In the Arthurian legends, the Siege Perilous is a seat at the Round Table reserved for the knight who will find the Holy Grail. That knight turns out to be Sir Galahad. You can read all about him in The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad. The Siege Perilous is the only instance I’ve ever seen of siege being used to mean “seat.” So I betook myself to etymonline.com to track the word down, and it turned out to be quite an adventure.
The Middle English word siege or segge (seat, throne) derives from the Vulgar Latin sedicum, which derives from classical Latin sedere (to sit). I had suspected that it was a coincidence that the Middle English siege (seat) looked exactly like the Modern English siege (the military action of surrounding a town or fort with an army to force a surrender). But I was wrong: they are different uses of the same word. Just as Sir Galahad sad down on the Siege Perilous, a besieging army “sits down” outside a fortified place to wait out the inhabitants.
The Latin sedere (to sit) gives rise to an astonishing number of seemingly unrelated English words. Some are obvious, such as seat, sit, set, settle, sedate, sedentary (tending to spend a lot of time seated), and sediment (the stuff that settles to the bottom of a liquid). A sedan chair is a chair you can sit in and be carried around. Saddle has obvious connections to sedere, though it had never occurred to me before today.
Less obvious are the words that contain the stem sess-, which derives from a participial form of sedere. A session is literally a sit-down. Your church may be led by a session of elders, who sit down every month or so to hash things out. There are legislative sessions, judicial sessions, and jam sessions, though, from what I understand, it is not unusual for musicians to stand rather than sit during jam sessions. I am happy to report that the phrase “rap session” seems to have gone out of favor. A session ale is a lower-alcohol ale that lends itself to sitting and talking (NOT having a rap session!) deep into the night, as opposed, say, to putting a lampshade on your head and throwing up in the umbrella bucket.
Obsession has an interesting history. Originally it was a direct synonym for siege (the military kind). Whereas siege and besiege came to English by way of French, obsession and obsess came directly from Latin—ob (against) + sedere (to sit). A city was obsessed when an army “sat against” it. By the sixteenth century, the idea was applied to evil spirits: when evil spirits haunted a person, the person was said to be obsessed by evil spirits. These days we apply the term more broadly, but the idea still obtains: an obsessed person is haunted by an idea or thought.
The words possess and possession also derive from the sedere/sess- root. The word possession started as a real estate term: your possession was the bit of land where you had the right to settle down. According to etymonline, it was probably a compound of potis (having power) + sedere (to sit). The verb possess was a back-formation from the noun possession. As the centuries passed, the meaning of the words broadened from real estate holdings to anything a person might own.
Speaking of real estate, one perennial foe of possessors of real estate is the tax assessor. You may have heard the joke, “I always wanted to live in a $300,000 house; now, thanks to the tax assessor, I do.” (That joke was funnier when $300,000 could buy a big fancy house.) Anyway, because the judge had other things on his mind than the value of taxable property, he had a close assistant who figured such things out. This assistant was the assessor, so called because he sat next to the judge—ad (at or beside) + sedere. As with obsess and possess, the meaning of assess broadened from judging the value of real estate to judging the value, importance, or extent of anything, especially abstract nouns like damage, risk, or relative merit.
A word with a parallel history to assess is assize. As with assess, its constituent parts mean “sit beside.” Assize came to us by way of French; the word is obsolete in English, but a good synonym would be session. I bring it up because assize is the source of our word size. In France, l’assise (les assises? I’m getting out of my depth here) was responsible for weights and measures, as well as property tax assessment, all of which is related to the size of things. L’assise can easily be mistaken for la sise. And before you know it, we’re supersizing things. (Bonus etymology: Big Gulp is of Dutch or Flemish origin—gulp is, anyway.)
An assiduous person one someone who is able to “sit at” a job and get it done without getting up and walking around (something I have done several times since I started writing this letter, in spite of my sedentary tendencies). But oddly enough, sedulous, which means the same thing and looks exactly like it would derive from sedere, has a different root altogether. The Latin origins are se– (without) + dolo (guile). A sedulous worker stays at the job without sneaking around or trying to get out of work. He is not a half-stepper, as one of my long-ago employers termed it.
An insidious person, on the other hand, is very much full of guile. She “sits in” ambush—in + sedere—and jumps on you just when you least expect it.
A dissident is a person who sits apart from the mass of people—dis (apart) + sedere. I recently heard on The Rest Is History podcast that the word dissident originated with Romans at the Colosseum who sat while everyone else stood to honor the Emperor. I’m sorry to report that this doesn’t seem to be accurate, but it would be pretty great if it were.
Believe it or not, there are many more English words related to sedere, including subsidy, dodecahedron, banshee, cathedral, cosset, preside, reside, and supersede. If you want more great sitting-related content, I refer you to this entry from etymonline.
