I Am Engaged

 

A fortnight ago, in a little break from launching Rhyme and Reason, I took a young lady for a walk in a woods, and returned with a muddy left knee and a fiancée. 

I have been told that it is important that I understand the meaning of this engagement. So I have checked up. Engagement is closely related to a mortgage (note the gage in both), and to a wager, which I would have suspected. The original sense was to pawn something, or offer it as a guarantee. 

By the 1600s it had become an obligation or an "encumbrance" according to the OED and referred to any debt or oath legal, moral or financial. Debts and duties get you tangled up in things, and so by 1642 an engagement could be defined as the fact of being entangled, and by 1665 two armies could get together in a military engagement and try to shoot each other.

In 1811 an engagement could mean a social appointment, as in otherwise engaged, or it could be a promise to pay (1849) or an appointment to a salaried post (1884). 

But to me, and to that young lady, engagement means all of these things at once.

I then discovered that an engagement can also be a formal promise to get married. I hadn't noticed this at first, as the meaning only really separated itself in the early nineteenth century. The lady then informed me of the existence of "engagement rings", which I hadn't heard of as the OED only records the term from 1861, and I'm bad at keeping up with the news. 

I tracked down their first citation for the word engagement ring, just to get myself up-to-date. It reads thus:

If a gentleman wants a wife, he wears a diamond ring on the first finger of the left hand; if he is engaged, he wears it on the second finger; if married, on the third; and on the fourth, if he never intends to be married. When a lady is not engaged, she wears a hoop or diamond on the first finger; if engaged, on the second finger; if married, on the third; and on the fourth, if she intends to live single. 

This paragraph has caused me much confusion, as I've noticed that my fiancée is already married and that I am no gentleman at all. 

I also suspect that, somehow, I'm owed a diamond ring.