Inky Fool

Cundum

2012-01-27T14:14:00.001Z

Oh, the things you find in old dictionaries! This from Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811):

Cundum. The dried gut of a sheep, worn by men in the act of coition to prevent venereal infection; said to have been invented by one colonel Cundum. These machines were long prepared and sold by a matron of the name of Philips, at the Green Canister, in Half-moon Street, in the Strand. That good lady having acquired a fortune, retired from business; but learning that the town was not well served by her successors, she, out of a patriotic zeal for the public welfare, returned to her occupation; of which she gave notice by divers hand-bills, in circulation in the year 1776. Also a false scabbard over a sword, and the oil-skin case for holding the colours of a regiment.

The OED doubts the good colonel's existence, but to make up for that it provides the following lovely couplet from a poem of 1744:

Let not the Joy she proffers be Essay'd,
Without the well-try'd Cundum's friendly Aid.

Either way, it has nothing to do with the town in France.

The Inky Fool completely misunderstood the idea.

The Cut

2012-01-26T13:29:00.000Z

Here is some Cambridge University slang from the eighteenth century:

TO CUT, (CAMBRIDGE). To renounce acquaintance with any one is to CUT him. There are several species of the CUT. Such as the cut direct, the cut indirect, the cut sublime, the cut infernal, etc. The cut direct, is to start across the street, at the approach of the obnoxious person in order to avoid him. The cut indirect, is to look another way, and pass without appearing to observe him. The cut sublime, is to admire the top of King's College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till he is out of sight. The cut infernal, is to analyse the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.

I have done all four of these, but never knew that there was a name for them.

Sorry, I didn't see you there.

Dust and Dustmen

2012-01-25T13:09:00.000Z

Dust used to be the subject of poetry. Hamlet, in his great prose speech, asks of mankind:

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me...

Because men are made of dust, and to dust we return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, fun to funky. So Auden also asked:

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

In which he merely adds sexual appetite to the vacuum-fodder. It was therefore rather pleasant to find this entry in an old slang dictionary of 1811:

DUSTMAN. A dead man: your father is a dustman.

Which lends a certain poignancy to this song:

Epitomy

2012-01-24T13:28:00.000Z

An epitomy was, originally, a brief summary of a book - a sort of Reader's Digest precis for people who couldn't be bothered to read the whole thing. Indeed, the Greek epitome means cut. It's from this original meaning that we get the modern sense of paragon or perfect type, for if somebody says that he's the epitomy of good manners what they mean is that you don't need to bother to read a whole book on etiquette: just look at him.

Equally, if you epitomise something, you edit it.

Cole Porter once did some research on epitomies. He was on a cruise and writing a song about the best things in the world. So he asked all his fellow passengers to name the thing that they considered the tops. The result was this song.

Grum

2012-01-23T12:00:00.001Z

Dr Johnson's dictionary contains the splendid word grum which means... well I hardly need to tell you what it means: a bit grim and bit glum. The word died out in the mid nineteenth century, but, if you felt like reviving it, everybody would understand exactly what you meant.

(And, for vital information on the practice of glumming, see this old post).

English to English Translation

2012-01-20T12:45:00.001Z

From late 1989 to early 1990 the Prime Minister of Greece was a fellow called Xenophon Zolotas. However, the apogee and apex of his career from the Inky Fool's point of view, was a speech he made to the International Monetary Fund in 1957. It was not a speech that did much in the way of changing the world or any of that rot that politicians waste so much time on. It was, though, a speech composed only of words that derive from Greek. I reproduce it here and follow it with a translation of my own.

I always wished to address this Assembly in Greek, but realised that it would have been indeed "Greek" to all present in this room. I found out, however, that I could make my address in Greek which would still be English to everybody. With your permission, Mr. Chairman, I shall do it now, using with the exception of articles and prepositions, only Greek words.

Kyrie, I eulogise the archons of the Panethnic Numismatic Thesaurus and the Ecumenical Trapeza for the orthodoxy of their axioms, methods and policies, although there is an episode of cacophony of the Trapeza with Hellas. With enthusiasm we dialogue and synagonize at the synods of our didymous organisations in which polymorphous economic ideas and dogmas are analysed and synthesised. Our critical problems such as the numismatic plethora generate some agony and melancholy. This phenomenon is characteristic of our epoch. But, to my thesis, we have the dynamism to program therapeutic practices as a prophylaxis from chaos and catastrophe. In parallel, a Panethnic unhypocritical economic synergy and harmonisation in a democratic climate is basic. I apologise for my eccentric monologue. I emphasise my euharistia to you, Kyrie to the eugenic and generous American Ethnos and to the organisers and protagonists of his Amphictyony and the gastronomic symposia.

Which means, approximately:

Gentlemen, I compliment the heads of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for the uprightness of their axioms, methods and policies, although there is a brief disagreement between the Bank and Greece. With enthusiasm we talk and consider together at the meetings of our twin organisations in which various economic ideas and dogmas are analysed and synthesised. Our critical problems such as inflation cause some agony and melancholy. This phenomenon is characteristic of our epoch. But to get to the point, we have methods that can prevent catastrophe. Also, sincere international economic cooperation is necessary. I apologise for my eccentric monologue. I emphasise my gratitude to you gentlemen, thanks to the well-born and generous American people and to the organisers and key players of this international meeting and dinner.

So Greek government finances are fine by me.

Your Ass

2012-01-19T14:00:00.000Z

Merely a link today, to this linguistics essay on the use of the phrase your ass, as in get your ass in here. After all, any essay that contains the line

In 3 we argue that your ass’s unusual behavior is due to its semantic and social functions and that it can be accommodated once these are taken into account.

has to be worth reading.

The Fifty Most Quoted Lines of Poetry

2012-01-18T12:11:00.000Z

This post has already gone up twice; but, as it's the one on which I worked hardest, and as this blog is always gaining and losing adherents, I see no reason not to wheel it out for a third time. As the Bellman remarked, "What I tell you three times is true".

The idea of the post is simple. When you type a phrase into Google, Google tells you how many hits that phrase gets on the Internet, or how many pages contained that exact line.

It should be stated before we begin that Google is, for a computer program, often strangely illogical and inconsistent, but it's the best we've got. The number of hits is listed after the line. Click on the author's name for the full poem.

Counting down from number fifty...

50. The mind is its own place, and in itself/[Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n] 403,000 Milton
49. Full fathom five thy father lies 438,000 Shakespeare
48. If you can keep your head when all about you 447,000Kipling
47. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways 467,000Elizabeth Barrett Browning
46. If music be the food of love, play on 507,000 Shakespeare
45. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers 521,000Shakespeare
44. What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare 528,000 W.H. Davies
43. The moving finger writes; and, having writ,/Moves on571,000 Edward Fitzgerald
42. They also serve who only stand and wait 584,000 Milton
41. The quality of mercy is not strained 589,000 Shakespeare
40. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 594,000 Coleridge
39. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears 615,000Shakespeare
38. Shall I compare thee to a summers day 638,000 Shakespeare
37. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness 641,000 Keats
36. A thing of beauty is a joy forever 649,000 Keats
35. Do not go gentle into that good night 665,000 Dylan Thomas
34. Busy old fool, unruly sun 675,000 John Donne
33. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone 741,000 Auden
32. Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality 891,000 T.S. Eliot
31. O Romeo, Romeo; wherefore art thou Romeo 912,000Shakespeare
30. The lady doth protest too much, methinks 929,000Shakespeare
29. The old lie: Dulce et Decorum Est 990,000 Wilfred Owen
28. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose 1,050,000 Gertrude Stein
27. When I am an old woman I shall wear purple 1,060,000Jenny Joseph
26. I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree. 1,080,000 Joyce Kilmer
25. Hope springs eternal in the human breast 1,080,000 Alexander Pope
24. When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes 1,100,000Shakespeare
23. I grow old... I grow old.../I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled 1,140,000 T.S. Eliot
22. 'The time has come', the Walrus said,/'To talk of many things'1,300,000 Lewis Carroll
21. A narrow fellow in the grass 1,310,000 Emily Dickinson
20. Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all 1,470,000 Keats
19. To be or not to be: that is the question 1,640,000 Shakespeare
18. In Flanders fields the poppies blow 1,640,000 John McCrae
17. The proper study of mankind is man 1,770,000 Alexander Pope
16. A little learning is a dangerous thing 1,860,000 Alexander Pope
15. But at my back I always hear 2,010,000 Marvell
14. Candy/Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker 2,150,000 Ogden Nash
13. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun 2,230,000Shakespeare
12. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold 2,330,000W.B.Yeats
11. Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me 2,360,000 Emily Dickinson
10. Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all 2,400,000 Tennyson
9. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair 3,080,000 Shelley
8. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield 3,140,000 Tennyson
7. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams 4,860,000 W.B. Yeats
6. Not with a bang but a whimper 5,280,000 T.S. Eliot
5. And miles to go before I sleep 5,350,000 Robert Frost
4. I wandered lonely as a cloud 8,000,000 Wordsworth
3. The child is father of the man 9,420,000 Wordsworth
2. I am the master of my fate 14,700,000 William Ernest Henley
1. To err is human; to forgive, divine 14,800,000 Alexander Pope

Shakespeare doesn't make the top ten and Gertrude Stein is more quoted than Byron. Bet you didn't see that coming.

And many, many thanks to the Antipodean for these (click to enlarge):

Our rules were that:
1) it had to be a whole line of poetry (minimum 8 syllables) that
2) hadn't become famous as a title (e.g. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind)
3) or as a song (e.g. And did those feet in ancient time)
4) or is pretty exclusively for children (e.g. I do not like green eggs and ham).
5) The phrases were googled in "inverted commas", which gives you only pages with the precise phrase.
6) No more than one line per medium sized poem.
Originally I didn't allow tetrameters, or at least required a couplet, however "The child is father of the man" changed our minds as it's the second place on its own and nowhere when linked with the adjacent lines. These rules have been broken a few times at our discretion.
P.S. Google is sometimes eccentric on the number of hits, which can vary by clicking refresh. This is because it keeps adjusting to deal with spam and people trying to fool Google in to high rankings for their page. So sometimes it does odd things with line-breaks or even gives more results when there are more words in the search, which is utterly illogical. They also seem to vary slightly by country. Robert Frost's lines dipped slightly (or I noted them down incorrectly). The final arbiter has to be what pops up on my screen when I try the line in inverted commas.
P.P.S. Because of the demands of work, I shall not be able to leap upon corrections, suggestions and amendments with my usual predatory alacrity. These were measured back in February 2010 and may have changed. My attitude to such ructions and revolutions will be, I am afraid, utterly idle. I refer complainers to the Bellman.

The winner.

Bellibone

2012-01-17T12:04:00.001Z

Doctor Johnson's dictionary often says a little more than it seems to. Consider the second sentence of this definition.

Bellibone n. A woman excelling in both beauty and goodness. A word now out of use.

Which is a terrible lexicographical statement about the modern woman. According to the OED the word was still going in 1586, which means that if we could get a firm date for this Donne poem of about the 1590s we would be able to pinpoint precisely when it all went wrong for the fairer sex.

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

From which it will be easy to see why Johnson also described chivalrous as A word now out of use.

Guinea

2012-01-16T11:35:00.001Z

From the Dear Dogberry page comes the question of Guinea: Guinea the African country, New Guinea the Asian country, and guinea the unit of currency. They are all connected. Let us start, as the word did, with West Africa.

There is in the Tuareg languages of north western Africa a word aginaw, which means black people; and it's just possible that this is why the Portuguese decided to call a stretch of the north west African coast Guiné. Just possible, but not certain.

What is utterly certain is that Ynigo Ortez de Retez had a great surprise when he got to the Far East. He was a Portuguese explorer who knew the Guiné coast and its black, frizzy-haired inhabitants. But he went further, all the way round Africa to Asia, where people had straight hair and lighter skins until... he got to an island east even of the Malays that was populated by black fellows with frizzy hair, just like the chaps back in Guinea (see picture). He therefore decided to call it New Guinea, and the name stuck. Papua is probably derived from the Malay word for frizzy hair.

Back in Africa the British regarded the Guinea coast with envious eyes, partially because it had some lovely gold mines. In 1663 we started to use this gold to make coins with little pictures of elephants on them and one eighty-ninth of a pound of 22-carat Guinea gold in each. One of these coins was therefore worth twenty silver shillings.

But the prices of gold and silver fluctuate, and they fluctuate in relation to each other. So when gold was expensive and silver was cheap, you could find that a golden guinea was worth thirty silver shillings and so on and so forth. Eventually, in 1717, the value was fixed at twenty one shillings to one guinea. In modern parlance this means that a guinea is worth £1.05. The last guinea was minted in 1813, however, for reasons best known to nobody, it is still the currency in which racehorses are traded.

Notice the little pachyderm at the bottom

Blarney

2012-01-13T13:12:00.000Z

In 1602 a chap called George Carew was negotiating on behalf of Queen Elizabeth with various lords of Ireland, and trying to get them to come over to the English side. One of the lords with whom he was negotiating was Cormac MacDermot MacCarthy, the Lord of Blarney.

Blarney kept sort of saying that he possibly might help without actually giving any firm promises to Carew. This went on for so long that one day, when Carew was reporting to the Queen, she (according to legend) lost her temper and shouted "Blarney! Blarney! What he says he never means! It's the usual Blarney!"

Well, that might be the true story. But the legend then gets more complicated with the introduction of the Blarney Stone. This is a stone in Blarney Castle that (apparently) if kissed will give you forever the gift of the gab. However, this appears to be a tradition that only sprang up in the 18th century.

Double-however, the whole story about Queen Elizabeth (which is retailed in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) is a trifle strange as the OED doesn't record the word before 1766.

Which makes me think that the whole thing is a bunch of blarney.

The Inky Fool's lapiphilia was getting out of hand.

Puny

2012-01-12T13:32:00.001Z

Puny comes from the French puis né, meaning born afterwards. It was originally therefore meant to mean junior. That's why, in a British court, all but the most senior judge are called puisne judges; and, yes, puisne is pronounced in exactly the same way as puny.

So all younger children are punies. As a middle child I'm not quite sure how to take this.

A puny can also mean an absolute beginner, hence the line in Middleton*'s Revenger's Tragedy:

I see thou art but a puny in the subtle mystery of a woman.

I wish girls would stop saying that to me.

The Inky Fool hires himself out to commuters

*Or Tourneur

Doggess

2012-01-11T13:20:00.000Z

This is from Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811):

BITCH. A she dog, or doggess; the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of whore, as may be gathered from the regular Billingsgate or St Giles' answer, 'I may be a whore, but can't be a bitch.'

And what I love most about all that is the word doggess.

Phrontistery

2012-01-10T12:03:00.000Z

How vainly men themselves amaze adding bits on to their houses - a games room, a gym, a private cinema. If I ever have the money, I shall build myself a phrontistery, or possibly a phrontisterion, they mean the same thing: a place for thinking.

In such a room the eager phrontist could meditate, cogitate and ponder. This would continue until I got into a bad mood, at which point I would go to the boudoir and sulk.

As Andrew Marvell said of his garden:

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men :
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow ;
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.

The Phrontisterion of Trapezous

Licking Lechers

2012-01-09T12:38:00.000Z

It is, perhaps, appropriate that the English word lecher comes from the French for licker, although it may rather cramp the thoroughgoing lecher's style.

The French for lick is still lecher, which is why the French for window shopping is faire du lèche-vitrine, which literally means to go window licking. Meanwhile over in English slang a window-licker is a rude way to refer to somebody who isn't right in the head.

It's also always amused me when talking to academics that, unless you have Olivier-like diction, lecher and lecture sound identical.

Crorections

2012-01-06T13:00:00.002Z

As Auden said, It is time for the destruction of error.

Since the dear old Etymologicon came out, I have been fielding occasional e-mails from those who have noticed five mistkaes. It’s the first one that shames me as it is of proper lexicographic significance.

1) In my list of the words and phrases invented by Winston Churchill I for some reason included the term iron curtain. I’ve no idea why I did this as, though Churchill did make the phrase famous, it had been around since the eighteenth century as a safety device in theatres, and had been used to describe the Soviet border from at least 1920. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

None of the rest (to my lackadaisical mind) seem to be too serious, but in the interests of full disclosure:

2) I said that beechwood is good for carving because it is soft. However, a correspondent writes:

Beech wood is not soft. Speaking as a former professional cabinet-maker, I can attest with blisters to how soft beech wood is not. Botanically, it's a hardwood as it comes from a deciduous tree, and in practice it is good for the sort of carving you describe as it is reasonably tough, not brittle or splitty (splitty is a perfectly good word in common use amongst woodworkers), but most of all it is a) abundant and therefore cheap; b) of no use in ship-building and therefore available; c) fine-grained, diffuse-porous, not ring porous, and pretty consistently straight grained and therefore takes detail well. Compared to oak, it is not very hard, but compared to other commonly available woods in germany in the middle ages (such as pine and spruce) it is indeed pretty rock-like. My guess would be it was chosen for its consistency, detail-holding, and price characteristics.

3) I said that Thomas Derrick used his invention to execute the Earl of Essex. Derrick did kill Essex, but as the latter was an aristocrat it was done with an axe. A commenter points out:

Essex had the right to have his head chopped off, and Derrick made a complete hash of the job. It took him three strikes before he was able to wave the head about to a great cry of 'God Save the Queen'.

4) I said that the Ancient Greeks used poison arrows. However, I'm told that:

The ancient Greeks did not as a general rule poison their arrows in war. Some of their opponents did, such as the Scythians, so they certainly knew of the practice.

5) I said that outsiders never win horse races, and that favourites always do. A racehorse owner wrote to tell me that this isn’t really the case. The favourite wins about one third of the time. Hundred-to-one shots win slightly less than every hundred races. The remainder is made up by well backed horses who aren’t quite the favourite.

I also made an utterly idiotic passing reference to the Maginot Line, implying that it was a WWI thing, when of course it's WWII. This has already been removed from reprints.

Anyway, all of the above will be tweaked in reprints so that it will look as though I never made the mistakes at all. If anyone else has noteiced an error, do say.

Blockbuster

2012-01-05T13:31:00.000Z

Somebody has enquired as to what block it is precisely that a blockbuster film busts.

Well, I assume that she meant film. But a blockbuster was originally a kind of bomb. The phrase dates from 1942 when the large bombs of more than eight thousand pounds began to be referred to as blockbusters. But of course, that's explosives and not films.

The second well-attested meaning of blockbuster is rather stranger. It's a kind of estate agent. Specifically, it was a kind of American real estate agent who would irritate the hell out of white people by selling one house on the block to a black person, which apparently in 1950s and 60s America was somewhat controversial.

But the films? Nobody is quite sure. There are two theories. The first is that it's a simple transfer of the explosive power of the blockbusting bomb. There's a line in a detective novel from 1957 that goes:

One day I had what seemed to me like a block~buster of an idea for a musical play.

However, the term didn't really catch on until the 1970s when spectacular and super-grosser were pushed out of the lexicon and blockbuster took their place.

The other theory is just that: a theory. It may well not be true but showbiz folklore says that a blockbuster is a show that is so popular that all the other theatres on the block are bankrupted, and end up bust. This doesn't really work as, presumably, they would profit from the ticketless turnaways who couldn't get into the main show.

This amuses me.

Rasher

2012-01-04T13:14:00.000Z

This morning, as I incinerated my breakfast, I was reminded of the etymology of the word rasher, as in a rasher of bacon. There are two theories on the subject. The first rather tedious one is that it's cognate with razor and therefore means a thin strip that has been cut off.

However, the first etymologist to tackle the rasher was John Minsheu (1560-1627). He, in his Ductor in Linguas, gives an explanation that is much more fun, though not necessarily much more true.

A Rasher on the coales, q. rashly or hastily roasted.

This does, at least, tally with my experience.

Every damn morning.

Ultracrepidarian

2012-01-03T13:01:00.000Z

Ultracrepidarianism is giving opinions on subjects that you know nothing about, and is thus a terribly useful word. Ultracrepidarian was introduced into English by the essayist William Hazlitt, but it goes back to an ancient story about the great Greek painter Apelles.

The story goes that Apelles used to leave his new paintings out on public display and then hide behind a pillar to hear people's reactions. One day he overheard a cobbler pointing out that Apelles had painted a shoe all wrong. So he took the painting away, corrected the shoe and put it out on display again.

The cobbler came back, saw that Apelles had taken his advice and was so proud and puffed up with conceit that he had made the great painter change a detail that he started talking loudly about what was wrong with the leg; at which point Apelles jumped out from his hiding place and shouted: ne sutor ultra crepidam, which approximately translates as the cobbler should go no further than the shoe. Thus ultracrepidiarian is beyond-the-shoe.

Anybody wishing to know my opinions on baseball, carpentry or Pop Idol should send a stamped self-addressed envelope somewhere else.

Leave it out, son.

A Year and a Day

2012-01-02T14:08:00.002Z

All right. I didn't get round to posting anything yesterday for various intensely technical reasons involving gin and smiles. So today's post will have to be on the old rule of a year and a day.

A year and a day used to be terribly important in murder cases. If you stab me and I die five minutes later that's definitely murder. However, what if you stab me and I die a month later? Or six months? Or fifty years? At what point does it merely become a long term injury that may aggravate, but cannot be said to have caused, my final coil-shuffling?

Until 1996, there was a nice simple rule: a year and a day. If your victim dies before then, it's murder: after that it's just bad manners.

Anyway, this takes me back to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the opening scene of which occurs:

While New Year was so yep [young] that it was new comen,
That day double on the dais was the douth [food] served...

When in walks a huge green knight who challenges the assembled knights to a game. Any one who is brave enough can come and strike him once with a sword on condition that, in a year and a day (presumably January 2nd), the green knight can do the same to his assailant. Here's the relevant stanza (spelling slightly modernised):

"Nay, frayst I no fight, in faith I thee tell;
It are about on this bench but beardless childer;
If I were hasped in arms on a high steed,
Here no man me to match, for mights so weak.
Forthy I crave in this court a Chistmas gomen [game],
For it is Yule and New Year, and here are yep [youngsters] many.
If any so hardy in this house holds himselven,
Be so bold in his blood, brayn [mad] in his head,
That dare stiffly strike a stroke for an other,
I shall give him of my gift this giserne [battle-axe] rich,
This axe, that is heavy enough, to handle as him likes,
And I shall bide the first bur [blow], as bare as I sit.
If any freke be so fell to fond [test] that I tell,
Leap lightly me to, and lach [grab] this weapon;
I quit-claim it for ever, keep it as his own.
And I shall stand him a stroke, stiff on this flet [floor],
Else thou will dight me the doom to deal him another, barlay.
And yet give him respite
A twelvemonth and a day;
Now hie, and let see tite [quickly]
Dare any herein ought say."

Gawain takes up the challenge, and, without wishing to give too much away, has a bad January 2nd. An oddity of all this is that the father of a friend of mine still used to say "barlay" in the playground in Cheshire in the 1950s.

Bloody January again

Glamorous Grammar

2011-12-30T15:42:00.001Z

I've been pootling through William Goldman's The Princess Bride and came across this line:

glamour is an ancient concept. See "glamer" in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Well... depends what you mean by ancient as glamer is merely eighteenth century. But the fun thing about glamour is that it's grammar.

The glamour of grammar is a bit easier to understand if you consider the French grimoire, meaning book of incantations and spells. Once upon a time, grammar meant any sort of writing or learning. Writing, to those who don't do it, is a mysterious business and so a book of spells and magical incantations became known as a grammar or, by slight French alteration, a grimoire (which has nothing to do with grim).

In Scotland such magical grammars started to be pronounced with a L instead of an R, and thus a Scottish word for a spell was a glamer, usually in the phrase to cast a glamer over. Glamer became glamour and was imported back into English English by Sir Walter Scott, usually in the phrase to throw a glamour on somebody.

And so by the late nineteenth century, our modern glamour had emerged.

So it's just the old L-R confusion. And, if you want to know how that works, watch the video below:

Requiescat In Pace

Mungy

2011-12-29T12:27:00.000Z

Sometimes, a word simply sounds right. Such a word is mungy, with a soft, j-like G. Say it. Mungy. I barely feel it needs explanation, but in case you can't guess it means overcast and damp. You might find mungy stuff under a woodpile, although the word usually applies to the weather; and always applies to the weather in the Lake District.

Hob and Nob and Hobnobbing

2011-12-28T13:06:00.001Z

I have been asked by Twitter whether there is any connection, however tentative and tangential, between hobnobbing and hobbledehoy. The short answer is No, because nobody has any idea where hobbledehoy comes from. However, I did discover the true meaning of hobnobbing, which is much more fun than I expected.

The first record of hob nob is found in Twelfth Night where an angry duellist is described thuslyly:

He is knight, dubbed with unhatched rapier and on carpet consideration; but he is a devil in private brawl: souls and bodies hath he divorced three; and his incensement at this moment is so implacable, that satisfaction can be none but by pangs of death and sepulchre. Hob, nob, is his word; give't or take't.

Hob appears to come from the Old English for have, and nob from have not. However, the meaning of hob nob seems to have shifted slightly to give or take - in this case the knight will either give death or take it, but it is a mortal duel.

However, hob or nob quickly became a much more friendly term when combined with a few drinks. If I fill a festive flask and say, 'Here's to you, dear reader of this ridiculous blog,' and you say 'No, here's to you, dear writer of this ridiculous blog,' then we can be said to have toasted each other hob a nob.

Hob nob became a shortening of such mutually amicable bibosity, so that in 1762 Oliver Goldsmith could have the line:

Hob nob, Doctor, which do you chuse, white or red?

And soon such friendly exchanges became known as hobnobbing.

Anyway, after nearly a week at number one on the Amazon bestsellers list, I can gaze with monumental patience on The Etymologicon's comfortable lapse to second place. I shall go and unearth for myself a beaker of the warm South, pop the cork and drink a toast to all of you, dear readers. I shall hob, whether you nob is up to you.

Lurgy, Lurgi or Lurden

2011-12-27T12:33:00.001Z

Apologies for lack of posts. I have been struck down with a loathsome and lingering lurgy. Lurgy is a purely British term for an unspecified but horrid disease that is doing the rounds, and it was invented by comedians. The first recorded case of lurgy appeared in a 1959 episode of The Goon Show Lurgi Strikes Britain*. That episode was written by Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, so I blame them for my current condition.

However, the OED, in an uncharacteristic fit of theorising, suggests that those writers may just possibly have got it from fever-lurdan, or the disease of laziness. Fever-lurdan was a facetious term not recorded after 1806, but its last recorded spelling was fever-largie, so maybe there's something in the connection. I'm either too lazy or too ill to research further.

By the way, as a fun bit of trivia, Jimi Hendrix first started taking acid because it made listening to the Goons much funnier.

Merry Christmas one and all.

*The Goons spelled it Lurgi, the OED has it as Lurgy, presumably to differentiate it from lurgi the chemical process of gasification (which is horribly relevant to me).

Trivial Musings

2011-12-24T12:00:00.002Z

I am not here. This post is programmed and, all being well, I am probably somewhere on the M6 Toll in the back of a car, sleeping the sleep of the unjust. That means that all you get today is this lovely little piece of prose from a book called Trivia from 1917. I have spent much too much time on Oxford Street in the last week, and this description of that occidental bazaar therefore bores into my very soul:

One late winter afternoon in Oxford street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad - into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. Om Mani padme hum - I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.

Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and anger.

Merry crimble.

Christmas in Bedlam

2011-12-23T11:51:00.002Z

My life, my flat and my diary are all utter bedlam, which is rather appropriate for Christmas. You see, bedlam is simply a variant form of Bethlehem.

The Wycliffite Bible of the fourteenth century says that Jesus was born in Bedleem, but the King James Version took us back to Bethlehem because it's closer to the Hebrew. However, the two pronunciations were pretty much interchangeable until the end of the sixteenth century.

So the chaos and pandemonium of Christmas? That is down to the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem for the poor distracted people of London. Distracted in this context means mad, for St Mary of Bedlam was the original English madhouse. As the C17th playwright and inmate Nathaniel Lee put it

They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.

As the Bethlehem/Bedlam hospital was the most famous madhouse in Britain it easily became a byword for any disordered place filled with poor distracted people like me.

The reasons for my distraction are legion. The Etymologicon is still number one in the Amazon charts, which is playing havoc with my liver. This success is despite my writing, and purely because it has been read so well by Hugh Dennis, whose last instalment can be listened to here. And as a result of all this curiousness I've just been interviewed for this evening's Channel 4 news. Link will follow.

The Bethlem Royal Hospital still exists, is still a psychiatric hospital, and is now based in Bromley in South London.

And here is Hogarth's great painting of Bedlam Hospital:

The Inky Fool checks into his hotel

A Pair of Links

2011-12-22T11:57:00.000Z

There's a little piece by me in today's Scotsman, which you can read upon line by clicking on this link. It's all about the origins of Christmassy words like satsuma and advent, and explains why Xmas is the original spelling.

The reading of The Etymologicon continues on Radio 4, and today's episode can be heard by following this link. It's being read so well that my litel bok has found itself, like a stage-frightened actor shoved from wings to spotlight, number one on the Amazon bestseller lists. This has, I'm afraid, resulted in pot-fury followed by ale-passion.

Misopogonistic

2011-12-21T11:55:00.002Z

Christmas is the season when strange men in red hats and white beards lurk and loiter in every shopping arcade. It's therefore the time when the word misopogonistically really comes into its own.

Misopogonistically is an adverb that means with a hatred of beards. Sample sentence:

"No I don't want to see what's in your grotto," she said and scowled misopogonistically.

It is, I confess, a rare word and nobody will know what you mean, but with some words incomprehensibility is half the fun. Even more obscurely, the original Byzantine Greek word from which English things misopogonistical derive, had the more specialised meaning of disliking bearded philosophers. It pleases me immensely that the search for truth might be based on facial hair.

I came across this misopogonistically whilst trying to do some further research on yesterday's rather hurried post on possible antonyms for bibliophile; you see it's just a couple down from misogrammatist, which means a hater of learning.

However, I think the readers' suggestions were much better than anything that the whole history of the English language has produced - a regular gallimaufry of linguistic pearls. I particularly liked the various misobiblical coinings, and the Latin odilibri, which, if stressed on the second syllable*, is quite beautiful to say.

Incidentally, The Etymologicon continues to be read very well by Hugh Dennis on Radio 4. Here's a link to today's episode. In fact, it's almost certainly Mr Dennis' splendid voice (or maybe Dan Mogford's lovely cover) that's sent the book stumbling so far up the bestseller lists that it's currently number 3 on Amazon's charts, a vertiginous height from which it will almost certainly toboggan gaily into remaindered lowlands. Still, fun while it lasts.

This is James Murray, the original(ish) editor of the OED, whom I wrote about here.

*I know it shouldn't be, but do try it.

Not a Bibliophile

2011-12-20T13:00:00.003Z

In Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies the hero, Adam, is stopped at customs and books are discovered in his luggage. An official tells him:

'Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside. That's what he said the other day in Parliament, and I says "Hear, hear...."'

I thought of this because I awoke this morning to an anxious e-mail from a friend of mine asking what the opposite of a bibliophile is. Is there any succinct and recondite term for a book-hater? (It turns out that the poor fellow is related to one, and would feel better if he could put a posh name to this oddity).

There is bibliophobia, a dread of books, but that's not quite right as dread differs from dislike. A close dictionary neighbour of bibliophobe is biblioclast, which is somebody who destroys books (particularly the Bible). And then there's the even odder Skoob. This was a tower of books that was burnt in the sixties by a fellow called John Latham. In the sixties this constituted art. Skoob is, of course, just books backwards (and is therefore related to yob and wonk). It's also, oddly, the name of a very good second hand bookshop that lurks under the Waitrose in the Brunswick Centre.

But a book-disliker? Perhaps I could name it after somebody. A great literary character who dislikes books. It may be merely lack of coffee, but I can't think of one off hand.

I might be inclined to coin the term a Callimachus. Callimachus was an Alexandrian poet whose most famous line was 'a great book is a great evil'. However, that's probably just that he liked short books, as do I, so it doesn't really work.

Or maybe a Larkin who once wrote that "Books are a load of crap." Or Bulwer Lytton "We may live without friends, we may live without books;/But civilised man cannot live without cooks."

Or... The problem is that those who don't like books, rarely write down their opinions.

So I'm stuck with Callimachus as my best offer. If anyone can better that (and I'm sure somebody can) put it in the comments, please.

A Skoob tower in Bloomsbury in 1966, photo nabbed from this article.

An Egg Dance

2011-12-19T12:28:00.002Z

Over on the Dear Dogberry page, a reader has asked why we have the phrase walking on eggshells when walking on eggs would make much more sense. For myself, I can't understand why you would do either. However, upon investigation I've discovered that walking on eggs was the original version of the phrase. The OED records it from 1734, where as the walking on eggshell doesn't pop up until 1860.

A much more amusing variant is a thing called an egg dance, which can be performed at home, but probably not on your best carpet. All you'll need is a bunch of eggs, which you arrange on the floor, and a blindfold, which you put over your eyes. You now dance around trying not to tread upon any eggs however lightly.

Egg dancing gets a mention in a sixteenth century play called The Longer Thou Livest, The More Fool Thou Art.

Upon my one foot prettily can I hop
And dance it trimly about an egg.

And there's a good description of it from 1801:

This performance was common enough about thirty years back, and was well received at Sadler's Wells; where I saw it exhibited, not by simply hopping round a single egg, but in a manner that much increased the difficulty. A number of eggs, I do not precisely recollect how many, but I believe about twelve or fourteen, were placed at certain distances marked upon the stage; the dancer taking his stand, was blind-folded, and a hornpipe being played in the orchestra, he went through all the paces and figures of the dance, passing backwards and forwards between the eggs without touching one of them.

As you can imagine, an egg-dance became a byword for any intricate and difficult task, and makes a lot more sense than walking on either eggs or eggshells.

Scrambled eggs at the Inky Fool offices

P.S. The first part of the Etymologicon was read out by Hugh Dennis on Radio 4 this morning. You can listen to it by following this link.

The Big Chiz

2011-12-16T12:22:00.002Z

It's a delightful little oddity of the English language that the phrase the big cheese has nothing whatsoever to do with milk products.

The Urdu word for thing is chīz. This meant that back in the days of the British Empire Anglo Indians wouldn't talk about something being the real thing, but the real chīz. Chīz became a term of approbation used for anything that was the pinnacle of its kind, but it wasn't spelled chīz, it was spelled cheese. From there it was a trifling step to making a man a cheese, and then the big man became the big cheese.

That is all for this week (unless the importunate muse comes upon me on Sunday), so do remember that the serialisation of The Etymologicon will begin on Radio 4 at a quarter to ten on Monday.

The opposite of a big cheese

P.S. What's the only cheese that's made backwards?

Edam.

Sorry.

Oorie

2011-12-15T12:08:00.001Z

Just in case you were looking for a word to describe today's weather oorie is defined in the OED as:

Dismal, gloomy; cheerless; miserable as a result of cold, illness, etc.

Which just about sums it up.

P.S. I'm going to be lingering at the Waterstones Covent Garden author's evening tonight from five till eight-thirty. If you're in the area, do come along and say hello.

Vainglory, Hubris &c

2011-12-14T12:39:00.000Z

Yes, I know you're bored with my wittering on about The Etymologicon. You've been reading this web-log for eons and you wish I'd just get back to a post a day. But you must remember that this is my baby, my masterpiece, my pride, my hope and my joy. And I want you to buy at least fifty copies each. So, as my ego is as frangible as it is vast, here's a little round-up of what the press have been saying about my baby.

First off, The Etymologicon is going to be Radio 4's Book of the Week next week. Every weekday morning at a quarter to ten Hugh Dennis will be reading extracts to an expectant nation, and the whole thing will be repeated at half midnight and be available on the Listen Again thingummyjig. This is also the Radio Times' number one radio choice for Christmas.

Anyway, to the papers:

"But this year's must-have stocking filler – the angel on the top of the tree, the satsuma in the sock, the threepenny bit in the plum pudding, the essential addition to the library in the smallest room – is Mark Forsyth's The Etymologicon" - Ian Sansom in The Guardian

"I'm hooked on Forsyth's book ... Crikey, but this is addictive" - Mathew Parris in The Times (who also made it one of his books of the year).

"The stocking filler of the season... How else to describe a book that explains the connection between Dom Pérignon and Mein Kampf?" - Robert McCrum in The Observer

"The snappy section lengths and the perky writing style, plus the comely jacket-less cover, makes this prime fare for the Christmas market. You can read it through at a sitting or two, or dip in as fancy takes. A perfect bit of stocking-filler for the bookish member of the family, or just a cracking all-year-round read. Highly recommended." - Matthew Richardson in The Spectator

"Kudos should go to Mark Forsyth, then, author of The Etymologicon, who has tried to sort out this linguistic mare’s nest and help us see the wood for the trees. Clearly a man who knows his onions, Mr Forsyth must have worked 19 to the dozen, spotting red herrings and unravelling inkhorn terms, to bestow this boon – a work of the first water, to coin a phrase." - The Sunday Telegraph

And then there's all the lovely ones from around the web that I shall bore you with some other time. For the moment, I shall be available for signing and the like at Waterstones Covent Garden tomorrow (Thursday) night.

And if you want a useful word to describe this post you can choose between omphaloskepsis and quomodocunquizing.

He shall be me, or vice versa

Homicidal Orthography

2011-12-13T13:39:00.003Z

I've spent a jolly morning looking at the Murder Map, which is a map of London marking the spot of every homicide, fratricide, patricide, uxoricide &c in London. You can even filter the results by murder weapon. The reason it was such a jolly sight to me was that I appear to live in a small, murderless island. In fact, the only murder round my way was committed with a ligature.

Now that surprised me because, as a linguistic sort of chap, a ligature is just something that connects two letters, and I am afraid of no man who tries to kill me with joined up writing.

A ligature is... well, it's hard to explain, given that blogspot doesn't allow me medieval script but take, for example, double U. You don't see that written down much do you? Looks a bit odd. Double U is the full spelling of the letter W, because the letter double U is made of two ligatured ues (that's something else you don't see much).

Anyway, the reason for my murderous confusion is that ligature comes from the Latin ligare meaning bind. That's why you have ligaments, and medical ligatures which are pieces of thread used roughly like a tourniquet. And if you take some binding string, wrap it round somebody's neck and pull then you have murder by ligature. And if you do that ten minutes walk from me, then I think you're beastly.

It's terrifying to think that this is going on only ten minutes walk from my flat.

Oops-a-Daisy

2011-12-12T12:07:00.000Z

The other day somebody asked me where the phrase oops-a-daisy comes from. Of course, I didn't know, but I never feel that Ignorance should stand in the way of Opinion, so I muttered something about lackadaisical and tried to look wise. By extraordinary coincidence, it turns out that I might have been right. Oops-a-daisy has a strange and meandering history that goes like this.

First, oops-a-daisy predates oops and whoops. Oops only appeared in 1925 and whoops is even younger having stumbled into the language in the 1930s. They're both variants of the original upsidaisy which was something you said to a child as you lifted it up back in the nineteenth century.

Upsidaisy is a variant of up-a-daisy which dates back to 1711, also addressed to a child to make him rise. So where does the daisy come from? Well, the OED says compare lackadaisy. You see, words influence each other. When the word bunkum already exists, it encourages people to change hocus pocus to hokum. In the same way, lackadaisy (and lackadaisical) appear to have influenced the formation of up-a-daisy from up.

Lackadaisy is formed from lackaday, which is a shortening of alack the day! which means something along the line of curse the day on which something happened, which comes from lack meaning failure, fault, reproach or shame.

And thus did a tour through the dictionary pretty much confirm my nebulous and face-saving guesswork. Who needs scholarship when you have bluff?

P.S. For anybody who particular wants to hear my brief appearance on Friday morning's Today Programme, the relevant segment can be found here.

Streamline

2011-12-09T12:00:00.002Z

If you potter about the business world for even five minutes you're liable to come across the word streamline, often as a verb. This may seem curious, given that streams tend to meander in curvy and inefficient fashion, simply taking the route of least resistance, and heading permanently downhill - all things that businesses try to avoid.

Properly speaking, though, the streamline is a very precise scientific idea. It is a situation where the direction of any given particle moving past a surface is equal to the tangent of the curve of the surface at that point.

A tangent is, of course, a straight line that touches (tangibly) a curve (as in the picture at the top right). So if an object is of just the right shape and put in a stream in just the right place it will have a minimal deflection of the flow.

The word streamline was invented in 1868 and spent the next 65 years as a proper scientific term, appearing only in stern academic papers on inviscid fluid, until it was taken out one night by the poet Stephen Spender, who got the word drunk, took her honour from her, and included her in a bit of a poem about sunset. Now, shamed and denuded of her original sense, she is, I'm afraid, in business.

The Inky Fool has a new car

Fewtrils and Fattrels

2011-12-08T12:31:00.000Z

Fewtrils and fattrels are little things of no value, like this blog-post. They are toys and trifles, mere baubles. The words may therefore be useful for those of you sending Christmas presents, as in "These few festive fattrels I found for you."

That's all for today as I'm horribly busy, but for those of you of a North-West-Londoney disposition I'm doing a reading and book-signing of The Etymologicon at West End Lane Books in West Hampstead tonight at seven-thirty. And, for those of you who get up early, my career as a radio-strumpet* continues apace and I'll be on the Today Programme tomorrow sometime between seven and seven-thirty in the morning.
*I dislike the term media-whore.

Meting

2011-12-07T13:10:00.001Z

A fellow on twitter asked me whether justice was the only thing that can be meted out. The short answer is that other things can be meted [out], and the long answer is that justice is one of the very few things that cannot properly be meted.

Tennyson's gorgeous poem Ulysses begins thusly:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

Here, meting is pretty much a synonym for giving. And that could be that unless you remember the responses in the Order for Holy Communion as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.

Priest. Let us geve thanckes unto our Lorde God.
Aunswere. It is mete and right so to do.
Priest. It is very mete, right, and our bounden duety that we should at al times, and in all places, geve thanckes to the, O Lord holy father, almighty everlasting God.

And here, mete is pretty much a synonym for appropriate. So who's right? I always find it hard to choose between God and Tennyson, or even, occasionally, to distinguish the two. It is therefore a great theological relief to me to be able to tell you that they are both right, for they are each giving two extremes of one general meaning. Mete means measure.

Or it did once. But then its meaning drifted to something that had been measured, or meted, until something of the right dimensions was mete. And therefore something that was appropriate was mete. That's what's going on in the Communion service. But also if you measure out to a person the amount that is due to him, then you are meting something out.

That's why you can mete out punishment. It means that you are giving a sentence that is measured and appropriate to the crime. And here's the problem with justice: justice is that which is appropriate. So if you mete out justice, you are giving the appropriate amount of appropriateness, and then you drown in a vortex of tautology.

So the full answer is that you can mete out anything you like - fines, food, sharks or champagne - but you can't mete out justice.

At least medioxumate.

The French Have A Word For It

2011-12-06T13:11:00.001Z

Merely a link today to this article in The Guardian about French neologisms. It includes the word attachiante, which is a portmanteau of attachant (charming) and chiant (bloody annoying) and means a lady that you can't live with and can't live without: beautiful yet unbearable, intoxicating but intolerable.

Such words are terribly necessary if you're a Frenchman.

Jornada

2011-12-05T13:01:00.001Z

A jornada is a Mexican (originally) term for a day's journey without water. If there is no water there is no reason to stop your horses and so a jornada has neither pause nor relief. It's not a word we use much. It's hard to travel for a day in England without it bloody raining, let alone avoiding all rivers. Nonetheless, I think that jornada could usefully be revived to mean a day without an alcoholic drink, or indeed an occasion or ordeal where the wine flows like concrete. Thus "That team-building exercise was a complete jornada. Anyone want to go to the pub?"

Stationary Stationery

2011-12-04T12:29:00.001Z

Those who have never liked the fine distinctions of English spelling will rejoice to learn that the first recorded use of the word stationery, in Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1727, goes thus:

Stationary, Stationers Wares

The -ary -ery distinction was only introduced in the nineteenth century to annoy schoolchildren.

But what is it that makes stationery so stationary? Why so still?

Well, once upon a medieval time, most books were sold by itinerant tinkers and traders who would set up shop in a different place everyday, or often only on market day. An exception to this rule was the stationarius. This was an official position within a university. A stationarius was given a shop from which to sell books and parchment and the like. This meant that unlike most of his competitors he was a stationary booktrader and thus became known as a stationer. In return for the shop he was required to swear fealty and obedience to the institution.

The stationer only slowly became differentiated from the bookseller. It wasn't until 1656 that Blount wrote in his Glossographia

Stationer is often confounded with Book-seller, and sometimes with Book-binder; whereas they are three several Trades; the Stationer sells Paper and Paper-Books, Ink, Wax, etc. The Book-seller deals onely in printed Books, ready bound; and the Book-binder binds them, but sells not. Yet all three are of the Company of Stationers.

Which hardly clears things up. The distinction didn't really catch on until a hundred years later, and the -ery until a hundred years after that.

Hmm

Foolscap

2011-12-02T11:36:00.001Z

Foolscap paper is one of those things that I've never really been sure about and to which I have never devoted even the idlest of my idle thoughts. I had never, for example, noticed that it's a contraction of fool's cap. But it is.

That's odd because foolscap is an old paper size. Whenever it's used in the news (and it often is) it's put there to evoke what editors like to call a bygone era filled with dial telephones, morality and rationing. Foolscap was a little bit larger than A4, and once upon a time it bore a watermark depicting a jester's headdress.

When it did this is a matter of fevered debate amongst those who care about paper sizes. The earliest known example in England dates from 1659. Indeed, there's an obscure story that during the Commonwealth the republican Parliament replaced the royal watermark that had once appeared on all the laws of England with a fool's hat. But like all the best stories that's probably tosh.

There are much earlier fool's caps in German printing, indeed they go back to 1479. This lends some credence to the idea that the fool's cap was introduced by Sir John Spielman who built England's first paper-mill, as the poor fellow was German.

Despite his teutonicness he still managed to get a legal monopoly on all paper production in England in 1581 and thus he achieved immortality. Not with his paper, not with his watermarks, but because he managed to be obliquely satirised by Shakespeare.

In Henry the Sixth part II, the ridiculous rebels capture a lord and their peasant leader, Jack Cade accuses him thus:

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and, contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.

As Shakespeare would have had to obtain his paper from Spielman's foolishly behatted mill one way or another, we can make a shrewd guess at who he had in mind.

Incidentally, despite the fact that it's probably about his fourth play, Henry VI part II contains Shakespeare's first truly memorable* line, and it's said by another of the peasant rebels when they're planning what to do once they've seized power:

CADE I thank you, good people: there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their lord.

DICK The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

P.S. There's a lovely review of The Etymologicon over at Tom Cunliffe's excellent blog A Common Reader. Moreover, I shall be talking about the book tonight on Resonance FM on the show Little Atoms, which is also available as a podcast. Evenmoreover, I'm going to be on Loose Ends on Radio 4 tomorrow (Saturday) at a quarter past six.

Smithfield still feels like this on a Friday night.

*Incidentally, I once posted something along these lines before and was bombarded with impolite e-mails from people who assumed that I hadn't read Titus Andronicus. I have, and can even recite you a couple of speeches from it. However, neither Titus nor Love's Labours have any lines that are known to the man upon the Clapham omnibus.

Incensed Incendiaries of Incense

2011-12-01T13:39:00.001Z

Just a little object lesson today in how a word's meaning can branch with time, like the delta of a river.

Once upon a time there was a Latin word incendere, which to burn. Its meaning is pretty much perfectly preserved in the word incendiary, especially incendiary weapons, which still set fire to things.

However, the word is also preserved in that to which fire is set, namely the incense that is burnt in the higher kind of church in a thurible.

And finally the word is preserved figuratively as a synonym for angry - incensed. This of course merely means that your passions have been fired, your tinderbox sparked and that you're about to explode like an incendiary in a censer.

Permit Me To Discept

2011-11-30T13:53:00.001Z

I was reading Nightmare Abbey the other day, when I came upon this opening line in a piece of dialogue:

Permit me to discept.

'Eh?' I thought, and ran to a dictionary. Discept, it turns out, is a very, very arcane way of saying disagree. However, it has the great advantage that as nobody will be quite sure what the word means, it would be hard to take offence. Moreover, as nobody has any idea what the word means it immediately establishes that you're a jolly clever person and your disception will therefore carry more weight.

As a tidbit of literary trivia, the character who utters the line, Mr Ferdinando Flosky, is a piss-take of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Nightmare Abbey also contains the wise words: "You may as well dine first, and be miserable afterwards." This is a rule by which I live.

P.S. I'll be at the author evening in Waterstones Islington tonight from five till eight. But, if you're a North West Londoner, I'll be at West End books on December the eighth; and, if you're a central Londoner, I'll be at Waterstones Covent Garden on the evening of the 15th.

Disception granted.

Skinning a Flint

2011-11-29T13:07:00.001Z

The other day I happened to use the word skinflint, and even as the word was popping out of my mouth, it occurred to me to wonder where on earth it had come from. Does it meant that you're flinty-skinned? Or that you have such a lean and hungry look that it appears that your skin is drawn over flintlike bones?

It turns out that neither is the case. Instead, there is a dead phrase whose cadaver lurks in that word. Once upon a time, avaricious people were said to be so greedy that they would skin a flint for its hide. Presumably, back when central heating was expensive and furry animals were abundant, people would occasionally skin dogs and cats (there's more than one way to do this) and, I imagine, even mice and rats in order to save money at the tailor. The absurd pinnacle of such skinning would be the attempt to skin a flint.

Daniel Defoe wrote a book called the Complete English Tradesman (1727), in which he warns that a successful merchant is liable to end up with the following reputation:

That he has been a Hard-Head, a Devourer, a Jew; for these, and more such are the general Titles by which such Tradesmen are usually distinguished and known; that he will let no Body live by him, that he will skin a Flint, that he will buy cheaper than any Man can fell, and sell dearer than any Man can buy; that he cares not who sinks if he can but swim; that he grinds the Faces of his Workmen, and will hardly let a poor Man live by his Labour: Thus he has got what he has by griping and squeezing of labouring Men; and that it will never thrive with him, and the like.

There was even a sister phrase to flay a flint and a later American variant that he would skin a flea for its hide and tallow. All lost and gone to the great phrasebook in the sky.

P.S. For those of you who live within striking distance of Islington, I will be along for the author evening at the Waterstones on Islington Green tomorrow (Wednesday) night. Essentially, there'll be mince pies and wine from 5 till 8 and all are welcome and I undertake to sign copies of The Etymologicon with any personalised dedication that your big heart requires.

Bring me my best skinning-knife.

Variant Extravaganzas

2011-11-28T13:10:00.000Z

The word extravaganza was imported from the Italian to describe an extravagant type of writing that was terribly popular in the nineteenth century. The Victorian stage was filled with extravaganzas, which were defined, by one of their chief exponents, as the whimsical treatment of a poetic subject.

Extravaganza was merely the Italian term for an extravagance, and nowadays, of course, you can have an extravaganza of Christmas trees or shopping or whatnot. Anything faintly over the top can be an extravaganza.

So far, so fun. But regular readers of this blog will know that I have a penchant and peccadillo for vagant words. You see, the vagant in extravagant just means wandering, and an extravagance was merely a wandering beyond the limits. That means that I've also been able to post on the English words noctivagant (wandering around at night), montivagant (wandering over mountains) and omnivagant (wandering absolutely everywhere).

This opens the delightful possibility that if you spent the whole night wandering around it would be a noctivaganza, and that a week's walking holiday in the Alps might count as a montivaganza and so on and so forth.

All of this was suggested to me by Paul Norman of Books Monthly who has just written a very complimentary review of my book The Etymologicon, which you can read here (it's on the left of the page).

I think the third from the left may be a crafty man.

The Law of the Plinth

2011-11-25T12:23:00.002Z

A very observant reader has posted on the Dear Dogberry page asking why there aren't more rhymes for plinth. She observes that:

I can't think of anything it rhymes with or even any other word with 'nth' apart from numbers ending in a 'n' when ordering things by position.

Now that's not exactly right, and indeed she corrected herself with labyrinth. There's also hyacinth, labyrinth, absinthe (depending on how you pronounce it) and synth. There are even some weakly stressed words like jacinth (a kind of gem) and Corinth. However, that last example might make you notice that all of these words are late imports. None of them derive from Old English.

Even the OE-derived words that have Nth, such as month and ninth, once didn't. The Old English for ninth was noneth, and for month was monat. Had you been alive a thousand years ago you wouldn't have found any nth words. Or mth words. Or mf words. The Anglo-Saxons had no umph. This is the long arm of the Ingvaeonic Nasal Spirant Law.

Don't worry. Ingvaeonic Nasal Spirant sounds rather intimidating and complex, but it isn't.

Ingvaeonic just means Old English, Old Frisian and Old Saxon. These were old languages spoken in Denmark(ish) and then brought to England.

A Nasal sound is just one that you can't make when holding your nose. Try it. Pinch your nose and say 'tatty'. Easy, isn't it? That's because T isn't a nasal sound. Now try saying 'man'. Weird, ain't it? Now try saying 'Steve McManaman'. As Jesus of Nazareth almost put it: 'Man cannot say God and mammon when holding his nose.'

A spirant is the same as a fricative. It's any sound made by forcing air through a bit of your mouth. So clasp your tongue between your teeth and blow. You should get a Th sound. Put your top teeth on your lower lip and... Ffffff. It's the same for Sssss and shhhh. And, technically, the last sound in Johann Sebastian Bach is also a fricative.

So what's the Ingvaeonic Nasal Spirant Law? It's the Law that says that in the Ingvaeonic languages words never end with a Nasal sound followed by a Spirant. Just doesn't happen. And nobody knows why. The Germans do it all the time. The Germans, for instance, say Uns. The Old Germans said Uns. But for some reason, when Old English was being formed, that N got dropped and so we say Us. The Germans talk about a gans, but we have a goose.

All of which means, that one observant reader was close to discovering a law of first-millennial linguistics all on her own.

I was lounging around on my plinth
And thought, as I sipped an absinthe,
Though some like the guitar
I'd rather by far
Hear the sweet man-made sound of a synth.

The which limerick was necessary so I could post this slightly blue-languaged video.

This song is particularly funny if you live as close to Exmouth Market as I do.

Utter Filth and Obscenity which Should be Burned

2011-11-24T11:53:00.001Z

Read no further. The following post will be utterly obscene. Filth. Beginning to end lewdness and blueness. If you desperately need a respectable logophilic fix, click on the clever widget on the right and you can read all sorts of lovely etymologies in my brand new shiny book, The Etymologicon.

It's got the thirty pages of wonderful etymologies and, so far as I recall there's nothing obscene there at all. As The Observer correctly observed last Sunday, it's "The stocking filler of the season... How else to describe a book that explains the connection between Dom Pérignon and Mein Kampf." Only those who are beyond redemption should continue with this post.

Got that?

Fine, if you're a foul enough gutter-dweller, you may click on the jump break.

There's a point in The Simpsons where Bart observes:

I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.

For some reason Americans think that both of these words are somehow not obscene, when they both, of course derive from fellatio. So I set myself to discover when blowing became sucking and why. I didn't get an answer. But I did find two synonyms for fellate that my innocent little lexicon had never contained. The first is gamahuche, from the French gamarucher (which means the same). The first citation is from the works of Edward Sellon, whom you may remember as the author of such works as The New Ladies' Tickler (1866) or The Ups and Downs of Life (1867). But it was in The New Epicurean of 1875 that he wrote the immortal lines:

‘Quick, quick, Blanche!’ cried Cerise, ‘come and gamahuche the gentleman.’*

And then, in 1880, the word appeared in a couplet in an extraodinary Victorian poem:

You may frig and gamahuche and try every plan,
But fair fucking's the pride of an Englishman.

I knew that British national identity must be based on something. Gamahuche pretty much faded in the 20th century and was replaced by the delicate-sounding Latinate: irrumation. One who practices irrumation is an irrumator - and I had sort of half known that. You see, way back at school when I was learning Latin I was rather fond of the poet Catullus, and I do remember finding a poem of his that opens:

Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo

Which roughly translates as:

I'll bugger you and screw your face.

Such poems appeal to puerile schoolboys. In fact, pedicabo derives from the Greek for school boy, because that's what the ancient Greeks used schoolboys for. But irrumabo (the first person future of irrumare), derives from ruma, the Latin word for udder. So irrumabo sort of means "I'll make you suck my udder" etymologically, if not practically.

I don't think there should be an illustration for this post. Those who feel the need for a picture can go over to bookhugger.co.uk where they have the fourth day of my amusingly changed book-covers.

*N.B. I did Google this phrase and the book does appear to be online. However, its contents are pretty much illegal, so I would research with caution, and preferably on someone else's computer.

Perfumigation

2011-11-23T12:09:00.000Z

Once upon a time, there was a Latin word fumare that meant to smoke, from which we get fumes. Now, some smoke is a welcome guest in the nose of the smeller and some isn't. So burnt incense was called perfume, but smoking out a hornets' nest was called fumigation, and the dung of deer was called fumet, although why you'd need a special word for deer-dung is beyond me.

There's a pub I know that has a little beer garden at the back. This closes at 10:30pm and a sign says that "smokers may fume out the front", which is a funny little etymological pun. Moreover, it alludes - unknowingly, I assume - to the obscure C19th word fumacious. A fumacious person is one who is fond of smoking.

Eh?

Inenubilable

2011-11-22T12:27:00.000Z

The Latin word for cloud was nubes and, as a result, some eighteenth century classicist invented the lovely word enubilate, which meant to blow the mists and fogs away and to make something clear. It's rather like elucidate or clarify, just much prettier.

Then, in the twentieth century, a journalist went further and invented the utterly wonderful word inenubilable for something that cannot be enubilated. Inenubilable can be applied to problems, mysteries, enigmas and other dark conundrums.

It may also be applied to cities that are incurably mist-laden, like London today. Or as Max Beerbohm put it in Zuleika Dobson:

There is nothing in England to be matched with what lurks in the vapours of these meadows, and in the shadows of these spires—that mysterious, inenubilable spirit, spirit of Oxford.

And there are three more lovely book covers up at bookhugger.co.uk.

Changing Covers

2011-11-21T12:34:00.001Z

I've been having fun with the names of books. Essentially, I've been messing around and taking titles back to their etymological origins. For example, wuthering was once a dialect term for a coughing fit or a big blast of wind. Height was originally heaven. So Wuthering Heights is Coughing in Heaven.

But the truly fun thing is not what I've been doing, but the work of a graphic designer and the lovely people at Icon Books who have been Photoshopping the covers of these old books and putting on my revised titles. Would you like to see one? You would? Then go to the bookhugger website where they'll be putting them up all week.

Today's dose is Wuthering Heights and Lord of the Rings (which has to do with bread).

They're far better quality than this effort of mine, which is explained in this old post.

Tintiddle

2011-11-18T12:29:00.000Z

Some words catch on, and some words need a helping hand. Gelett Burgess, who was a writer and humourist and artist etc etc, invented the word blurb, which we all know and dislike, but he also came up with tintiddle.

Tintiddle is an English equivalent for esprit d'escalier, or wit that comes too late. It is the perfect comeback that you think of five minutes after the event when, in the French, you are already shuffling forlornly down the stairs. It's also an utterly beautiful word and I intend to revive it, although I fear that, lethologically, I will always remember it too late.

And you, sir, are an ass.

Queer Carey Street

2011-11-17T12:31:00.001Z

Those of you who follow the news (and, as Evelyn Waugh said, News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.) will, likely as not, have come across the fabulous outrage occasioned by Robert Peston referring to insolvency as "Queer Street".* This has led to lots of people talking about the etymology of the phrase. So I shall throw my proverbial hat into the lexicographic ring.

Queer Street first pops up at the beginning of the nineteenth century and is defined in Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue as:

Wrong. Improper. Contrary to one's wish. It is queer street, a cant phrase, to signify that it is wrong or different to our wish.

However, by the mid-nineteenth century it had come to mean broke, insolvent, penurious and heading for bankruptcy. I would take a guess that this shift in meaning comes down to the Bankruptcy Court which was established on Carey Street in London in the early 1840s. There was certainly a phrase, listed in the OED and Brewers of "being on Carey Street" meaning that you were heading for bankruptcy. The OED doesn't record this phrase until the 1920s, but I just found this description of an artist's predicament from the 1880s:

For the moment, he keenly felt the disgusting cramped situation of Carey Street, which compelled him to peep at his objects, through the rails of his apartment : for the moment, also, he felt the immediate necessity of procuring the gold talismanic key to give him once more liberty, again to wander amidst the beauties of nature : it was then that MORLAND painted for money...

And if I can backdate the phrase forty years, somebody else ought to be able to take it further.
So I shall stick my neck out and make a claim for convergence. An existing term, Queer Street, became an alternative name for the site of the new Bankruptcy Court, Carey Street. All of which allows me to use this photograph.

It's a rich man's world, but a poor man's heaven.

*Phew, what a jormungandrian sentence.
P.S. Photographic credits to The Antipodean.

Crimean Clothes

2011-11-16T11:40:00.000Z

As a little follow up to Monday's post on The Charge of the Light Brigade, it's quite astonishing how many clothes are associated with that single military encounter. The basic shape of the disastrous charge was this: Lord Raglan sent an order to Lord Cardigan who got the order rather muddled and set off on the most famous and most foolish charge of the Battle of Balaclava.

Now, Lord Raglan had lost an arm in the Battle of Waterloo and therefore had his coats specially tailored so that the sleeve was sewn on in a line from armpit to neck, rather than out to the corner of the shoulder. This style is known to this day as the Raglan Sleeve.

Lord Cardigan liked wearing button-up jumpers. These are known to this day as cardigans.

Balaclava is a cold sort of place in winter (the charge took place at the end of October) and so the British soldiers kept warm with knitted woollen coverings for their whole heads, which became known as Balaclava caps and then just as balaclavas: a style now favoured by skiers and terrorists.

Incidentally, Lord Raglan lost his arm at Waterloo where he was aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington, after whom the boots.

The rider is Cardigan, the horse is a jumper.

Waterstones, #inkf, and Piddle

2011-11-15T10:55:00.001Z

Once upon a time there was a village in Dorset called Piddle. Or, more precisely, it was listed in 1212 as being called Pidela Walteri, which is Latin for Walter's Piddle. Piddle just meant lowland and Walter was, one assumes, the landowner.

Anyway, for some reason lost in the mists of medieval time, the Piddle got dropped and the Walter remained. In fact, it started to be called Walter's Farm, or in old English Walter's ton. Then people stopped pronouncing the L in Walter and it just became Water's ton. The important thing was that the people who lived there acquired the surname Waterstone. They had sex and had children who had sex and had children in a long, frenzied line of lust and procreation that led inevitably to the birth of Tim Waterstone in 1939. And his name had nothing to do with either water or stone.

Tim Waterstone founded Waterstones bookshops in 1981 and they are now the largest chain of bookshops in Britain. Then all it took was for me to write The Etymologicon and the lovely people at Waterstones to read and like it and a plan was formed. Essentially, I'm spending the day doing a word surgery. The idea is that you tweet a word to me with the hashtag #inkf and I'll do my best to tweet back with an explanation. Try to include @inkyfool and @waterstones.

It could all have been very different, though. If that Dorset village had dropped the other half of its name I would be teaming up with Piddles.

This is Wyre Piddle in Worcestershire, which I've actually visited.

#inkf

2011-11-14T18:57:00.000Z

Tomorrow, I'm going to be doing a word surgery in conjunction with the lovely people at Waterstones. The idea is that you can go onto Twitter and tweet at me asking questions about etymology and philology and anything at all to do with words. I will tweet back to the best of my ability and thus the day will run in a spirit of joyous logopandocie. All you need to do is tweet with the hashtag #inkf.

And just to prove that I'm not making this up, have a look at Waterstones' Twitter page, it's a thing of beauty.

Quaquaversal Artillery

2011-11-14T11:12:00.001Z

As a devotee of Tennyson, I've always been horribly irritated that he's best known for his worst poem: The Charge of the Bloody Light Brigade.

For the last century and a half schoolchildren have been oppressed with the lines:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them....

Which brings me to the brunt of my post: the very useful word quaquaversal. Quaquaversal means in every direction. So those three lines could usefully be deleted and replaced with the two simple words: quaquaversal cannon, or, if you wish to keep a remnant of the metre: Cannon quaquaversally.

Tennyson actually didn't like the poem much himself and considered cutting it from the second edition of the collection in which it came out. He had only written the wretched thing in a few minutes after reading an article in The Times which mentioned that 'someone had blundered'. He liked the dactyllic rhythm of the phrase and the rest is pseudo-history.

Just in case you were wondering, Tennyson knew that most accounts had closer to 700 men involved, but wrote in a letter that 'Six is much better than seven hundred (as I think) metrically'. So the numbers are there for the metre. Also, as a Lincolnshire boy, Tennyson would have pronounced hundred as hunderd, which means that, for him at least, it really did rhyme with blundered.

Monday morning with the Inky Fool

Bints

2011-11-11T12:36:00.000Z

There's a rather ungentlemanly term for a woman in Britain: bint. It doesn't mean anything in particular, it's just a synonym for woman that conveys, in the most vulgar way, that you don't like her. I had always assumed that it was thieve's cant or that the word had just appeared magically in some pub and then spread like around the country. But then I happened to be reading an article on the formation of Arabic surnames (as you do), and saw the magical words:

bint = daughter

So, I hurled myself at the OED and found that bint does indeed come from the Arabic. The phrase was popularised by servicemen returning from duty in Egypt during the Second World War, the bints of Egypt being (presumably) particularly beautiful. Indeed, in my Dictionary of Services Slang bint is still defined as girlfriend, and as a synonym for lush.

The Inky Fool out on the pull

The Epithets of Transferred Wodehouse

2011-11-10T13:31:00.000Z

There's a fantastic article in The Guardian on P.G. Wodehouse's letters. Being a thoroughly technical chap, what I particularly like about it is the thoroughly technical analysis of Wodehouse's use of the transferred epithet. That's when an adjective is deliberately applied to the wrong thing. For example, one might sip a contemplative whisky, when in fact it is the sipper who is contemplative and the whisky is merely whisky.

Similarly, there are Wordsworth's lonely rooms and Auden's lovely lines:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm.

Anyway, go and read the article by clicking hereupon.

Antithalian

2011-11-09T13:51:00.000Z

If you are antithalian you are constitutionally opposed to fun and festivities. Thalia is the muse of comedy and the grace of plenty. So if you don't like her, you are antithalian. And if you don't like her, I don't like you.

Over to Foyles

2011-11-08T12:07:00.000Z

What are you doing here? I've written a lovely long piece for the Foyles blog. It's all about bibliophagists and sarcophaguses and sarcasm, but to read it you'll have to follow this link.

Rabblings

2011-11-07T11:38:00.001Z

The Inky Fool's crack team of highly-trained IT specialists is a terribly nice chap who's quite prepared to work for biberages. Last week (while I was growing pale and spectre thin and dying) he was very kindly making some changes to the main page of inkyfool.com. So I felt rather bad, having checked it, to have to phone him up and tell him there was a typo. He had described this blog as "The rabblings of the Inky Fool", when of course it should be "ramblings".

'No,' he replied firmly when I told him. 'Rabblings is a word. I checked.'

I was suspicious, but I feel that all humans, even those who specialise in IT, should be given the benefit of the doubt. So I turned to the OED and found that there is indeed a verb to rabble. Here are the definitions.

1 a. To speak or read aloud in a rapid and incoherent way; to gabble; to ramble.

b. To utter (words or speech) in a rapid confused manner; to rattle out incoherently.

2 a. To put (something) together hastily, knock up.

b. To work in a hurried and careless manner.

Which is the most concise summation of my little web-log that I've ever seen.

We may be upgrading soon.

Kindles

2011-11-04T14:22:00.000Z

I'm afraid I've fallen horribly ill and am incapable of doing anything other than shivering and moaning. However, over on the Kindle blog, I've written a piece on the etymology of the word kindle. Those with withdrawal symptoms can just follow this link.

The Inky Fool this morning.

Go, Litel Bok

2011-11-03T13:14:00.000Z

It's out! The Etymologicon is in bookshops today. It is published (etymologically made public, and therefore related to pubs). I scampered up to the Waterstones on Islington Green and there it was on the table, lying alluringly next to The Gashlycrumb Tinies.

I feel like a proud father who has finally managed to clone himself in book form. At the end of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer says goodbye to his book:

Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedie...

And then he adds that:

And for there is so great diversity
In English and in writing of our tongue,
So pray I God that non miswrite thee,
Nor thee mis-metre for default of tongue;
And read where-so thou be, or else sung,
That thou be understood, God I beseech!

I rather like the idea of people singing The Etymologicon. In fact, I shall insist on it as a condition of sale. So, if you don't want to have to demonstrate a good voice and a mastery of the harp, you should run out and get a copy today.

By the way, for the Londoners among you, The Londonist website has a thing up today on me and the etymology of Tube stations. It can be found by clicking on this link.

Go, litel bok.

A Widget

2011-11-02T12:00:00.002Z

Look what the clever fellows at Icon Books have done. Do you see it? Just to the right of this sentence? In the right hand column? That's a widget and if you click on it you get to read the opening twenty pages or so of my brand new, shiny, beautiful, lovely, osculable book: The Etymologicon, which is available in all good bookshops (and some evil ones) on Thursday.

No. This is.

Jestress

2011-11-01T13:29:00.001Z

I've never liked the word comedienne. I don't know exactly why, but it bugs me. There's something about the faux Frenchiness of it. It might be condescendingly sexist, or it might be tediously feminist, and either way it rankles. So I was immensely pleased when I happened across the word jestress, which is simply the female form of jester.

By a pleasant etymological path, a jester was originally somebody who told gestes which were medieval romances. And gestes comes from the Latin gesta which meant deeds (e.g. the Gesta Francorum was The Deeds of the Franks). Gesta comes from the verb gerere which meant carry. And that's why when you carry a child you gestate.

But jesters can't gestate, only jestresses can do that.

Replaced

By And By

2011-10-31T13:10:00.000Z

A by-way is a little path aside from the main road. A by-product is a less important product aside from one's main aim. So I had always assumed that a by-law was a little law aside from the laws of the land. I was wrong.

If you want to know about the by in by-law you should investigate in Derby, Whitby, Rugby, Grimsby, Selby, Ashby Puerorum or any of the towns in the north eastern quarter of England that end with the letters -by.

Why are all those towns in the North East? Because they were all named by the marauding Vikings who ravaged and raped and pillaged their way around England until Alfred the Great made them stop. In fact, you can work out the line of the Vikings' farthest advance by simply pulling out a map of Britain and searching for the -bys.

By was simply the Viking word for town, and if you go to Norway or Sweden it's still the word that those unrepentant marauders use. So what do you call a law that only applies in this town? That's right, you call at it a by-law.

P.S. The media maelstrom that is The Etymologicon continues. Not only was I on the radio again last night way past my bedtime, but there's a piece in today's Daily Mail. The book will be lolling in the shops on Thursday. And, if you're in another country or can't make it to a bookshop, you can order it with free shipping to anywhere in the world from this website.

A Churl on a Gentleman

2011-10-28T12:21:00.000+01:00

For as long as I can remember I have known the old drinker's rhyme:

Beer and wine:
Feeling fine.
Wine and beer:
Oh dear.

There are even equivalents in other languages, although I can't now remember what they are. However, I did find a rather lovely alternative in Brewer's: Don't put a churl on a gentleman.

Churl is an old word for a fool, and before that it meant peasant, and before that, way back in the days of Old Norse when it was spelled karl, it just meant man. That's also where we get the names Carl, Charles, and (oddly given that it means man) Caroline.

Even more oddly, Charlemagne is a variant of Charles/Carl and because of that the Czech word for king is kral, the Polish is krol, and the Lithuanian is karalius. So a churl is, etymologically, both a man and a woman, a peasant and a king.

And, for what it's worth, I've always said:

Beer, wine and whisky:
Feeling frisky.

Would it be churlish to point out that this song is about an eleven year old?

Twinters, Bidents and Conundrum-Makers

2011-10-27T12:28:00.000+01:00

A twinter is a two-year-old cow. It's a dialect term that is a shortening of two-winters. A two-year-old sheep, on the other hand, is called a bident. A bident is one short of a trident, which is three-toothed fork. The idea is that after two years a sheep, apparently, has two rows of teeth and is therefore ready to be sacrificed. This causes me concern as today is, in a way, my second birthday. I am a twinter and bident.

Inky Fool is two years old today. The earth has completed its weary journey around the sun twice since first I posted on the subject of branding. And just to emphasise the pointlessness of it all, the planet is now back where it started.

Inky Fool, though, is not. Inky Fool has gained many lovely readers, such as you*. Moreover, Inky Fool has a book - The Etymologicon - that will be coming out in a week's time and is already available on Kindle.

And as it is my blog-birthday, I shall simply quote the following for no reason other than the fact that I like it. It's from Dialogues of Dead (1699) by William King.

Hesychius. Why so they are! But can there be more Wit than in an Etymology, of which you are full from all Languages?

Gouldman. Etymologies may indeed furnish Materials for Quiblers, Punsters, and Conundrum-Makers, but these sorts of Wit are as much out of use as hammer'd Money.

Finally, I should apologise. There was no post yesterday. I thought there was. I wrote one and I believed that I had clicked on PUBLISH POST. Mind you, I'll believe anything.

The birthday party

*Well, I assume you're lovely. Are you? Answers in the comments, please.

Sacralgia and Kippers

2011-10-25T13:10:00.001+01:00

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh has this to say about kippers:

Adam ate some breakfast. No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings.

Now, if you want to make a great smell for your deity what you need is burnt bone, and apparently (I've never sacrificed anyone myself) the best bone to do this with is the os sacrum, the sacred bone. It's at the bottom of your spine and the Romans believed that it was the part that the gods really liked. That's why it's called the sacrum to this very day.

If you have a pain in your sacrum, it's called sacralgia. What I like about this is that, etymologically, sacralgia means sacred pain, but really it means a right pain in the arse. But if you told somebody that they were being a sacralgia, they would never realise.

This makes sacralgia a very useful word.

The Inky Fool regrets his choice of restaurant.

Currying Favour and Curried Horses

2011-10-24T13:01:00.002+01:00

It's a little odd that even at the finest of Indian restaurants you can't order a curried favour. In fact, currying favour gets odder the more you look at the phrase. That's because favour isn't favour. It's a horse.

Once upon a time, six or seven hundred years ago there was a French allegorical poem called the Roman de Fauvel. It's about a horse called Fauvel who leaves his stable, moves into the biggest room in his master's house, and installs a custom made hayrack.

The point of the allegory is that the second the horse appears to be in charge everybody suddenly wants to be his friend. People come from far and wide to groom Fauvel.

For some reason this story was immensely popular and got translated into English, with the name Fauvel unchanged. However, the English word for grooming a horse was currying. It's a verb that is, apparently, still used in equestrian circles*. Thus a phrase developed. Anybody who sycophantically went round trying to be nice to a lord was said to be currying fauvel.

However, once the old French allegory had been forgotten, the idea of currying fauvel started to look rather odd. What the hell was a fauvel? Nobody knew any more.

Confusion about the phrase lasted until 1560 when the Geneva Bible came up with this line:

He thoght by this meanes to courry fauour with the worlde

It makes sense. Nobody knew what a fauvel was, but everybody knew that a sycophant wants a favour. So every since then favours have been curried and patronage has been vindalooed.

And here is the original favour being curried.

*I have never moved in equestrian circles myself. I can't seem to maintain a stable relationship.

P.S. There's an article about my book, The Etymologicon, in today's Sun.

The Telegraph

2011-10-23T11:20:00.000+01:00

Some words pop up long before you think they would. The periodical Nature mentioned a marvellous maze of internetted connections in 1883. Computers have been employed since 1613 (when they were people who computed). The telegraph has been around since 1794. It was invented by a French chap called Claude Chappe and it consisted of wooden posts that could be moved around and thus form a distant vision or, in Greek, a tele-graph.

All of which is a long way round of saying that today's Sunday Telegraph (available at all good agents of news) has two lovely articles about Inky Fool and the book The Etymologicon: a leader that can be read here, and an article that is behind this link. In the papery version of the paper (from Greek papyrus) they can be found on pages 13 and 27.

This makes me inordinately and exorbitantly proud.

The Inky Fool could not afford a mobile phone.

Authentic Authors

2011-10-21T13:06:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I was in a pub. There is nothing unusual about that. The pub had two beers available on tap, and on the taps were those little armorial plates that tell you the name and the ABV and other such urgent information. What struck me, though, was that one of the beers described itself as original, and the other described itself as authentic.

I, of course, made a fuss. I told the barman that I made a point of only drinking beers that were both. I tried to haggle a reduction, failed and got drunk anyway. However, even in my beers, it occurred to me that I didn't really know what authentic meant. Did it mean real, extant? In which case it would hardly need to be pointed out. Did it mean not fake? Who fakes beer?

So, I fled to a dictionary, and of course authentic, etymologically, means something that is by an author, and therefore has authority. So authentic is, or was, roughly a synonym for authoritative and referred to books.

It should be remembered here that in the medieval period there were writers and there were auctors. Auctors were the only ones who had auctorite and whose words were therefore auctentyke, from which we get authentic.

I have to therefore concede that T-shirts could be authentic or knock-off copies. I would also note very, very strongly, that as I am an author The Etymologicon (which comes out in only a few days time now) will definitely be authentic, although it unfortunately contains no beer.

Pre-order it here. Please.

Me in the pub

A River, In Other Words

2011-10-20T12:30:00.001+01:00

If you click on this little link, it will take you through to a map of America. On it every place name that refers to a watercourse is marked (apart from river and creek because they're too common). However, the bayous are marked in green, the rios are marked in white, the brooks in pale blue, and so on and so forth. It's therefore a map of regional dialects and old languages.

It's rather wonderful, and I didn't even know that a kill was a kind of stream (it's evidence of Dutch settlers).

Also, if you click on the image, it ought to enlarge.

This, incidentally, is what T.S. Eliot had to say about rivers:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget.

This song has always interested me. The central idea of it is that a river is something that you can skate off on, like a road. This works if you're Canadian, but to an Englishman it's like saying 'I wish I had a fish to do my gardening for me.' Some thoughts, like some wines, don't travel. The same thing goes for rain and shade in the Bible.

Esquisse

2011-10-19T12:21:00.001+01:00

Esquisse is a sublimely pretty word. Try saying it aloud. It sounds like a gentle kiss. In fact, it is a first sketch, an idea dashed off in a few seconds as a preliminary and plan for a larger and greater work. As such, it sounds like a thoroughly useful word. One could employ it in business presentations: "Of course what you see here is merely an esquisse, but once we've got the marketing guys and people from compliance in, I think you'll find it'll be quite something. Just needs some adumbrations."

It would raise the tone.

Ossian, Oscar, and Ocker

2011-10-18T12:56:00.000+01:00

Back in the eighteenth century, European culture was obsessed with the idea of the noble savage, particularly the Celtic variety. They loved the idea of some kilt-clad warrior striding around a misty moor or foggy fen, playing lonely bagpipes and gazing down the glen.

There was a slight problem, though: no actual account of a noble Scotsmen had ever been found*. So a wily poet called James Macpherson decided to make one up. He claimed to have discovered and translated an ancient Scots epic about a chap called Ossian. It was a complete fraud, and those parts of it that I've read are terrible, but it was the fraud that the literary world wanted, and they lapped it up.

Goethe loved it and mentioned it in Werther. Napoleon was so obsessed with the poem that he carried a copy with him everywhere. He even insisted that his godson (who later became king of Sweden) be renamed after one of the characters in the poem, who had the then obsolete moniker of Oscar.

Thus did the name Oscar suddenly become popular all over Britain and Scandinavia.

A few decades later an Irish nationalist called Jane decided to give her son the silliest possible old Celtic name she could imagine to fit in with her political principles. So she called him Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

Oscar Wilde was convicted of Uranian lust in 1895 and the name Oscar took a bit of a hit in its popularity, but only in Britain. In Scandinavia Oscars thrived. And in Australia.

In fact, Oscar was such a common Australian name that when, in the sixties, a comedian called Ron Frazer wanted to create a character who would embody all the quintessential Australian virtues of boorishness and barflying, he called him Oscar, or more precisely he used the Australian shortening of the name: Ocker. Here is a video of Ocker in action.

As you can see Ocker isn't actually that bad a fellow. However, the word has moved on. Most Australians today are unaware of the original comedy sketches and use the word ocker (uncapitalised) as an adjective to refer to the most boorish, beer-swilling, prawn-barbying, becorked-hatted bush-whacker imaginable. It's the Australian equivalent of redneck.

It's therefore an immensely useful word if you wish to abuse Australians in words of their own invention, and who doesn't want to do that?

Ocker Oscar

*This is unchanged.

Horse Chestnuts, Radishes and Radicals

2011-10-17T13:37:00.002+01:00

I had always assumed that the horse chestnut had something to do with the horse radish, and I'm therefore terribly sad to find that I was, essentially, wrong. I had had a lovely picture in my mind of a proud horse tending his garden.

Horse chestnuts were once used as a medicine for horses, they were believed to cure their coughs. Other horse medicines included horse bane (phellandrium equaticum) which cures horses with palsy, and horse cassia (cassia marginata) which helps with their constipation.

However, horse radishes don't cure a horse of anything at all, they're just big. A horse ant is a big ant. A horse cucumber is a big cucumber. A horse mushroom is a big mushroom. And a horse radish is a great big radish.

Incidentally, radish means root etymologically speaking, from the Latin radix. That's why, if you want to change things from the roots upwards, you are a political radical. This means that, so far as I'm concerned, all radishes are radicals and all radicals are radishes.

Or maybe I'm wrong.

P.S. If you want to hear me on the radio last night, you can follow this link. I start about half an hour in. I haven't listened to it myself, but that's because I have a pathological hatred of my own voice.

Beau Traps and Affpuddles

2011-10-14T12:56:00.000+01:00

So, the rain has stopped and you're strolling along the pavement wearing your best socks when moist disaster strikes. You tread upon a paving stone that looks dry and safe, but it's loose. The stone flicks down and water that was hidden beneath it squirts up and spoils your socks, soaks your shoes, and leaves the hem of your trousers sodden. There is a name for this.

In fact, there are two names. Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) has this entry:

Beau Trap A loose stone in a pavement, under which water lodges, and on being trod upon, squirts it up, to the great damage of white stockings; also a sharper neatly dressed, lying in wait for raw country squires, or ignorant fops.

A beau was, of course, a well-dressed young man. So a beau trap is the enemy of good clothing. However, the term has an antiquated feel and there is a more recent alternative. Douglas Adams and John Lloyd once wrote a book called The Meaning of Liff. The idea of the book was that they took British place names and assigned amusing definitions to them.

...there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist.

On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places.

Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.

Anyway, The Meaning of Liff contains this entry for the name of a Dorset village:

Affpuddle (n.)
A puddle which is hidden under a pivoted paving stone. You only know it's there when you step on the paving stone and the puddle shoots up your leg.

So there are two names for the same pavemental phenomenon. But are there any others? A friend of mine was asking me for something more modern-sounding. More hip. More cool. If anybody has another term - either one you've heard or that you've just invented - please post it in the comments.

The caption here reads: Treading in a beau trap while in the act of gaily advancing your foot, to make a bow to some charming woman of your acquaintance whom you suddenly meet, and to whom you liberally impact a share of the jet d'eau.

Leaving in the Lurch

2011-10-13T13:11:00.000+01:00

The other day, I was promising not to leave a friend in the lurch when I noticed that I had no idea what a lurch was or how, exactly, you could be in one. I like to keep my promises nebulous.

I had always thought that leaving in the lurch had something to do with lurching back and forth, or that political favourite: a sickening lurch to the right.

However, sideways lurching is of nautical origin and has nothing to do with being in or out of the lurch. This latter lurch is helpfully defined in John Florio's 1598 Worlde of Words:

Marcio, a lurch or maiden set at any game.

A lurch is a score in a game, specifically it's a thrashing where one player doesn't win even a single point. If I beat you at tennis by a game to love that's a lurch. In fact, there are all sorts of terribly technical variants. In the game of cribbage a lurch involves scoring 61 before your opponent has scored 31. In whist it's something else, and in some sport it means scoring five before the other player scores one.

Anyway, lurch became a term for any uncomfortable pickle or scrape that you might find yourself in. And thus you can have a chap at your lurch, give a chap the lurch, or leave somebody in the lurch.

Now, if you're British, go and get yourself a copy of today's Times. If you turn to page 30 you'll see Matthew Parris writing about my book The Etymologicon, which is out in three week's time, but can, as you'll know, be pre-ordered here.

The Inky Fool prepares for a comeback

Nice Niece News

2011-10-12T12:40:00.000+01:00

I am unclified*. I have joined the avunculate**. I am an eme*** and an oom****. My patruity***** has come upon me. I should therefore toddle off and see my new niece.

*Turned into an uncle
** Maternal uncles regarded as a collective body (so saith the OED)
*** Uncle (Old English)
**** An older man, especially an uncle. (South African)
***** The condition of being an uncle (as opposed to paternity).

P.S. Last week's posts on uncleship were on time. My niece was not.

Advance Copies of the Etymologicon from Waterstones

2011-10-11T16:04:00.000+01:00

The enchanting people at Waterstones are giving away a few advance copies of my book, The Etymologicon, on Facebook. To be in with a chance just follow this link.

The Etymologicon, in case you didn't know, is all about the strange etymological connections between words. So if you vitally need to know what testicles have to do with testaments, why all dogs are cynical, or how barristas connect to barristers, The Etymologicon is the tome for you.

It's here and it's shiny, and it's in the shops from November the third.

(And you can pre-order it here)

Red Herrings

2011-10-11T12:33:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, I explained how harking back was to do with calling back dogs who have lost the trail of scent. Harking back is thoroughly necessary when the dogs are following a red herring. Hounds love the smell of a good red herring. Thomas Nashe observed, back in 1599, that:

Next, to draw on hounds to a sent, to a redde herring skinne there is nothing comparable.

So, if you want to lead a dog astray the best thing to do is to drag a red herring along the ground, thus making a false trail of scent for them to run after. It appears that this was originally done just to give the dogs and horses some exercise. You laid out a herring trail and then went for a jolly good gallop. This from the Gentleman's Recreation of 1697:

Now, that I may not leave you in Ignorance what a Train-scent is, I shall acquaint you that it has its Name as I suppose, from the Manner of it, viz. the trailing or dragging of a dead Cat or Fox (and in Case of Necessity a Red-herring) three or four Miles, (according to the Will of the Rider, or the Directions given him) and then laying the Dogs on the Scent.

Nineteenth century huntsmen, though, got wilier. They used red herrings as deliberate distractions to train hounds to follow the original scent. They would lay out one scent of proper prey, and then drag a red herring across it. If the dogs followed the red herring they were harked back to the original trail.

So in 1836 The Times could write metaphorically that:

Mr. Rice called Lord Lyndhurst's intimation that the Government might take off the whole of the stamp duty ‘a false drag—the scent of a red-herring to draw off the hounds’.

And thus the modern red herring. There is also a phrase 'Neither fish, nor fowl nor good red herring.' But nobody knows where that comes from at all.

And now go and look at this on Facebook: Waterstones are giving away advanced copies of my book! I saw the first copies yesterday and they are more beautiful than all other things on earth. So go to Waterstones and like it all those other facebiblical things that folk do.

Fishing with the Inky Fool

Harking Back, Forward and Away

2011-10-10T13:31:00.000+01:00

Shakespeare stole most of his best ideas from The Simpsons. So Mr Burns' great line "Release the hounds" is repeated in much less memorable form in The Tempest, where Prospero sets a pack of ghostly dogs on Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo.

A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds, and hunt them about, PROSPERO and ARIEL setting them on

PROSPERO Hey, Mountain, hey!

ARIEL Silver I there it goes, Silver!

PROSPERO Fury, Fury! there, Tyrant, there! hark! hark!

CALIBAN, STEPHANO, and TRINCULO, are driven out

The reason for all those harks of Prospero's is that, though hark can just mean listen up as in Hark the herald angels sing, hark is also a hunting cry. When you want your hounds to set off you shout Hark-away. If you want them to follow the scent onwards you shout Hark forward. However, if they have lost the scent and gone the wrong way, you shout Hark back.

In 1882 Robert Louis Stevenson said of a fellow that "He has to hark back again to find the scent of his argument."

But these days the original hunting sense has been forgotten, except by very old people who own packs of hounds, like Mr Burns.

P.S. And if you want to know the etymological connection between Caliban and the Caribbean, I explained it here.

Uncle Sam of the U.S.

2011-10-07T13:44:00.001+01:00

I sometimes wonder as I post these things, whether everybody else knows this stuff already. But to continue with our theme of uncles, I never realised that Uncle Sam's initials are U.S., or United States; and though nobody is utterly sure of the origin, the OED says

The suggestion that it arose as a facetious interpretation of the letters U.S. is as old as the first recorded instances, and later statements connecting it with different government officials of the name of Samuel appear to be unfounded.

So there. I set off to do a bit of research and started reading an 1816 book called The Adventures of Uncle Sam in Search of his Lost Honour, but aside from the phrase "Thus ejaculated the chief steward" it's terribly tedious. It does, though, have a nice bit at the beginning about how important it is for a book to be printed, otherwise:

Deeds of fame hard earned in iron fields of argument flutter on to future times, like the treaties of savages, on the tongues of women, mutilated, distorted, exaggerated and defrauded of half their beauty...

Which seems a terribly ungentlemanly attitude towards the tongues of women. Speaking of books being in print, did I mention that my book - The Etymologicon - is being published in three and a bit week's time? Did I mention that it's filled with all sorts of fascinating and entrancing etymological tales? Did I mention that you can pre-order it from this site with free shipping to anywhere in the world?

I did? Oh well.

This says "Friends-Democrats, Uncle Sam and Ivan". It's from a Tsarist pro-American propaganda campaign that started in 1917, and was then cut short.

Bob's Your Uncle

2011-10-06T12:55:00.000+01:00

As a follow on from yesterday's post on avuncular nepotism, here's a brief account of exactly why Bob is your uncle.

It should be noted that there are several theories for this, and a new one is invented every week, but the standard line* is that it refers to the political career of Arthur Balfour. Balfour was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1902 to 1905, which, given the size of the British Empire, made him pretty much the most powerful man in the world. However, it was not always thus. When he was first elected to parliament in 1874 he was considered a bit of a joke; and when he was suddenly made Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1887, everybody thought that it was rampant nepotism because the prime minister who promoted him was his uncle, Robert Cecil.

So, Balfour's easy success was down to the fact that Bob [Cecil] was his uncle.

As I said, there are a bunch of other theories, partially because the earliest written reference comes in 1931. However, if you wanted to know what Uncle Bob looked like, you should (probably) see the picture below.

*Despite what a citationless Wikipedia article may tell you.

Avuncular and Nepotistic Uncles

2011-10-05T12:43:00.000+01:00

Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews - sons mine... ah God, I know not! Well -

The word nepotism is, literally, nephew-ism; because the Latin for nephew was nepot. However, nepotism gained its current currency from the overactive and sinful loins of the medieval popes. An Italian history of the papacy written in 1667 was titled Il Nipotismo di Roma and it opens thusly:

I begin the History of the Nipotismo, from the time of Sixtus the fourth, since he was the first that delivered up Rome and the Popedom in prey to his Nephews.

Sixtus the Fourth created 34 cardinals, of which six were his nephews; except that they probably weren't. You see a Pope wasn't officially allowed to have any sons, so, when he did, he would pass them off as his nephews and then show them enormous favouritism, or nepotism. So the primary definition of nepotism in the OED is:

The showing of special favour or unfair preference to a relative in conferring a position, job, privilege, etc.; spec. such favour or preference shown to an illegitimate son by a pope or other high-ranking ecclesiastic.

They in turn would have illegitimate sons whom they would pass off as their nephews and so on and so forth until the Roman Church had become thoroughly avuncular.

That's because avuncular just means like an uncle. So if you treat somebody in an avuncular manner, you behave as though you were a friendly and indulgent uncle. That's why nepotistic (being nice to your nephews) is exactly the same thing as avuncular (being nice to your nephews*).

In fact... hmmm... that's a very neat point, but it may be wrong. You see, I just checked, and avuncular, etymologically speaking, means like an avuncul and in Latin an avuncul is a maternal uncle. So perhaps a maternal uncle is kinder because his sister's children are not competing for his own children's inheritance. I don't know anything about Roman inheritance law, but that would make sense. Therefore, both words would have to do with the twisted relationship between uncles and wills.

This brings us inevitably to the nineteenth century and the wonderful dramatic monologues of Robert Browning. One of the best of these, and for some reason one of the least known, is The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church, Rome. It's basically the deathbed speech of a thoroughly corrupt medieval priest who, among other things, can't remember which are his sons and which are his nephews.

Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews - sons mine... ah God, I know not! Well -
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
What's done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,
And as she died so must we die ourselves,
And thence ye may perceive the world's a dream.

It's an absolutely bloody fantastic poem and you can read the whole thing by clicking on this link. There's a great bit in it where he's describing an ornament that he wants on top of his sarcophagus:

Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,
Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast...

Such lascivious blasphemy! Read the whole thing here. It's much better than anything I write.

*Nieces are innumerate and don't count.

The Inky Sage

2011-10-04T13:55:00.000+01:00

Not so much a post today, as a photograph. On the right you will see a picture of the great man Laszlo Biro. Biro (1899-1985) was a Hungarian journalist who noticed that newspaper ink dried more quickly than the ink in fountain pens. However, it was too viscous to put the one inside the other. So he and his brother came up with the ballpoint which is known today as the biro, although technically Biro should be capped up as, like Hoover or Photoshop, it remains a proprietary name.

As a strange point of linguistic imperialism, Biro was bought out by a Frenchman called Marcel Bich, who started manufacturing Bic Biros. I once bought a Bic Biro and noticed that it said on the side Made in France. What amused me was that this was a French company making a French product and I had bought the Biro in France. But it still said Made in France in English.

Dungle

2011-10-03T12:19:00.001+01:00

Some words seem to have been invented just so that they could be used as names for characters in a Charles Dickens novel, or by children's authors. Such a word is dungle. I can just imagine old Professor Dungle pottering about his library, or Mr and Mrs Dungle being the evil family with whom our orphan-hero is forced to live.

In fact, though, dungle has a precise and clear meaning. It's a verb and it means to throw something onto a dunghill; once there the thing is said to be dungled.

It's worthwhile noticing that a dungled person is liable to end up sharny-faced, which is an old Scottish term for bedaubed with dung.

I'm glad I don't live in Old Scotland. However, I also reckon that I could get away with calling somebody sharny-faced and making it sound like a compliment.

As we're on the subject of dunghills, I cannot but quote John Lyly's lovely lines:

It is the disposition of the thought that altereth the nature of the thing. The sun shineth upon the dunghill and is not corrupted, the diamond lieth in the fire and is not consumed, the crystal toucheth the toad and is not poisoned, the trochilus liveth by the mouth of the crocodile and is not spoiled,

This is all terribly true, however the last clause is a bunch of crap:

a perfect wit is never bewitched with lewdness neither enticed with lasciviousness.

Dungled.

Twenty [One] Books on Language

2011-09-30T12:44:00.000+01:00

A lady asked me to post a link to her list of the twenty best books on language. So here it is, and a very interesting list it seems too. However, there is one glaring omission that renders it utterly obsolete - it doesn't include this blog's book The Etymologicon.

The mere fact that The Etymologicon doesn't actually come out until November the third does not excuse this. November 3rd is only a few weeks away; and, anyway, you can already pre-order it with FREE SHIPPING TO ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD from this website, and that's with a 25% reduction.

And how else are you ever going to find out about the etymological connection between film buffs and buffaloes, or find Mick Jagger's use on a lawn? No how - that's how. No how.

Did I mention the free shipping? Did I? I did? I mentioned the free shipping. Good. Then your Christmas shopping is solved by FOLLOWING THIS LINK.

Gold foil on crimson cloth.

It's all too beautiful.

Umbrellas and Bumbershoots

2011-09-29T13:28:00.001+01:00

It's a funny thought for an Englishman that the etymological purpose of an umbrella is to keep the sun off you. Umbrella comes from the Latin umbra, or shade, so an umbrella is a little shade, just as a parasol is a protector-against-the-sun, just as a parachute is a protector-against-falling.

An eldritch combination of the above words is bumbershoot - which is an American slang term for an umbrella and an utterly lovely word to say. Basically, if you mess up the word umbrella you're as likely as not to get something along the lines of brolly or bumber. Then, if you notice that an umbrella looks a bit like a parachute you can add the chute onto the end and get bumbershoot, which first appeared in 1896.

The OED has bumbershoot down as originally and chiefly US. However, I intend to import it the moment that the Indian Summer currently hanging over London perishes in October's icy grip.

Damned sunburn

Anglophone Saxophones

2011-09-28T14:08:00.000+01:00

The English-speaking world is anglophone because England (or Angle-land) is named after the Angles who invaded along with the Saxons when the ages were Very Dark Indeed. But what of the poor dear Saxons? Why didn't they get a phone?

Well, they sort of did. You see, the surname Sax or Saxe means Saxon, and does all across northwest Europe. So Adolphe Sax (1814-1894) must have come by a straight male line of descent from a Saxon. So when he patented the saxophone in 1846, the anglophone world was finally reunited with its etymological twin.

Anglophone and saxophone.

Hanging Out with Pickwick

2011-09-27T13:08:00.000+01:00

There's a strange feeling that you get when you're reading an old novel and find what you thought was a new phrase. Take, for example, hanging out. It's a phrase that I would have imagined was invented by surfers in the 1960s. So when you come across it in Dickens' Pickwick Papers from 1837 it feels decidedly odd:

Mr. Bob Sawyer, thrusting his forefinger between two of Mr. Pickwick's ribs, and thereby displaying his native drollery, and his knowledge of the anatomy of the human frame, at one and the same time, inquired—

'I say, old boy, where do you hang out?' Mr. Pickwick replied that he was at present suspended at the George and Vulture.

Not only was the phrase around, but it was familiar and annoying enough to be parodied. In fact, hang out comes from the idea of hanging out a sign to show that you're there for business. The same thing once struck me when I was reading Great Expectations. Wemmick is miserable and tells Pip:

"It's a bad job," said Wemmick, scratching his head, "and I assure you I haven't been so cut up for a long time."

Pickwick Papers also contains a character called Mr Phunky, which may be a forerunner of our more modern term. It was only eight years later, in 1845, that a writer called Samuel Naylor was able to pen the immortal line:

I do feel somewhat funky.

Anyway, here's a recording of an interview with Mr Pickwick.

The Esquivalient Cartographer

2011-09-26T12:51:00.001+01:00

Many moons ago, I wondered whether there was a lexicographic equivalent of a cartographer's folly. Basically, mapmakers put tiny mistakes into their maps so that they can prove that a rival has simply copied from them. So I was wondering whether dictionaries did the same thing. And it turns out that they do.

The New Oxford American Dictionary apparently included the word esquivalience as just such a copyright trap. The entry ran:

Esquivalience—n. the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities ... late 19th cent.; perhaps from the French esquiver, ‘dodge, slink away.’

Which is rather appropriate. The trick worked as well. Dictionary.com included the word and credited it to their paper-sister publication Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English. So the lexicographer's folly exists. Dictionary.com have since removed the word.

Mind you, I think esquivalient is rather a beautiful word, and intend to use it for every workshy lollygagger I come across.

Of course, in some ways, Blackadder got there first with his contrafibularities.

American readers should now recognise Hugh Laurie.

P.S. This article also has a nice bit about Mountweazels.

Apocolocyntosis

2011-09-23T12:37:00.002+01:00

Last night I was sending a text message in which I happened to use the word apocolocyntosis. I was shocked to discover that apocolocyntosis isn't in my phone's dictionary, but even more shocked when the lady I was texting replied that she didn't know what apocolocyntosis meant. Barbarians and heathens! I live among barbarians and heathens.

Apocolocyntosis is, of course, the act of being turned into a pumpkin, or pumpkinification if you like. Now, I'll admit that it's not that useful a word when you're not talking about Cinderella; but, when you are, it's invaluable.

It's also a nice, single, concise word if, for example, a loved one were turned suddenly into a pumpkin and you had to call the emergency services.

The origin of the word has nothing to do with Cinderella. It was the title of a satire by Seneca the Younger. When Roman Emperors died they used to go through an apotheosis, which is when you become a god. So Seneca wrote a satire about how when Claudius died the gods wouldn't have him and he was instead sent to hell. Seneca describes Claudius' deathbed thus:

The last words [Claudius] was heard to speak in this world were these. When he had made a great noise with that end of him which talked easiest, he cried out, "Oh dear, oh dear! I think I have made a mess of myself." Whether he did or no, I cannot say, but certain it is he always did make a mess of everything.

At Claudius' funeral procession they chant this:
Mourn, mourn, pettifoggers, ye venal crew,
And you, minor poets, woe, woe is to you!
And you above all, who get rich quick
By the rattle of dice and the three card trick.

And as I'm a pettifogging minor poet who can actually do the three card trick, I find these lines unutterably tragic.

The Emperor Claudius

P.S. Just to be precise the name Apocolocyntosis was ascribed to Seneca's satire (probably) by Cassius Dio.

An Actual Oubliette

2011-09-22T13:00:00.001+01:00

I had often heard and used the word oubliette, but until a couple of weeks ago I had never actually seen one.

An oubliette is a dungeon with an entrance (usually in the ceiling) but no exit. If you meet a chap you don't like, you can throw him into an oubliette and then forget about him entirely. The French for forget is oublier, hence the name.

Of course, despite the rumours, I don't own an actual dungeon, but the word is so useful as a metaphor that I use it regularly. I've even used the word on this blog here and here. The OED mentions that oubliette is almost always used figuratively. Then, on holiday, I was visiting the castle of Najac and saw this sign:

A ladre, by the way, is a miser. So the sign says Tower of the Misers, Ancient Oubliette. And next to the sign was a door (apologies for the quality of the photos, I had only my phone).

And here is the best photograph I could take of the interior of the metaphor.

It only remains to mention that I also visited Albi, which is the town after which the Albigensian Heresy was named, although it's better known as Catharism, which means purity. Catharism is very important in the history of buggery as I explained in this old post.

Essoinment

2011-09-21T13:18:00.000+01:00

Whenever you read the minutes of a meeting, whether it's a board-meeting, an AGM or an orgy, you will find near the top the cumbersome phrase "apologies for absence", or in some particularly verbose cases "apologies for non-attendance". This can be done away with. You see, there is a single (and singularly useful) word for that: essoinment.

Essoinment is the act of essoining, and essoining is (OED):

To offer an excuse for the non-appearance of (a person) in court; to excuse for absence.

So all that the minutes of the meeting really need is Essoinments followed by a list of names.

Too many essoinments.

A ------ of iPhones

2011-09-20T12:20:00.000+01:00

The other day my sister asked what the collective noun should be for iPhones (there was a pile of them on the table), and I couldn't think of one.

Just as there is a pride of lions and a murder of crows, there are all sorts of odd collective nouns hanging around the language - for example a nonethriving of jugglers.

Once*, several British Prime Ministers past and present were gathered together and somebody asked what the collective noun should be for such a meeting. Harold Macmillan suggested that they should be called a lack of principles.

Anyway, if anyone can come up with a collective noun for iPhones, please leave it in the comments. An imaginary prize will be awarded for the best.

Am I doing this right?

*The details of this story vary enormously but they all seem to agree that it was Macmillan who came up with the bon mot.

The Burrito Bureaucracy

2011-09-19T12:31:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, I sat at my desk eating a burrito, without realising that there was any connection between the two.

Burrito is Spanish for little donkey. Apparently this is because a burrito looks like a donkey's ear (and as you'll know from a previous post donkeys' ears are so long that they spawned the phrase donkeys [y]ears).

Anyway, a burrito is a little burro and burro comes from Spanish burrico, and burrico comes from Latin burricus meaning horse, and burricus probably comes from burrus meaning reddish brown.

But that same Latin burrus went into French as bure meaning dark brown. The French, being a literate lot, started to cover their writing desks with dark brown cloth. These desks became known as bureaus. Soon the office that contained the desk came to be known as a bureau, and when the office and officialdom rule, you have a bureaucracy.

And hence the bureaucratic Flying Burrito Brothers.

Anadiplosis and Anaphora

2011-09-16T11:15:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, I was shuffling along the street with my iPod on shuffle. These two shuffles are, incidentally, related. Dragging your feet became fidgeting which in turn became moving the cards around in a pack. Anyway, I was about to shuffle off this mortal coil when on came David Bowie's song Modern Love, and I was suddenly struck by the rhetorical arrangement of the chorus.

Anaphora is the technical term for starting a series of clauses with the same words. A classic example is Winston Churchill's speech:

...we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender...

It's a simple and surefire winner of a rhetorical technique. Another simple trope is anadiplosis. This is where you use the last word or phrase of one clause as the first word or phrase of the next. Yoda once pointed out that:

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

So what do you get if you cross Winston Churchill with Yoda? You get the chorus of David Bowie's Modern Love, which goes like this:

Never going fall for
Modern love, walks beside me,
Modern love, walks on by,
Modern love gets me to the church on time.
Church on time terrifies me
Church on time makes me party
Church on time puts my trust in God and man.
God and man, no confessions,
God and man, no religion,
God and man don't believe in
Modern love.

It's a great little chorus and, if you think about, is simply an exercise in anadiplosis and anaphora that comes full circle to the refrain of modern love.

And here is a beautiful cover version.

Elephantship and other Ships

2011-09-15T17:15:00.001+01:00

Sometimes, the dictionary disappoints. You see the word elephantship and your mind races, your imagination buds and blooms, as you imagine a boat manned entirely by pachyderms. However, the OED defines elephantship as the personality of an elephant. It's the same ship that you find in lordship, hardship, friendship, and governorship, which is not a ship manned by the gubernatorial.

It's also the same ship that you find in worship, which is really worth-ship. There used to be a lot more of these words but they have slowly dwindled and vanished. I shall revive them, though, and set sail on a drunkship to gladship.

Hell yeah.