ɪmˈpiːtʃmənt

impeachment: The accusation and prosecution of a person for treason or other high crime or misdemeanour before a competent tribunal; in Great Britain, the judicial process by which a person may be tried before the House of Lords at the instigation of the House of Commons; in the U.S.A., a similar process in which the accusers are the House of Representatives and the court is the Senate.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Article II, Section 4, of the Constitution Of The United States

As a sort of companion to my post about the etymology of the word prorogation, it seems like it might be time to investigate another unusual word that is freighted with political significance at present.

It’s an interesting fact, often omitted from potted histories of the U.S. Constitution, that its drafters borrowed both the technical usage of the word impeachment and the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” from British constitutional law. Impeachment was originally a process by which the English Parliament could remove from office (and indeed judicially kill), representatives of the King who were deemed to be abusing the powers of their office. (That’s what the “high” in “high crimes and misdemeanours” means—the crimes and misdemeanours cited are not of the sort available to the common person, only to those who hold high office.)

Impeachment comes from the verb to impeach and the suffix -ment, which forms nouns from verbs, relating to either the process or result of the verb’s action. The verb to impeach came to us from Old French empechier, which in turn derived from the Latin verb impedicare. And impedicare refers to the Latin noun pedica, meaning “shackle” or “snare”*. So impedicare was the act of placing a person in shackles, and it gives us our English word impede. The same etymology applies to Modern French empêcher, which means “to hinder”, and that is also the original meaning of the English word impeach. But in English the sense of hindering a person, or impeding what they were doing, gradually evolved into the idea of legally challenging their actions, and so to its current highly specific usage. We also used to have a verb appeach, with the same derivation, and which underwent the same slow evolution in its meaning. It’s now obsolete and replaced by impeach, but it has left a tiny residue behind by dropping its first letter to form the verb to peach—to peach on someone is to give evidence against them.

Returning now to impedicare and our word impede, an impediment is of course something that impedes; impedimenta are things that impede progress, and the word has come to be applied to bulky baggage.

Latin impedicare had an opposite, expedire—to release from fetters. Which of course gives us English expedite, meaning to clear of difficulties or to hasten progress. Something expeditious is speedily performed, and an expedition is a well-organized movement of people and equipment. However, the word expedient has taken on negative connotations—an expedient may clear difficulties and hasten progress, but the final result is deemed unsatisfactory or reprehensible. (Expedite also once came with an exact opposite, impedite, which has become obsolete in favour of impede.)

There seems also to have been another Latin opposite to impedicare—depedicare. There’s now no written Latin evidence for it, but it is presumably the origin of the French verb dépêcher “to hurry”. And we used to have an English word depeach, derived from the French, meaning “to send away” or “to dispose of”. But its function has now been entirely taken over by dispatch, which (despite the similarity in sound) has a different etymology.

Finally, if you’ve been fretting about the derivation of the name of the fruit, peach, it has nothing to do with any of the above. The Romans thought of it as a “Persian apple”, persicum malum, which in Late Latin mutated into persica, then into Italian pesca, French pêche, and finally into our peach.

* And if you’re thinking that pedica has something to do with Latin pes, “foot”, you’re right. Pedica was something that tangled up your feet and stopped you walking.