I absolutely love getting notes from readers, especially when they’re about word usages…even if they tell me I’m using something incorrectly, LOL. I make mistakes just like anybody, of course, but when someone points something out to me, I immediately go and look it up, soaking up everything I can about it.
And I was pretty surprised to learn the history of the word option!
It’s been a noun in the English language since around 1600, but at that point in history, it meant “the action of choosing,” and then “the freedom of choosing.” The word came to us from the French with its roots in the Latin optio, meaning “free choice.” It wasn’t until 1885 that it came to meant “the THING that may be chosen” (emphasis mine), which is how we primarily use it today. Who knew that was so new??
The sense of the word that we get in phrases like stock option joined the fun as far back as 1755, and the verb in that sense is from 1880.
(For the record, the setting in which I was using option in the modern sense was 1906, so I was probably safe to do so…though I was worried for a moment, fearing I’d had it in my 1860s Dreams of Savannah! And wouldn’t be surprised if I had…sometimes I just don’t think to question things!)
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.
So the original use of “option” would be preserved in a phrase like “you have the option of what you want to do,” correct? It’s so hard to know how words were used in the past! I remember finding out that “notice” was not used as a verb until well after the noun form was in use. I don’t remember the exact year it changed, but I know it was after my characters’ era…which isn’t to say my characters haven’t used it. This type of issue is why my author’s note always says, “I have tried not to use anything blatantly anachronistic, but some idioms may not be completely true to the era.” There’s always going to be something I missed! But it does annoy me when writers have their characters from the Middle Ages use words like “okay.” So I appreciate your attention to this!