Things I Didn't Know About Murder

Apparently the original meaning of the English word "murder" was a secret killing. Like, a killing where there are no witnesses, perhaps prototypically during the middle of the night. "There's been a murder!" then, is said when someone discovers a body, with the murderer nowhere in sight. Just, like, killing someone in the middle of the street in broad daylight was not part of the definition, no matter how "premediated" or however much "malice aforethought," the terms of art that form the standard modern definition. And apparently the reason why this was the original meaning of the word came from, like, Norse/Germanic culture, where such open killings weren't considered especially shameful. Oh, you'd be subject to the weregild, the price a killer had to pay to their victim's family (which, of course, varied as a matter of law with the relative statuses of the victim and the killer), and perhaps you might start a blood feud, but you weren't viewed as having committed a real crime. (It kind of sounds like murder, secret killing, was seen as an offense against the state and hence covered by the criminal laws, whereas ordinary killing was just a private offense and hence subject to something more like civil law.)

I never knew that before, and I wonder how much path dependence there's been in the way we define "murder" as a subset of homicides. That old value system, wherein just killing someone in the street wasn't shameful/wasn't an offense against the state, is long dead, but the law still views cold-blooded, deliberate, planned killings as worse than impulsive or impassioned ones, and many definitions still explicitly include murder by poison, say, as a form of first-degree murder. How much of that is the baleful influence of the barbaric culture from which we got the literal word murder? I wonder.