Proper: belonging before behaving

There's a small sting in the word 'proper'. We use it to mean correct, or decent, or done the right way - a proper meal, a proper apology, behaving properly. But that sense of social approval is the newest thing about it. It's only recorded from 1704. For the five hundred years before that, 'proper' meant something much plainer: your own. A proper noun is still the name that belongs to one particular person or place, and that's the older word showing through.

I find it telling that a word for 'what belongs to you' drifted into 'how you ought to behave'. Somewhere along the line, owning a thing and doing the right thing started sharing a word. The full story - and where French took the same word - is on the card.

Check out propre (French), propio (Spanish) and proprio (Italian).