Biology and ecology

L’humus looks like a technical term with no family, borrowed into English out of soil science and left standing on its own. It is nothing of the kind. The Latin humus is the ground, the earth underfoot, and English is full of its descendants — they simply do not look like soil. To « exhume » is to take out of the ground and to « inhume » is to put in; « humble » comes from humilis, low, close to the ground, and « humiliate » is to put somebody back down there. Even « posthumous » was drawn into the family by mistake: the Latin was postumus, a superlative of post, and later writers respelled it with an h as though it meant after the earth. The one word that is not a relative is the one that sounds closest. « Hummus », the chickpea paste, comes from Arabic ḥummuṣ, the chickpea, and has nothing to do with soil at all. So l’humus in a French text is, etymologically, the most ordinary word on the page, and « hummus » on a menu is the stranger.