Like dessert and servant, the word serviette ultimately derives from the Latin servus, meaning slave. When English borrowed serviette from French in the late fifteenth century, the word denoted a small cloth placed before each dinner guest, a meaning serviette may have acquired because its function—to mop up spills or wipe off fingers—was once performed by Roman slaves and British servants. If so, then serviette’s diminutive ette ending was intended to suggest that a serviette is like a “little servant”: equally helpful in wiping applesauce from your husband’s chin, but much less likely to impregnate the neighbour’s milkmaid. Since the late nineteenth century, however, the word serviette has fallen into disrepute. In England, calling your napkin a serviette is tantamount to calling your host’s dinner her vittles or her purebred shiatsu a critter, in Canada, napkin tends to be used when the item is made of linen, while serviette tends to refer to the rough rectangles of paper—seemingly made of recycled toothpicks—that are dispensed from metal boxes on restaurant tables. Why napkin overtook serviette in status is unclear. In origin, napkin goes back to the Latin word mappa, which referred to the napkin a Roman emperor might throw into a stadium to signal the beginning of the games, just as today a manager might end a boxing bout by throwing in the towel. The Latin mappa then developed in two directions: it became part of the Medieval Latin term mappa mundi, meaning doth of the world, which became the English word map, the first maps being sketched upon sheets of cloth; mappa also entered French as nape, meaning table doth, which gave rise to naperie—the generic term for all table linen—which entered English as napery in the late fourteenth century. The French nape also developed the diminutive form napkin, meaning little table cloth, which English borrowed at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Before napkin and napery were borrowed by English, however, the French nape had already developed the form, naperon, referring to a cloth that cooks wore while in the kitchen. This naperon was borrowed by English as napron in the early fourteenth century, but by the end of the sixteenth century the initial n had drifted over to the preceding indefinite article; in other words, a napron became an apron. The same shift happened to an umpire, which used to be a numpire, while the reverse happened to a newt, which used to be an ewt.