Origin and Secretarial Uses
The word originated in ancient Rome, for a slave at his master's personal service "within hand reach", performing any command; later it was specifically applied to an intimately trusted servant (often a freedman) acting as a personal secretary.
A similar semantic evolution occurred at the French royal court, where the secrétaire de la main du roi, originally a lowly clerk specializing in producing, at royal command, the Sovereign's signature on more documents than he cared to put his pen to, developed into the secrétaires d'état, the first permanent portfolio ministers, to which the British Secretaries of State would be the counterpart.
The term is often used interchangeably with secretary or scribe.
Read more about this topic: Amanuensis
Famous quotes containing the words origin and/or secretarial:
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“I got a little secretarial job after college, but I thought of it as a prelude. Education, work, whatever you did before marriage, was only a prelude to your real life, which was marriage.”
—Bonnie Carr (c. early 1930s)