to the influence of the Anglo-Norman “deinzein,” our old friend “denizen,” which was often used interchangeably with “citezein.”
