Joe Grimwade
Cancel: v. 1. To call off/abort an event.
2. To cross something out with lines.
As the fluorescent orange lettering on the station’s departures board switched from ‘LATE’ to ‘CANCELLED’, a collective groan swelled through the throng of passengers waiting on the platform. Eyes swivelled in disgust; long-suffering commuters returned to their phones in a cloud of chronic resignation; the hope on the faces of a group of schoolchildren, eager for their day trip to the city, died.
Another average morning on the UK rail network, you might think. The cause of the cancellation, however, was not the average ‘Leaves on the line’.
A static voice on the tannoy announced: “We are sorry to inform passengers that the 7:56 Parthenos Trains service to Cambridge has been cancelled. This is due to a collision between a prison van and a fisheries lorry on a level crossing, leading to the spillage of a large number of crustaceans on the tracks. Clean-up crews are attending the scene.”
How unlikely! Yet, this seemingly remarkable confluence of cancelled trains, crabs, and the custodians of the incarcerated does at least have sound etymological precedent, in the development of the verb ‘to cancel’. It begins with a corruption of the Latin carcer, ‘prison’, resulting in cancer, a grille of the kind you’d expect to see on a prison window and, coincidentally, also the (etymologically unrelated) Latin for ‘crab’. So far so tenuous. The diminutive of the metal grille cancer is, however, cancellus (cancer + -lus), denoting any lattice barrier or grating. Pliny the Elder even used this term to describe the criss-crossed wrinkles on an elephant’s skin; creases that, he believed, served the elephant as a death-trap for irritating flies (Plin. HN 8.30).
Associated with cancellus was the verb cancello, meaning ‘to arrange in a criss-cross pattern’, ‘to enclose in a lattice’, or – significantly – ‘to cancel a document by crossing it through’. The cross-hatching of the stylus, which resembled the grille on a prison window, and which showed the contents of a document were null and void, thus came to stand for the scrapping of any event. From there, the verb ‘to cancel’ was inherited into the English lexicon quite predictably, via the Romance languages – in this case, Anglo-French. ‘Cancel’ had assumed its present meaning by the mid fifteenth century.
The end.