Pamphlet

Anatoly Liberman tells us at his etymological Oxford University Press blog, that the word brochure derives from the French verb brocher, to sew a book, to stitch it together. Thus etymologically all brochures should be stitched. And pretty much they are — bear in mind that wire staples count as stitching — in the trade it’s called wire stitching. As regards the brochure’s cousin, the pamphlet, the Oxford English Dictionary gives us the definition “A short printed work of several pages fastened together without a hard cover; a booklet; a leaflet”. They derive the word from the French and take its use in English back to the fifteenth century. Professor Liberman says “but in some other modern European languages, a pamphlet makes one rather think of its synonym lampoon“. As he points out the word pamphlet often carried an erotic charge. He quotes bibliophile Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, who wrote in The Philobiblon, (The Love of Books) shortly before his death in 1345 “that the…