Effigy is one of those words I’ve never really thought about too closely, until I decided to look it up. Its main meaning is “a likeness” or “portrait”, as in the effigy of the Queen on the British Pound coin, and the effigy of George Washington, both on the American quarter, and Mount Rushmore. It also has a cool history. Law officials would create straw effigies of criminals who had escaped, and burn them as a symbolic punishment, or a warning. Hence the phrase “to burn in effigy” (which I always heard as “to burn an effigy”, so now we’ve both learned something.) Now, we burn effigies in protest, or just for fun; as in the case of the Gävle goat, a goat effigy in Sweden which has been burned down by arsonists as an unofficial tradition, almost every year since 1966. Fun, right?

The word traces back to the Latin effigiēs, from the innocuous effingere, meaning “to fashion” or “to portray”. Hopefully you know how much I like patterns by this point, so the astute reader will pick out a word from there, and draw a connection. Is it finger? If so, you and I would both be wrong, sadly – but I’ll come back to that shortly. Effingere has a hidden ex– inside, meaning “out”, and fingere is a Latin verb meaning “to form” or “to shape”.

Okay, so it has nothing to do with any of the ten-or-so digits on our hands. What does it link to, then? Actually a lot. We’ll start with one of its closest relatives: fiction. Fiction, as in the genre of literature, can also mean “an invention”, and it used to have the meaning of “something fashioned or imitated”, as in this 1713 quote from the OED:

“The..Art of Painting..surpassing, by so many Degrees..all other human Fiction or imitative Art.”

It comes from the Latin fictiōnem, which also stems back to fingere, as fiction is something that is fashioned or formed: a conscious invention, in other words.

Another relative of fingere is feign, meaning “to invent something in a deceptive way”, or “to create a deceptive appearance.” This word stops off in Old French before it reaches the Latin, in the form feindre, meaning “to hesitate” or “lack courage”, but this form doesn’t survive today. The other meaning of feindre, which is “to shape, fashion or depict”, is what survives in the modern feign, and what came out of the original fingere.

The sibling of feign is a figment, meaning “anything moulded or fashioned”, but also “a fictitious invention”; this from the Latin figmentum, again, from fingere.

With all this talk of fiction, figments, fashion and form, it’s almost worth asking as this point: where did this vitally important fingere stem from in the first place? Ultimately, it traces back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE), in the form *dheigh- or *dʰeyǵʰ, depending on how the word has been reconstructed, I suppose. This means “to mold, to form, to shape”, and also… “to knead”. Interesting, then, that this dheigh found its way into Old English as well as Latin. The Old English word dag or dah may look a little unfamiliar, but this has also survived into Modern English, as the word dough. Yes, as in the precursor of bread. Something kneaded; something molded, fashioned or shaped. So, although they look as unrelated as apples and orangutans, dough is connected intimately to fiction (as well as effigy, feign and figment.)

It goes to show how much we knead fiction in our lives.

Punning aside, I did want to come back to that last odd-one-out in the fingere story, and that is finger. Yes, this has no etymological relation that we know of, to any of the above-mentioned words, despite appearances. It goes back to the Old English finger or fingor, back to the Proto-Germanic *fingraz. Its ultimate origin is, sadly, unknown: both the OED and Etymonline suggest it may have come from the Indo-European word for “five”, although the link in meaning is tenuous at best. The OED also suggests it may be related to “fang”. But this is one story that is lost to time. It is distinctly possible that there is a root, way back before even reconstructed languages, that connects finger and fingere. Until then, anything else we can say about these words, is just an act of fiction.