Laudator Temporis Acti

Vicky Osterweil, interviewed by Zoé Samudzi, "Stealing Away in America ," Jewish Currents (June 10, 2020):

The word "loot" was taken from Hindi by [British] colonial officers. It first appears in English in an 1845 colonial officer's handbook.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives earlier examples, s.v. loot, n.²:

Etymology: < Hindi lūt, according to some scholars representing Sanskrit lōtra, lōptra booty, spoil, < the root lup = rup to break; others refer it to Sanskrit lunt to rob.

[....]

[1788 Indian Vocab. 77 Loot, plunder, pillage.]
1839 Blackwood's Edinb. Mag. 45 104 He always found the talismanic gathering-word Loot (plunder), a sufficient bond of union in any part of India.

Id., s.v. loot, v.:

1842 [implied in: LD. ELLENBOROUGH Let. 17 May in Hist. Indian Admin. (1874) 194 The plunderers are beaten whenever they are caught, but there is a good deal of burning and 'looting' as they call it.

Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), p. 55, s.v. reup-:


More from Vicky Osterweil in the same interview:

Riots are really emotive, an emotional way of expressing yourself. It is about pleasure and social reproduction. You care for one another by getting rid of the thing that makes that impossible, which is the police and property. You attack the thing that makes caring impossible in order to have things for free, to share pleasure on the street. Obviously, riots are not the revolution in and of themselves. But they gesture toward the world to come, where the streets are spaces where we are free to be happy, and be with each other, and care for each other.

Labels: etymology, lexicography