During the Middle Ages, guests were brought to the dinner table by the sewer, and they would have been offended had they not been accorded that honour. The sewer was not, however, a stinking, underground channel of slow-moving sludge, but rather was a man, as fragrant as a man could be back then, whose job was to arrange the table, seat the guests, and check the dishes for evidence of poison. His job name, which first appeared in the fourteenth century, was derived from the French asseoir, meaning to cause to sit, a word that developed from a Latin compound formed from the preposition ad, meaning toward, and sedere, meaning to sit. The other sewer\u2014the one that sends steam billowing through manhole covers on cold, winter nights\u2014takes its name from a completely different source: it derives from the Old French essever, which developed from the Vulgar Latin exaquare, meaning to remove water. In turn, exaquare was formed from the Latin ex, meaning out, and aqua, meaning water.<\/p>\n
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During the Middle Ages, guests were brought to the dinner table by the sewer, and they would have been offended had they not been accorded that honour. The sewer was not, however, a stinking, underground channel of slow-moving sludge, but rather was a man, as fragrant as a man could be back then, whose job […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s"],"yoast_head":"\n