The Complete and Slightly Dramatized History and Etymology Of The Spoon

Spoons. Do you ever just look at that little metal fellow laying by your bowl on a Tuesday morning and wonder “where did you come from?” I cannot say many of us have, and I surely cannot say that many of us would expect to actually be riveted or entertained in any way by the long and complex history of a piece of cutlery. But much to my surprise, the heroic origin story of humanity’s silverware superhero proved to be an amusing, eye-opening, and unexpectedly emotional tale of the evolution of language, the slow ascension of metal cutlery, and the heart-breaking divide between the financially-formed factions that have cost countless lives and will exist as long as the human race itself. This tale will do nothing to assist you on your journey through life, but at the very least, it will be a tale you know and, much to your surprise, will be unexpectedly glad to know.

We should probably commence this voyage through the chronology of the spoon by participating in a sleuth-style examination of the world itself: spoon. Why do we call it a ‘spoon’? Out of all the five-letter combinations that the founding fathers of the English language could have selected, why was ‘spoon’ the one that fought its way through and became victorious. First of all, much like all great English creations, we stole it from someone else. The word ‘spoon’ is the descendant of an unholy fusion of words from three deceased languages that have been taped together into the verbal equivalent of Frankenstein’s Monster. The earliest ancestor of this word can be found in the Proto-Indo-European language, which serves as the great grandfather of the majority of European languages, with the word ‘speh’, which roughly translates to ‘chip of wood’. This translation may seem completely irrelevant to most people, but this was the official definition of the ‘spoon’ until the word used today gained enough recognition to serve as its own definition. Centuries later, the language evolved into the Proto-Germanic language, and the term used to describe the soup-stirring silverware was upgraded to ‘spēnuz’, which somehow manages to sound even more ridiculous than the previous terminology. If you study the etymology of the vast majority of English words (and seemingly have a non-existent social life), you will notice that almost all of those words have a Germanic origin, as the Proto-Germanic language covers almost the entirety of Northern and Western Europe. This proves one thing: the English love stealing creations from foreign lands. Eventually, the English language decided to stop using the same verbal language as the remainder of Europe and instead create their own vocabulary…using the same verbal language as the remainder of Europe. Soon, the infamous ‘Old English’ language was born, which is now widely recognised as the pretentious and unreadable language that seems more at home in Middle-Earth than in Medieval England. With the Germanic term serving as a base, the Old English term for a ‘spoon’ was the strikingly similar ‘spon’, which is so agonisingly close to the term we use today that you would expect the next term in the chronology to be ours. Unfortunately, that is not the case, as the dim-witted child of Old English stumbled onto the scene as ‘Middle English’, and it managed to come painfully close to the modern pronunciation of the word ‘spoon’, but spelt it with the proficiency of an illiterate rock. The term used was ‘spone’, which thankfully was the penultimate step on the unstable staircase that was the etymology of ‘spoon’. Why the journey to the seemingly-basic term ‘spoon’ had to tread through absurd terminologies is simply due to the evolution of language, but the inconceivable amount of near-hits with the word and the amount of terms that are hilarious say are much harder to explain.