patron
Before "patron" meant a paying customer, it meant a protector — Latin patronus, who stood in for those without standing. And in Old French, patron and pattern were the same word: the protector you followed and the model to copy.
The modern patron is mostly transactional — the customer, the artist's buyer, the named donor. Underneath sits an older asymmetry. The Roman patronus was the figure with standing who took on responsibility for someone without it: the freed slave, the courtroom client, the one whose word could not be heard. The relationship was not paid; it was structural — a kind of fatherhood extended outward.
Patron and pattern were one word in Old French. The protector you followed and the model you copied were the same figure. English split them around 1500 — but the older sense still survives quietly under the newer one, like an old building reused as a coffee shop.
- father — the Germanic branch; fæder in Old English
- pattern — patron's sibling, split off c. 1500 — the model to follow
- paternal — fatherly; the disposition
- paternoster — pater noster, "our father" — the prayer; later, the rosary bead
- patrimony — what comes from the father; the inheritance
- patriarch — father-rule (patḗr + arkhē)
- patriot — originally, one of the same fatherland (patrios)
- patrician — of the senatorial fathers
- patronize — to act as a patron; later, to condescend
- padre, padrone, compadre — the father, the master, the co-father — the Romance branches