Heart of the Jackal

The origins of the word Courage itself is something I love to reflect on:
“The word was carried across the English channel in 1066 by those brave Normans who planned to take over with William as a new king, deposing Harold II.
They did it too, installing courage as a new word taking over from an Old English word ellen.

This new French interloper word arrived with more meanings than just “bravery”—the one we give it now.

The root of the word courage is cour the French word for “heart.” The idea that our emotions originate in our hearts goes back at least 2500 years and one of the earliest books to make this connection was something called On The Sacred Disease about epilepsy written by followers of Hippocrates.

At first in English the word courage had meanings extending to all sorts of feelings one might attribute to one’s heart: thoughts, feelings desires and passions; gentle, sexual, and violent. It was in the 1300s thatcourage began to make it into print as an English word and it did so with those many different senses of emotion. Over the centuries all those other meanings fell away.

Before French, courage came from Latin and before that the cour part points back to an Indo-European kerd meaning “heart.” There is still enough similarity between this Indo-European kerden and the Old English heorte that you can see that the Indo-European root actually did percolate up into both Latin and Germanic languages.” (from the provided link above)