Farm Tax

Today I have been paying the farmer. Because, of course, farmers aren't farmers.

Some people have trade surnames: Mr Baker, Mr Butcher, Mr Farmer etc. And these people happily imagine that in some way off medieval time they had an ancestor who was a baker or a butcher or a farmer. The first two are right, but the Farmers are wrong. Because a farmer is a taxman. Or was.

The name has nothing to do with farms.

Once upon a time, there was the Medieval Latin word firma, which meant a fixed payment. (It's related in this to firm, firmament, affirm etc). From this you got the Old French fermier and the English farmer all meaning tax collector, or one who collects a fixed payment.

So Chaucer wrote (with his mind on what I'm doing today):

Him ought not be... cruel As is a farmer to do the harm he can.

This meaning of farmer actually survived all the way to the C19th, although by that time it had become rather odd.

But, feudally, rich landowners used to collect taxes on the land they owned, and they would have middle-men who were responsible for collecting the tax from a particular area. These tax farmers were responsible for a single farm from a single piece of land. They often had responsibility for making sure that it was cultivated its most profitable extent. Often they lived there as a tenant farmer.

People these days buy time-share apartments, which are often just referred to as time-shares. In the same way, the method of payment slowly came to be associated with the activity of agriculture. So the old words husbandman and churl were slowly replaced. And by the late C16th, farmer had become the standard word for somebody who simply owned a farm.

But the surname dates from the C13th. And that's why I've been paying the farmer.

Moors and Marrakech

The weather in England is, frankly, deplorable. So I've booked a ticket to Marrakech in Morocco, only to find that they're the same place, etymologically speaking.

Algeria is named after the city of Algiers (from the Arabic Al-Jazair "the islands"). Tunisia is named after the city of Tunis (which probably means something, but nobody can decide what). And Morocco is named after Marrakech (from the Arabic Maghrib-Al-Aqsa "the far west").

But wait (I hear you shriek), why did the As in Marrakech turn to the Os in Morocco? And why wasn't it named after Tangiers? And...

Very well, Tangiers had already given its name to a fruit called the tangerine, and anyway Marrakech used to be the capital. As for the As to Os, they're much more fun and will get you straight to the Steve Miller Band.

The French keep the As. They call it Maroc. And the Germans call it Marokko. But the English got terribly confused by Othello, and other Moors.

You see for years in English, the inhabitants of North Africa have been known as Moors, who were Moorish. So when a country got called Morocco, the English (who had just been watching some Shakespeare) decided that it must be named after the Moors and altered the spelling to make it look a little more like Moor-occo, which is what we blithely assumed it was.

But where does Moor come from? Well, once upon a time, during the Roman Empire, there was a province called Mauritania, and a chap from that province was called a Maurus, and hence Moor. And the odd thing is that even though Roman Mauritania was almost exactly where modern Morocco is, the words have nothing to do with each other (except in the English hybrid Morocco).

But it goes further! You see the English thought, for some reason, that their traditional folk dancing had originated amongst the Moors, hence Morris Dancing, which is really Moorish Dancing.

Moreover, there's a common first name meaning From Mauritania. Just as Adrian means from the Adriatic Sea, so all Maurices (and Morrises) should come from Mauritania.

Of course, they don't. For example, Maurice Prince of Orange was born in Dillenburg in Germany, and became Stadtholder of the Netherlands. That's why when Dutch sailors arrived at a little island in the Indian Ocean previously called Dina Arobi, they renamed it, in their prince's honour, Mauritius.

So, that's how you link Morocco, Marrakech, Mauritania, Moors, Morris Dancing, Mauritius, a novel by E.M. Forster and a song by the Steve Miller Band.

Of course, the second I'd booked my ticket to Marrakech, the weather forecast was changed and next week looks cold there too. Will we never be set free?

As a final titbit, the phrase "in Morocco" used to be a euphemism for naked.

The Servant Is Out Today

The Servant is out today: published and made public in the form of a Kindle Single. It is the strange story of a man who loses his identity. Also, it contains the line

It is much harder than you might think to show people your bottom.

Of which I am proud.

It's only £1.19 on the Kindle store. So, click this here link and give it a buy.

Tsundoku

The long-term tsunkdoku

I fear that the Japanese have been peeking into my bedroom. I can think of no other explanation for tsundoku, which is their word for a pile of books that you've bought and haven't got round to reading yet.

In fact, I'm not entirely clear whether tsundoku is the act of buying a book and not reading it, or the pile of books thusly abandoned on a bedside table. Or maybe it's both. Either way, it's a portmanteau of tsumu (to pile up) and doku (to read), and the verb is tsundeoku.

I actually have two tsundokus: one long-term tsundoku on the table in the corner, from which a book may, if it works very hard, graduate to the short-term tsundoku on my bedside table.

I suspect that those nosy Japanese have only seen the first one, as it's right by the window.

In other news, my short story The Servant will be available from tomorrow as a Kindle Single. It's a mystery story about a chap coming to terms with his own bottom, and you can order it now by following this link. As it only costs £1.19 it won't even matter that much if you consign forever to a virtual, ethereal, invisible tsundoku.

The short-term tsundoku

Gotham City and Ladies' Underwear

Herman Knickerbocker

Once upon a time, there were some goats (trust me, this is leading somewhere). These particular goats lived on a farm in Nottinghamshire a thousand years or so ago. This farm was therefore known as the Goat-Homestead or Gat-Ham. This later changed to Gotham. And the village of Gotham is still there to this day, just off the A453. There's a fish and chip shop there called Frydays.

Now, in the Medieval period, the people of Gotham gained a reputation for being fools. One much later account records them:

...some of the inhabitants engaged in endeavouring to drown an eel in a pool of water; some were employed in dragging carts upon a large barn, to shade the wood from the sun; others were tumbling their cheeses down a hill, that they might find their way to Nottingham for sale; and some were employed in hedging in a cuckoo which had perched upon an old bush which stood where the present one now stands.

This may all have been a subtle ruse, because madness was once considered contagious. So the people of Gotham just wanted to be left alone. But, either way, Gotham became a byword for foolishness, and the people of Gotham became a byword for Fools.

Now, we must journey forwards a few centuries, past the accidental discovery of a continent named America, to a chap called Washington Irving.

Washington Irving was living in New York (which has fewer castles than the old one) and was working for a satirical magazine called Salmagundi. Salmagundi had the sole porpoise of making fun of the good people of New York, and so, in 1807, in the 17th issue, Mr Irving referred to New York as "Gotham". This was nothing to do with Goths or anything like that. It was merely to imply that New Yorkers were all as foolish as the people from the goat farm.

Anyhow, Washington Irving was a New Yorker (who have few castles than Old Yorkers). He was thus and therefore acquainted with Herman Knickerbocker who represented New York in Congress. They were good friends and Irving said that they were like family. Mr Irving also had a plan to write a parodical history of New York under a pseudonym. As New York had originally been New Amsterdam, the pseudonym he chose was a Dutch one, based on his friend.

A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker came out in 1809. And, for our purposes, the important thing about it was that it fixed Knickerbocker as the stereotypical Dutch name. From then on, the original Dutch settlers of New York were called the knickerbockers, and the funny trousers (or pants) that they wore were called knickerbockers too.

Popularised by Mr Irving, and by George Cruickshank's illustrations, knickerbockers became a generalised term for odd bits of clothing worn beneath the waist. And thus and therefore, though American ladies wear panties, Englishwomen to this day wear knickers, which is just short for knickerbockers.