The Etymology of Attach
Every email attachment carries an echo of medieval stakes driven into the ground.βββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ 'Attach' descends from Old French atachier, a variant of estachier ('to fasten with a stake'), from estache ('a stake, post'), borrowed from Frankish *stakka β the same Germanic root behind English 'stake'. The original image was viscerally physical: pinning something to a post. Anglo-Norman courts extended this to law, where to attach someone meant to seize them, to fix them in place by judicial authority. English adopted both senses in the fourteenth century. By the seventeenth century, emotional attachment had entered the language β being fixed to someone by bonds of affection rather than rope. The word 'attack' shares the same origin, having taken the hostile branch of 'fastening upon' an enemy. The diplomatic title attachΓ©, borrowed back from French in the nineteenth century, returns to the root sense: someone fastened to an embassy.