Plus ça change

I'm a big fan of etymology, so when the week's political rhetoric was dominated by the word change, I decided to check things out. etymonline.com, what seems to be a useful online etymological dictionary, gives this background check on "change":

c.1225, from O.Fr. changier, from L.L. cambiare, from L. cambire "to exchange, barter," of Celtic origin, from kamb- "to bend, crook." The financial sense of "balance returned when something is paid for" is first recorded 1622.

I was intrigued when it became obvious that "change," the word we use to describe an action that brings about something different, has its roots in an economic transaction. "Change" is what you get when the value of one part of the exchange is subtracted from the larger value. But this happens only when transactions moved beyond mere barter into the widespread use of monetary currency. Still, the Latin cambire literally meant "barter," so, because all transactions, even bartered ones, can't be considered absolutely equal, then some value was always yielded over and above the value of the the two objects exchanged. So "kamb" symbolized how people "bended" or "crooked" the meaning of a transaction to make all things equal.

A Spanish etymological dictionary we have lying around here (Breve diccionario etimologico de la lengua castilla, ed. by Joan Corominas) takes this one step further. "Cambiar," it verifies, comes from the late Latin cambiare, whose synonym is listed as "trocar." "Trocar" is present in much of old Iberian languages, as well as Gascon, one of those French/Spanish fusions, and the dictionary speculates its more primitive meaning stems from "strike" or "clash" from the crash or squeezing of hands that is "symbolic of the moment of the sealing of a deal." I also see and hear in "trocar" a parallel to "trick" (the end result of a round of playing cards, and the economic transaction between a john and prostitute), and in trick I hear magic.

So change, then, is something of unknown, and sometimes magically determined value that is created during a clash of interests, a smoothing over of the violence that sometimes occurs in our political economy. For people like Obama, who suddenly finds himself perhaps the most viable candidate of all, and Hillary, the woman who would be king, the trick is to avoid the familiar French tautology:

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: "the more things change, the more they stay the same."