A Wexfordman I know, who years and years ago left his native place for the shores of America and eventually found a job in the FBI, asked me out of the blue the other night as we sat having a few pints, what the connection was between bureau, meaning the division of government in which he served, and the word that denotes a kind of desk, writes Diarmaid Ó Muirithe.

The history of bureau is interesting. Thought to be a word of non-Indo-European origin, it was originally burel in Old French and meant a piece of woollen cloth like baize, used to cover a desk. I had thought that burel must be a diminutive of bure still used in modern French but the great dictionaries pointed out that burel was in use in the 12th century, whereas bure didn't appear until the 15th.

But Webster says that it is possible that there is simply an accidental gap in the recording of bure in print and that burel does indeed derive from it; alternately burel may have been formed as a diminutive already in the Vulgar Latin as burra, shaggy cloth, the word that later gave bure. Anyway, this burel, by a kind of semantic transfer known as metonymy, led to a new form bureau, and the rough woollen cloth gave its name to the desk it covered. This metonymy is typical of that wayward language, French. In the 17th century, English borrowed this French word and its meaning. But the oul' metonymy caper didn't stop there. Not a bit of it.

Bureau was given another meaning, and of course, English followed; the word came to mean the office in which the desk stood. It later came to be applied to an office-based administrative unit, such as my friend once belonged to.

This strange evolution reminds me of the long journey of a legal word of French and Latin origin which once meant a piece of cloth. The Latin pannus meant a cloth and is the source of English pane (think of counterpane).

From pannus Old French got panel, a saddle cloth, and it had the same meaning in 14th-century English. And then metonymy took over. First the word was applied to the saddle itself. This meaning didn't survive, but another extended meaning did. Panel was applied in French and English legal circles to a sheet of parchment on which the names of jurors were written.

Extended again, it came to mean designating the jury, a use commonly found today in the verb to impanel.