‘Well, we all have areas of ignorance,’ said my husband with a little too much relish, I thought. He was responding to my admission that I had reached a ripe old age without realising that the words yoga and yoke had the same origin.

Yoke has been used in English for more than 1,000 years and yoga only since about 1785, but it had been in use in Sanskrit since the first millennium bc. The meaning of yoga was held to be either the yoking and reining in of the senses, or the yoking and joining oneself to the Prana (life force), the Om (absolute) and the Universe.

In perhaps a parallel area of meaning, religio (‘religion’) was related by early Christian writers to religare, ‘that which ties believers to God’, though Cicero connected it to religere ‘to read over again’ – to observe rites carefully.

The Indo-European word that eventually gave us yoke had been supplying similar words to many related languages. In Greek, ‘yoke’ was zugon; in Latin it was iugum. Even the Finns seem to have borrowed the word in the form jukka to mean ‘crossbar of a sledge’.

Meanwhile yoga slept happily in the Sanskrit vocabulary of Indian religions, until western fashion took up yoga classes. Yoga mats were first noticed by name in 1962, a momentous year that also gave us The Yogi Bear Show.

Does the celebrated bear derive his name, for an obvious reason, from yogi, an adept in yoga? The Oxford English Dictionary is cautious. ‘It is often said that the character was so named with allusion to the name of Lawrence Peter ‘Yogi’ Berra (1925-2015), a US baseball player known for his witticisms, but this is difficult to substantiate and has been denied by the creators.’

Berra got his nickname from a friend who thought his stance waiting cross-legged resembled a yogi in a film. It is hard to think that the bear of Jellystone Park did not share in Berra’s yogic sobriquet.