family [LME] A person’s family was originally the servants of their household. It then came to be ‘all the people who live in one house, including parents, children, and servants’, before it settled on its modern meaning from the later 15th century. The word is from Latin famulus ‘household servant’, as is familiar [ME]. The former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made a speech in 1985 where he opposed the government’s policy of privatizing state assets and supposedly accused them of selling off the family silver. What he actually said was: ‘First of all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go.’ Family is also used, chiefly in the US, as a slang term for the members of a local unit of the Mafia; a use popularized in the 1972 film The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola. The phrase in the family way [L17th] meaning ‘pregnant’ was in use earlier meaning ‘in a domestic way, in a domestic setting’.