Transcript for the Piece Audio version of metal - word of the day

This is the etymology moment, and I'm Charles Hodgson. Today we'll hear the story behind the word metal.
In the days of the ancient Greeks there was a need for materials from which to make swords and helmets and things. To obtain this material it was necessary to dig a hole in the ground. In the ancient Greek language of the day, this hole in the ground was called metallon, and by extension, so was the stuff they dug out of it and heat treated into useful tools and weapons. This Greek word was adopted by the Romans as metallum and later came to English through French. By the time it got into English the word metal had pretty much dropped it's meaning of the place where the stuff came from and was applied only to the stuff itself. That was first back in 1230 in our old friend the Ancrene Rule. In the passage where it appears, this old instruction manual for medieval nuns is recommending steering clear of other people who can lead you into sin. The passage draws an analogy by saying that
Neither gold nor silver nor iron nor steel is ever so bright that it won't draw a rusty stain from a thing that is rusty if it lies long beside it.
I'm reading this from a modern transcription of the Ancrene Rule and it's clear that the guy who re-wrote it from Middle English wasn't exactly sure what the original writers meant by the word metal. What I just read doesn?t even use the word metal, but there in the original metal is tossed in the cutlery drawer along with the gold, silver, iron and steel, as if it were a fifth kind of substance that would get rusty.
Over the following centuries the word extended beyond minerals to mean generally what something was made of, and particularly what a person was made of in terms of their character. Hence the word mettle spelled M E T T L E appeared as a variant spelling about 500 years ago, intended to notify readers that we were talking about personal attributes, not cutlery.
I had always wondered, particularly around times when the Olympics were on, whether the word medal M E D A L was related to the word metal M E T A L. Evidently I wasn't alone. Older etymology sources do link the two. After all, aren't medals made of metal? But more recent and more authoritative etymology sources turn instead to an old meaning of medal as a coin of specific value. This value was half a denarius. A denarius was a Roman silver coin but the operative part of this relationship is that the medal was half the value of the denarius. Since when you divide something in half you have a dividing line down the middle, in was the "middle" meaning the Latin word medius that gave medal its name. So medal is unrelated to metal.
Since I brought up that Roman coin the denarius I think it's worth telling you that its name harkens back to the days before trade was conducted entirely in cash. The value of a denarius was such that with it you should have been able to purchase ten donkeys; hence denarius means literally "ten asses."