Cremacirl here, I'm Minion Focardy. Welcome to the show about language and writing, rules, and cool stuff.

This week I have a Super Bowl themed show with a quick and dirty tip about where we get the words wage and wager, and whether they're related,

a meaty middle about what it means to punt something, and a tidbit about football shapes and words from the NFL rulebook.

But before we start, I have an AP style webinar coming up February 28th with Regan.com.

It's a basic and intermediate level session for people who need to know AP style for work.

It's live and you can ask questions at the end, but if you can't make it live, it'll also be recorded.

I'll put a link in the show notes and I'll also be tweeting about it. My Twitter handle is Cremacirl.

And speaking of Twitter, I do gather and often answer listener questions there, and a couple of months ago, Al Wix asked,

what's the connection between wage and wager? I'm answering this question today in my Super Bowl episode because I live in Nevada.

So I see what a big gambling weekend, a wagering weekend, this is every year.

Wage and wager both came into English in the early 1300s from an old north French word wage that means to pay, pledge or reward, and was spelled GAGE in old French.

The words are closely related, your wages being money pledged to you for work you did, and a wager being an amount you pledge when gambling.

A secondary meaning of the verb wage to carry out something like when we talk about waging war, developed in the mid 1500s, probably from the idea of pledging yourself to a battle or campaign.

The same root gives us the word mortgage with that GAGE spelling at the end from old French instead of the wage spelling.

Mortgage literally means dead pledge. The mort meaning dead and coming from the same root that gives us the word mortal.

The online etymology dictionary says that a mortgage was called a dead pledge because quote, the deal dies when the debt is paid or when payment fails.

The GAGE root also gives us the word engage. When you engage someone in a project they're pledged to you, and in a more metaphorical sense when you're deeply engaged in a book or story or conversation, you are in a sense pledged to it.

And finally when you become engaged to marry, you're making a pledge.

And in fact, if you go much farther back to proto-dermanic, wage comes from the same root as the verb wed as in to marry because back then a man would make a pledge often of money to take a wife.

So if you're waging on the big game this Sunday, don't go wild and bet your house or your mortgage. And when you look at your spouse and think of your engagement or wedding day, I hope you conclude that getting married was a good bet.

And before we move on, bookworm baby 25 coincidentally asked me a different question about the word wage while I was writing this piece.

The question was whether the word wages is singular or plural because it seems plural without S on the end, but you often hear it used singularly as in the wages of sin is death.

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