Isolation, Insualtion, Islands and Insulin

No man is an island, although I confess I am becoming a peninsula.

The Latin for island was insula, and something that was almost an island was a peninsula. Therefore when people needed a posh word for turning something into an island (these necessities arise), the English word insulation was invented. Originally, it literally meant turning into an island. In 1854 you could, with a straight face, write:

The insulation of peninsulas by the destruction of the isthmus which previously connected them with the mainland.

Then insulation started to mean anything that cut something off from the outside, and started to be applied to electricity and central heating. You could also talk about people being insular, if they lived on islands and were a tad unfriendly.

In the 19th century there was a German fellow called Paul Langerhans. Paul started cutting people open and discovering things. He discovered the Langerhan cells in the skin, and then the Langerhan layer (also in the skin), and then he looked in the pancreas and found little islands of cells that are called the islets of Langerhans. Then he moved to Madeira, became insular, wrote a guidebook and developed an unhealthy interest in sea worms.

Anyhow, the islets of Langerhans also have a technical Latin name: insulae pancreaticae. And the important chemical that they produce is therefore called insulin

All of these words were invented by clever fellows who knew Proper Latin. But in Italy, when the Roman Empire declined and fell, they forgot Proper Latin and started to speak Sloppy Latin or Italian as it is now known.

In Sloppy Latin they stopped pronouncing the N in insula and so insulatus became isolato, and the French nicked that and got isolé, and the insular English nicked that and got isolated. Later we decided that this adjective needed a verb and noun so we invented isolate and isolation. These are just the Sloppy Latin version of insulate and insulation.

The very odd thing is that none of these words are etymologically related to island. Island isn't Latin at all. It comes from Middle English yland, and that comes from Old English igland. The silent S got added a lot later, presumably in confusion.

Anyhow, back in the day (by which I mean Medieval and Early Modern times) whenever a reasonably well-off fellow died, his family would run down to the church with a bit of money and pay to have the bell toll. Other reasonably well-off people would hear this and they would send a servant to see who had gone to join the majority.

Which brings us to lovely and lamentable prose of John Donne's Devotions on Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. 

So go and wash your hands.

Paul Langerhans contemplating sea-worms.

Loo Roll and Role Play

As an important piece of public information in these time of panic and brouhaha, I want to let everybody know that the role that an actor plays and the loo roll or toilet roll that have become so inexplicably fashionable of late, are exactly the same word spelt differently (or spelled differently).

An actor used to be given a roll of paper on which his lines were written. That roll was his role.

In Shakespeare's time, when everything was being hand-copied before production, each actor would be given a roll that had only his lines and cues on. So the roll only contained the role, and if you were given a particular roll then...

Well, you get the point.

And before anybody objects, all Shakespeare's actors were male (apart from the ones that weren't).

Incidentally, if anybody is really keen on loo roll, you should read Bum Fodder: An Absorbing History of Toilet Paper by Richard Smyth. Can't recommend it highly enough. I keep my copy handy.

P.S.
In days of old
When knights were bold
And paper not invented,
They used a little bit of grass
And went away contented.

The Inky Fool panic-dreaming.

Pangolins and Idle Orangutans

I was sautéing some pangolin the other day, when it occurred to me that there are several Malay animals in the menagerie of etymology. (It also occurred to me that the I was filled with a vast apocalyptic dread as to how to spell sautéing).

Pangolin comes from the Malay pen-goling, which means the roller. This is because of the pangolin's endearing habit of rolling up into a scaly ball when it's frightened, and nothing to do with the delicious twizzlers you can make out of its rump.

Gecko is Malay, and is said to be imitative of that creature's cry. Anybody who has heard the melancholy cry of the distant gecko wandering in moonlit woods, mourning his lost love, will know the sound of true sadness. I have not.

Cockatoo means elder sibling. I don't know why. I have an elder sister, but she is featherless, to my knowledge.

Orangutan is Malay for man of the forest. Orang is man and hutan is forest. The name was recorded by a Dutch explorer called Jacobus Bontius in 1611. The locals told him that the orangutan was actually able to talk, but preferred not to, in case somebody asked it to do some work. This seems perfectly sensible to me, and nobody has proved otherwise.

Some historians even think that the orangutan recorded by Bontius wasn't an ape at all, but a a tribe of unfriendly and idle forest-dwellers. Some historians have no sense of fun.

The important thing about these animals - the pangolin, the gecko, the cockatoo, and the orangutan - is that, when you put them all together, you find that you have a delicious casserole.

I recommend panic-buying tins of all of them.

Incidentally, the Germans have a lovely word for panic-buying: hamsterkauf. Kauf means shopping and hamster means just what you think it does. The idea is that hamsters store food in their little cheeks, and that panic-buyers are doing something equally sweet.

Panic not, though, dear reader. If you're wondering what it's like to sit all alone for weeks at a time with only a tin of soup to tell your troubles to; I can report that it's not that bad. I've been doing it for years. It all depends on the soup.

The Inky Fool hears the call to work.

Macbeth, Pilate and the Washing of Hands

There has been much chitter and chatter of late about the washing of hands. A central question is what you should sing or recite to yourself while you do it. This is all down to a little virus that encases itself in a protective layer of fat, fat that is destroyed by twenty seconds contact with soap. Thus the virus may be killed (rather than washed off).

Nobody seems to have suggested the very obvious, greatest hand-washing speech in literature. Lady Macbeth:

Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why, then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?--Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.

The way I read that, it's almost exactly twenty seconds. Of course, Lady Macbeth only believes that she's washing her hands as she's mad and haunted by guilt, but most of modern Britain is too, or so I hear.

You could also take her husbands earlier hand-washing efforts, when he's still got the king's blood on his hands.

Whence is that knocking?
How is't with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

That's also pretty much bang on twenty seconds. Incarnadine, by the way, is a verb meaning to make bloody.

Oddly enough, the term red-handed, as in caught red-handed. Comes from medieval Scottish law, presumably on the basis that a murderer caught red-handed still has blood on his (or her) hands.

The other great hand-washing scene is altogether too short. Pontius Pilate in Matthew, chapter 27:

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.

Apparently, in France Camus' novel The Plague has been selling rather well. I'm glad of this as La Peste is a much better book that Sartre's Les Mains Sales.

The Inky Fool whiles away twenty seconds

Diners, Restaurants, Automats and Flats

I've been asked (in this twittering world), about the difference between diners and restaurants. The distinction is simple, diners come from trains.

Originally, in 1890, the diner was the carriage of a railway train where food was served. It was what we would now probably call the dining car (that's what Johnny Cash called it in Folsom Prison Blues), or in Britain the buffet car (because you're buffeted by nastiness and expense). The way that the old-style dining car worked was that there was a counter down one side of the carriage, behind which was a grill etc; on the other side there were tables for the passengers to sit at and munch.

This proved an important point: it proved that it was possible to make a restaurant so thin that it could be transported by rail, or even by road. This meant that diner-like restaurants could be prefabricated* and then driven to wherever they were needed. As diners are mainly needed beside roads to serve hungry motorists, this led to a lot of business and a lot of burgers.

The original diners, therefore, were long and thin and looked rather like railway carriages, because they were built to be transported by road. Here's a picture of a typical diner from 1941:

Diners could be dumped anywhere. By coincidence I was reading a James Thurber short story the other day that has a husband and wife driving along and arguing about which diner to stop at:

'I think I know the one you mean,' she said, after a moment. 'It's right in the town and it sits at an angle from the road. They're never so good, for some reason.'

The husband explodes in angry hunger. She continues:

'I've noticed the ones that sit at an angle. They're cheaper, because they fitted them into funny little pieces of ground. The big ones parallel to the road are best.'

And she was probably right.

The diner is therefore a transportable form of the restaurant. A restaurant restores you. That's because it sells restoratives. It all derives from soup and Parisian law.

There was a Frenchman called Boulanger and in 1765 he opened a little place beside the Louvre that sold soup. The soup was of the bouillon style that we would normally call consommé, but the standard French term of the time was to call it a restorative or restaurant. Boulanger even put up a sign in the window saying:

Venite ad me omnes qui stomacho laboratis et ego vos restaurabo

Which is a sort of parody of the Sermon on the Mount. It means Come to me all whose stomachs are distressed, and I will restore you.

So far, so very normal. What was odd about all this was simply that Boulanger also served leg of lamb, and that was illegal. Only members of the caterers' guild were allowed to serve cooked solids, it seems, so the caterers' guild sued Boulanger.

To everybody's surprise, they lost. I don't know the reason. I know nothing of Parisian bylaws of the C18th and I'm not about to start studying them. As far as I can tell, though, this created a legal precedent for a new kind of eating establishment outside of guild control. These new establishments became known as restaurants.

Finally, as this post has been going on a long while now, there's the automat. I never realised that an automat was a kind of American restaurant until I watched the film Easy Living recently. Essentially, an automat was a self-service place. There were lots of meals but they were kept behind glass in little boxes. You had to insert some coins to open the window. Then you took your food to the table to eat. Here's one of the automat scenes from Easy Living:



It was the cheap and cheerful place for a hard-up New York girl to go and get a bite to eat. And that goes to explain the line in Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend

A kiss may be grand but it won't pay the rental
On your humble flat, or help you at the automat
Men grow cold as girls grow old
And we all lose our charms in the end
But square cut or pear shaped
These rocks don't lose their shape
Diamonds are a girl's best friend.



A single line therefore contains an incomprehensible Americanism - automat - and a Britishism - humble flat - where the Americans would usually say apartment. That's probably because the song was co-written by Leo Robin (American) and Jule Styne (British).

Mind you, the fully British Flanders and Swann wrote the lines:

When they whispered Napoleon paid Josephine's rent
"That's nonsense," said Bonaparte.
"She lives on her own, apart.
In her own apart-
Ment"


*Like a sprout.

P.S. The ever-excellent 99% Invisible did an episode on automats. You can read or hear it here.

P.P.S. I thoroughly recommend Easy Living, or any film with Carole Lombard. My Man Godfrey is the best, but Easy Living, it seems, is on Youtube.

P.P.P.S. I wouldn't normally recommend that, but you can't buy the DVD for some reason.

P.P.P.P.S. The Thurber story, since you ask, was called A Couple of Hamburgers.