Welcome to “My Word!”, a new Coat of Arms column where Menlo faculty trace the surprising histories behind everyday language. In this edition, Upper School History Teacher Charles Hanson unpacks the word “commute.”
President Trump’s decision last October to commute the prison sentence of disgraced Congressman George Santos is remarkable for several reasons, one of which is the opportunity it provides to reflect on the double meaning of the word “commute.”
The legal sense of this word is the original one: by commuting a sentence, a king (or a president) changed it to a shorter one. That’s the echo of “mutation” you hear. But in everyday speech, we almost always use it to mean “go to work and back.” Where did that come from?
As it turns out, we know exactly how this happened. When the Boston and Maine Railroad was built in the 1830s, it was designed to move crops, not people. But farmers in Maine soon decided that it was a convenient way to travel to Boston. Being practically minded Yankees (that is, cheapskates), they asked the railroad if they could get a discount if they promised to ride the train a certain number of times per month or year. Such season passes became known as “commutation tickets,” since the railroad agreed to commute the normal fare to a lower one. The person who bought one was called a “commuter.”
The American coinage caught on all over the English-speaking world, but I don’t know of any other language that recast the old Latin word this way. In French, going to work and back is called “doing the ferryboat,” a nice visual image. Even more vivid is “doing the pendulum,” as both the Germans and Italians say. In Spanish and Portuguese you just go to work and back, which makes sense too.
