The Lone Ranger should have worn a balaclava

If someone says "mask", what's the first image that pops into your mind? I think of those surgical jobs that cover the mouth and nose and are intended to filter out pollution, or perhaps to stop the wearer from spreading germs.

Visit certain cities in Asia and you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd been invited to a masked ball.

Masked balls are not all that common these days, sadly, and in any case those are not the sort of masks the attendees would be wearing.

At a masked ball of the traditional variety (or even of the alternative variety, as portrayed in Kubrick's 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut), ornate masks covered only the top half of the face, leaving the nose and mouth free to inhale whatever pollutants were on offer.

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Comic books used to depict outlaws, highwaymen and assorted other crooks wearing a strip of fabric tied around their eyes, with slits cut out of it so that they could see. That's how you knew who the bad guys were, obviously.

Detrimental individuals of the gun-slinging variety were also sometimes pictured with what might variously be called a kerchief, a bandana or a buff wrapped around the lower half of their faces, which might have worked quite well as a disguise provided they did not have eyes of a particularly distinctive colour - that poor cowboy with one green and one blue eye was thrown into jail before you could say heterochromia - but for the most part, masking tape across the eyelids was how they rolled.

How these masks were supposed to effectively disguise a person's identity is beyond my understanding. If the Lone Ranger - who was not a crook but, like many other cartoonish heroes, preferred to remain anonymous - had worn a balaclava or some other sort of full-head covering, like Spider-Man, then I could understand why everyone was always asking: "Who was that masked man?"

But Tonto's buddy was mostly shown wearing one of those silly little black masks with eye-holes. Everyone must have recognised him immediately. It seems likely that he was a harmless lunatic and that his fellow Wild-Westerners were just humouring him by pretending not to know who he was.

The word "mask" has an interesting history. The Online Etymology Dictionary says it comes from an ancient, pre-Latin, Provençal dialect in which the word masco meant "witch". Mascara comes from the same root. It's not that difficult to connect the dots between witches, masks and makeup, but along the way there was also the Old French masque, a covering intended to hide or protect the face.

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In English, a masque became a play performed by amateur actors who wore masks, either because they were so bad that they did not want people to recognise them, or perhaps because there was no budget for a makeup artist.

This definition of masque stretched to encompass 16th-century balls to which guests wore facial coverings ranging from silly to elaborate to sinister.

The Elizabethans were not an overly pedantic lot and were happy to accept the alternative spelling "mask". By the late 1500s they were also employing the term "masquerade" - because why be satisfied with a short word when you can use a fancy long one?

And so it was that mask, masque and masquerade remained interchangeable for some time. Edgar Allan Poe's gruesome short story The Masque of the Red Death was originally published in 1842 as The Mask of the Red Death. Both versions referred to what we would call a fancy-dress party.

Apart from Poe's story, the word "masque" has largely dropped out of use. Which is a pity, because it's a pretty word that once performed multiple tasques.

• E-mail your observations on words and language to Sue de Groot on degroots@sundaytimes.co.za or follow her on Twitter: @deGrootS1