SUE DE GROOT | Of course Pablo cost an arm and a leg – how else would a sofa walk home?

In the midst of misery and mayhem there is always some small comfort to be found. For South Africans, in the wake of a week of collective insanity that saw shopping malls burnt and people left hungry, that solace came in the form of an expensive couch.

The sofa nicknamed Pablo, resplendent in blue leather that would not look out of place in the reception room of the DA’s headquarters, was stolen from an upmarket furniture store.

A reward was offered for its return; the people heeded the call and Pablo, lying discombobulated and slightly worse for wear on various city pavements, was rescued.

I have always wondered why no literate furniture baron has opened a chain of soft-furnishings stores called The Ottoman Empire.

This bespoke item, presumed lost but now found, has been reunited with all its component parts and is now safely ensconced as the showpiece of its maker’s collection.

Which leaves just one question: is Pablo a couch or is it a sofa?

When it comes to the furnishing of names for the things we sit on, there are subtle but important differences.

Teacher Alice Bryant, in answer to a query from a second-language English speaker on Voice of America’s “Learning English” web page in April, wrote: “In the US, the words ‘couch’ and ‘sofa’ are generally interchangeable … Historically, however, the meanings were different.

“The word ‘couch’ comes from French word ‘coucher’ and once meant a low, bed-like piece of furniture that did not have arms. And the word ‘sofa’, which comes from Arabic, was something more like a bench with arms and a back.

“Today, the American public uses either word, whether or not the piece of furniture has arms. However, some people consider the word ‘couch’ to be less formal than ‘sofa’. And sofas might sound as though they are more costly and refined than couches.”

Bryant is not wrong, but the etymological origins of those long things we sit or lie upon are slightly more complicated.

“Couch” started out as a verb in the 13th century. It meant to spread out, to put to bed, or to arrange, and is still used in this sense when we talk, for example, of couching horrendous news in more palatable terms.

About 150 years later, the couch verb progressed to mean “to cause to recline” and from there it was a just a short roll onto the noun version, the bed-like thing upon which one reclines while watching a flatscreen TV which miraculously cost only R5k even though it is worth R30k.

The Online Etymology Dictionary agrees with Bryant, saying a couch traditionally has a raised end for one’s head but no arms on which to rest one’s elbows while eating popcorn. A sofa, on the other hand, “has both ends raised and a full back”.

So all the tweeting wags who noted that Pablo “did not go sofa” were grammatically correct, but perhaps they did not know that the word “sofa”, adopted into English from Turkish in the 1620s, originally meant a section of floor covered with carpets or cushions.

In about 1717 the sofa morphed into the two-year-guarantee item we know today, and according to all this Pablo is indeed a sofa rather than a couch, although the distinction nowadays seems somewhat less important than the fact that looters mysteriously did not manage to offload a sky-blue item of furniture bigger than my lounge and worth more than my car.

Speaking of lounging, before the couch and the sofa came the settee, which is what my aunts and uncles used to call those multi-seated soft furnishings upon which we gathered to watch Dallas on a Tuesday night.

The settee, progenitor of the sofa, comes from the word “settle”, which in its verb form still means “come to rest” — exactly the purpose for which settles, which became settees, were intended.

Settle as a verb is often attached to the prepositions “down” or “for”, both of which are appropriate with regard to Dallas. I as a small unruly child was told to settle down, keep quiet and behave while the adults settled for cheesy Texan oil barons in the absence of any more edifying entertainment.

(As an aside, an Ottoman is a type of couch rather than a sofa. The OED calls it a “type of couch or cushioned seat without back or arms … associated with Eastern customs”. I have always wondered why no literate furniture baron has opened a chain of soft-furnishings stores called The Ottoman Empire.)

Settee is now a dismally unfashionable and outdated word. Perhaps because it did not easily attach itself to other words. “He’s such a settee potato” doesn’t really work, and if the iniquitous “casting couch” had instead been a “casting settee”, maybe even gruesome Harvey Weinstein would have thought twice about abusing those who sat on it.

In the same way as settees became sofas or couches, the room we call the lounge was once the parlour or drawing room. Drawing rooms had nothing to do with the doodling of pictures or the closing of curtains. They were so named because ladies in colonial times withdrew into these rooms when the menfolk wanted to be left alone at the table to talk about horseflesh, or something.

Speaking of flesh, the German word sitzfleisch (literally “sitting meat”) has no English equivalent, so in our couch-potato way we have simply appropriated the original. It means the ability to put your feet up and wait until rewards appear.

And this is something to gladden the soul, for it seems all good things come to those who sit and tweet, even missing bits of powder-blue sofas called Pablo.