Client – Podictionary Word of the Day

[display_podcast]

iTunes users can subscribe to this podcast

There was a period in my life when I was a consultant. There was an old joke about how if you ask a consultant the time he’ll borrow your watch so he can tell you.

That stings a bit. But the fact is that a consultant who doesn’t listen to their client in order to find out how his (or her) consultantly experience can best be applied isn’t much of a consultant.

To give a good answer about what time it is you need to understand what time the client thinks it is. This means listening to the client. Then when you figure out what to tell the client it’s kind of nice if they listen to you. But as long as they pay you they can listen to you or not, that’s their business.

Etymologically it wasn’t always this way. As we go back into the history of the word client we find that long ago your client had to listen to you. Listening was what made them clients.

As a consultant the word client is synonymous with the word customer. The sense of client as the person hiring a professional to help them out appeared around the time of Shakespeare 400 years ago. This meaning evolved because for almost 200 years before that the professionals being hired were invariably lawyers.

Although we can fire lawyers the fact someone has a lawyer usually means that they are actually in need of that lawyer and as such are pretty likely to listen to their advice.

It’s no surprise that a lawyerly word like client comes from Latin and the sense it had before the lawyers got hold of it was a kind of master/servant relationship with the client being the subordinate, which I’m sure suited the lawyers just fine.

Latin words of course usually originated back in Roman antiquity and in that context a client was a plebeian under the patronage of a patrician. The patrician protected the client but the client was pretty much a slave who had to come at the beck and call of their patrician. This was so literally true that the etymological meaning of client is “one who listens to be called” since cluere meant “to listen.”

---

Five days a week Charles Hodgson produces Podictionary – the podcast for word lovers, Thursday episodes here at OUPblog. He’s also the author of several books including his latest History of Wine Words – An Intoxicating Dictionary of Etymology from the Vineyard, Glass, and Bottle.