The modern sense of diplomacy, ?the management of international relations by negotiation? has a curious history. The original Greek word diploma from which it comes just meant something that had been folded in two (it is a distant relative of our word double). This word came into English with the same meaning as it had in its Latin intermediary, ?a state paper or official document granting some privilege?, a usage which arose because, in the days before the envelope had been invented, documents of that kind were commonly folded and sealed to keep them private.

From here, the word split two ways in English. In one, it retained much of its original sense by becoming a name for the piece of paper formally granting an academic or professional qualification, a use, which diploma still has, though these days it?s more likely to be rolled up with a bit of ribbon around it than folded in two.

Its other meaning grew up by a process of transference, firstly by referring to an archive of such official State papers (strictly speaking, the originals of such papers: even today a diplomatic copy is one exactly reproducing the original). In English the adjective diplomatic first referred to such documents, or to the process of deciphering ancient state papers. In eighteenth-century French, another transfer of meaning occurred around the phrase corps diplomatique. It originally meant just such an archive, but as the papers frequently referred to international relations, the phrase came to refer instead to the body of men who administered them?

Ashveen Kutowaroo

(To be continued next week)