There is a word that predates the industry that claimed it. Insurance descends from the Old French enseurance — an engagement to marry. Not a financial product. A covenant. A pledge made between two people before witnesses, encoding the promise that one would make the other safe. The commercial sense did not arrive until a full century later. By then the original meaning was already fading. By the generation after that it was gone entirely — an unknown unknown. Families let policies lapse not...

There is a word that predates the industry that claimed it. Insurance descends from the Old French enseurance — an engagement to marry. Not a financial product. A covenant. A pledge made between two people before witnesses, encoding the promise that one would make the other safe. The commercial sense did not arrive until a full century later. By then the original meaning was already fading. By the generation after that it was gone entirely — an unknown unknown. Families let policies lapse not...