Question: Please explain the etymology of the word "philately." I recognize "phil-" as the root meaning "love of," but what does the rest of the word come from?
Answer: "Philately," the word for "stamp collecting," was adopted from the French coinage "philatelie." A French stamp collector, Georges Herpin, suggested the term in 1864. He created it from Greek roots: the combining form "phil-," for "loving," and the noun "ateleia," which means "tax exemption." At the time, Herpin explained that since "ateles" (an adjective meaning "tax-free," from which "ateleia" is derived) was "a passable equivalent" of "franco" or "free," he had employed "ateleia" to express "postage stamp."While Herpin's choice for the second half of his word may strike one as a bit farfetched, 133 years ago it did not seem quite as strange. The postage stamp had then only been in existence two dozen years. Before that, the cost of mail delivery was usually borne by the recipient, rather than the sender, of the mail. It was not the most efficient system, and some private mail carriers had earlier figured out that it made sense to have the delivery charge prepaid by the sender. This mail was stamped with the word "free" (in France, "franco," a relative of the English verb "frank," which means "to mark a piece of mail indicating the payment of postage"). This stamped word was, of course, directed toward the addressee who would ordinarily have had to pay to receive the mail.
When the system of stick-on postage stamps was adopted, first by the British postal system in 1840, and gradually by country after country, it was a radical change: All postage would be prepaid. Although we do not think of it that way today, the postage stamp became the universal mark for "free to the recipient." Thus, Herpin's "ateleia" doesn't seem so mischosen after all, for what is the price of a postage stamp if not a tax levied on mail?
In fact, the new word caught on immediately among stamp collectors, although there were a few dissenting rumbles. Some noted that the meaning of the new word literally amounted to "a love of things that are tax-free" and suggested that "timbrophily" (from "timbre," the French word for "stamp") would be a more appropriate coinage. But these complaints were largely ignored, and only a year after Herpin's first suggestion, The Stamp Collectors Magazine was commenting that "philately," "philatelist," and "philatelic" had become "household words in the postage-stamp collecting world."
Question: Where did the word "posy," meaning "flower," come from? Our dictionary says "posy" is archaic, but I find it to be a popular word, far from being archaic.
Answer: You're right, the "flower" sense of "posy" is certainly not archaic. "Posy" has a few different meanings, and "a flower" is in fact the most recent one. It gets plenty of use. Perhaps your dictionary is referring to the original meaning of the word, "a brief sentiment, motto, or legend, often in verse," which was once popular but is now rarely used. It describes a short inscription, such as might be found on a ring, a coin, or a coat of arms.
"Posy" was born as a syncopated alteration of the word "poesy," a synonym of "poetry," and from there took a path of development completely divergent from that of its source word. After the original sense, a second sense sprang up: "a bouquet of flowers; nosegay." Additional meanings of words usually develop from previous ones through a clear pattern of association, but how the second sense of "posy" relates to the first is not easy to see. Perhaps the "bouquet" sense came out of the idea that an arrangement of flowers is as lovely as a poem. Or it could have been derived directly from the source of "poesy," a Greek word meaning "creation, making," since a bouquet, like a short verse, is a kind of creation.
In any case, it's apparent that the "flower" sense then developed from the "bouquet" sense.