Draw

We were riding around, looking at some of the large new houses—mansions, actually--in town, when I said to my wife, “Some of these places are so large they must have drawing rooms.” 

“Well, what is a drawing, and why is it called a drawing room?” she asked.  “I know it’s not a place where people draw pictures.  We read about drawing-rooms in English novels, but what, really, were they?”

“And why do we call those little rectangular boxes where we keep our silverware or underwear, drawers?  For that matter, why do some people call their underwear drawers?”

It was clear that in the ordinary words draw, drawer, and drawing-room, we had opened up a rich lode of etymology and so I will try to mine a bit of it here.

The root word draw comes from the common Teutonic root dragen.  Its most basic meaning is to cause anything to move toward oneself by the application of force, to pull or tug or drag (note how this word also derives from the root dragen).  The cowboy draws his gun, the water boy draws water from the well, the card-player draws a card, and the oxen draw the plow.  Perhaps you remember the word dray, a word not much used today but one that comes from the same root as draw and was used to describe the act of hauling something behind a horse, and later a vehicle.  Fifty or a hundred years ago, moving companies were often called draying companies.

In early times in Western culture, certain criminals were drawn and quartered.  What that meant in its earliest usage was that they were dragged around the town (that’s the drawn part) before they were quartered, that is, had their torso cut open into four sections.  Then they were hung.  Later according to OED, the word drawn was so associated with the quartering that it came to mean disemboweled.

But let’s move on to those drawers.  Why are those little rectangular containers of our stuff called drawers?  Because we pull or draw them toward ourselves when we use them.  Simple! And when we put on our drawers, our underwear, we pull or draw them up.

Now what about those drawing rooms that people were always going to in Jane Austin novels?  Well, actually, they were withdrawing rooms.  Drawing room is a shortened form of withdrawing. After dinner had been eaten often in a large public hall, the women would withdraw, that is pull away, to the withdrawing room, a smaller, private room enclosed by walls and doors.  And since women are more refined then men, the talk in drawing rooms was less bawdy then in the billiard room, and drawing room came almost to be a metaphor for proper.

That leaves us with draw meaning to make a picture or delineate a line.  As far as I can tell, the action of drawing, a sort of pulling of the pencil toward oneself, accounts for the use of draw for this action.    I could give many more variations on the use of this most basic word, but if I did you might draw the conclusion that I’m long-winded and like to hear myself talk, so I will stop here.