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From Reader's Digest's "Humor in Uniform" section, regarding the military:

While on leave, my Marine buddy and I met two nursing students from Southern California. After chatting them up awhile, the conversation turned to what we did in the service. When we told them we were in the infantry, the girls seemed very impressed, giving us big smiles as they told us how sweet that was.

Since infantry and sweet are seldom used in the same sentence, I was a little confused. Until, that is, one of the girls said, "We admire any man who works with infants."

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A laugh, of course. But is there a connection between infant and infantry?

Yes, according to
Dictionary.com:

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F. infanterie, It. infanteria, fr. infante infant, child, boy servant, foot soldier, fr. L. infans, -antis, child; foot soldiers being formerly the servants and followers of knights

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The gist of infans in Latin is 'not able to speak', and from there to 'young' and from there to youth, foot soldier.

So, that seems to indicate that there is a link between "infant" and "infantry." Dictionary.com has this:

"\In"fan*try\, n. [F. infanterie, It. infanteria, fr. infante infant, child, boy servant, foot soldier, fr. L. infans, -antis, child; foot soldiers being formerly the servants and followers of knights."

While I assume the definition of "infantry" has changed over the years, at least in the U.S., I don't think the "infantry" is really thought of as our "younger" soldiers. They are our foot soldiers, right?

[This message was edited by Kalleh on Fri Feb 20th, 2004 at 9:24.]

A colleague told me that it was standard practice for a French officers to call his men "mes enfants."

It makes me wonder whether there is a similar link between adults and adultery :-)

Richard English

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It makes me wonder whether there is a similar link between adults and adultery

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There is, as well as with adolescent. (And, yes, I saw your smilie.)

Word History: The adolescent grows up to become the adult. The words adolescent and adult ultimately come from forms of the same Latin word, adolscere, meaning “to grow up.” The present participle of adolscere, adolscns, from which adolescent derives, means “growing up,” while the past participle adultus, the source of adult, means “grown up.” Appropriately enough, adolescent, first recorded in English in a work written perhaps in 1440, seems to have come into the language before adult, first recorded in a work published in 1531.

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the same Latin word, adolescere, meaning “to grow up.”

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Yes, Jerry, -Vsc- is one of my favorite Latin suffixes. It's an inchoative one, signifying that some act is beginning to happen. The Latin adoleo means 'to burn, sacrifice; smell'. (It occurs in other IE languages, but is pretty common in Latin.) So a teen is just beginning to burn ... I see in Pokorny that alimentum 'nourishment' and alimonia 'nourishment, sustenance' are related, too. (I suppose that alma is, too.)