It is of immense importance to absolutely everyone that The Illustrated Etymologicon is now published, out, in the shops, for sale, and begging to be bought.
It's the same text as the original Etymologicon, but now filled, on each and every page, with delicious illustrations.
Is is therefore illustrious.
Illustrious and illustration both come from the Latin illustratus which meant lit up. In English the word illustration came first, and it meant to teach by means of examples, shedding light upon an abstract subject.
The Illustrated Etymologicon is therefore both illuminating and illuminated, enlightening and enlightened. It is, if you like, an illuminated manuscript.
The book is available in most English speaking territories, and in the lost former colony of the USA it can still be obtained by ordering it from The Book Depository.
Incidentally, the mini in miniature has nothing whatsoever to do with the mini in minute or minimum or miniskirt. In Medieval illuminated manuscripts there were little pictures painted by little monks. These pictures were often painted using red lead or minium. Because of that the verb for painting little pictures was miniare. And because of that the little pictures were called miniatures. The word then got applied to anything small.
Anyhow, all your Christmas presents are going to be this:
Pancallism is the belief that everything is beautiful, or at least everything that exists, which is quite a lot of things.
The idea, occurred to some medieval scholastic philosophers. Their reasoning went roughly like this.
God exists.
Existence is one of the features of God.
All the features of God are beautiful.
Hence existence is a kind of beauty.
I exist.
Therefore, I must be beautiful.
This is the sort of positive thinking that makes Medieval philosophy such fun; I expect it's also an extremely effective argument to put on your internet dating profile.
I came across the word pancallistic (the adjective) while reading Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages by Umberto Eco. The book's a little dry, but it's beautifully short.
The etymology, by the way is Greek. Pan means everything, as in a pandemic which is a disease that has spread to all the people. The demic there is the same as democracy, which is government by the people.
The callism bit comes from kalos, which meant beautiful and is the same root that you get when looking a pretty things in a kaleidoscope, or admiring somebody who is callipygian.
Since you ask, callipygian means possessing a beautiful bottom, and is also a very useful word to use on your internet dating profile, I expect.
The Inky Fool discussing Medieval aesthetics.
P.S. Another thing that exists and is beautiful is The Illustrated Etymologicon, which will be released on November the fourth.
Today is, of course, the 74th anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting. The event is celebrated by lexicographers everywhere because it gave the English language two new terms: flying saucer and pelicanist.
Kenneth Arnold was a businessman and aviator who, on June 24th 1947, saw nine thingummybobs flying past Mount Ranier in Washington State at over a thousand miles an hour. Or, he says he saw them. This blog post will not answer the great question as to whether extraterrestrial life visits earth, because, though I know the answer, I'm not telling.
The question as to who first called these thingummybobs flying saucers is rather vexed. Kenneth Arnold says that he didn't use the term, that he only said that the motion of their flight resembled a saucer being skipped across the surface of a lake. However, there was a journalist who insisted that Arnold said the objects looked like saucers, and the term could have been invented by any of a hundred headline writers who wrote about the Great Event.
(Incidentally, I have skipped a lot of stones across lakes, but never a saucer. I've never even heard of somebody skipping a saucer across a lake, and can only dream of having that much redundant crockery. We all need a dream.)
However it happened, and whoever said what, the term flying saucer came into being as a result of this event 74 years ago today.
Of course, there were naysayers. There were those who said that the flying saucers were, in fact, clouds, or very distant mountain tops, or very near drops of water on the windows of Mr Arnold's own aircraft, or pelicans.
The pelican theory is curious. Pelicans are large birds. Their wingspans can be over three metres (ten feet). But they don't really resemble saucers and they don't fly at over a thousand miles an hour unless they're in the most terrible hurry.
The pelican theory is a bit silly. It attempts to explain away a not-that-believable story with an even less likely one. It would be a lot simpler to suggest that Mr Arnold imagined the whole thing. The pelicans are unlikely, and if I have learned anything in this life, it is that one should never rely on an unlikely pelican.
So silly is the pelican idea, that flying saucer enthusiasts coined the term pelicanist for those who would explain away all sightings with unlikely substitutes. By extension the word can be used for anybody who proposes a preposterous but naturalistic explanation for an inexplicable event.
(Incidentally, and without wanting to sidetrack myself, there's a lot of pelicanism when it comes to Shakespeare. The (idiotic) theory that William Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare often runs something along the lines of "no man could never have written something so wonderful, that's simply not believable; so it must have been written by someone else").
Anyway, there are a lot of pelicans on the west coast of America. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the bay of St Francis they found an island absolutely covered with them. So they named it Pelican Island. Except being Spaniards they did it all in Spanish. And that's why San Francisco bay contains the island of Alcatraz, because alcatraz is just Spanish for pelican. It comes from the Arabic al ghattas meaning sea-eagle.
The English used to use the word alcatras, largely because pelicans aren't native to Britain so we might as well use the Spanish word. However, we never seemed to be entirely sure what an alcatras was. The OED lists alcatras as an English word, or at least a word used by the English, but one of the definitions is "Perhaps: an albatross".
This makes perfect sense because albatross is simply an alternative way of pronouncing alcatraz. Pelicans and albatrosses are both huge nautical birds, and could quite forgivably be mistaken for each other. This means that they are unidentified flying objects.
Of course, the albatross/alcatraz/alcatras has earned an immortal place in English literature:
A gorgeous bird is the pelican,
Whose beak will hold more than his bellican.
He can put in his beak
Food enough for a week.
But I’m damned if I see how in hellecan.
The Inky Fool was in a terrible hurry
P.S. The proximate cause of this post was The Times Crossword on Tuesday. The clue for 1 across was:
1 Pelican that's not more, unfortunately right after feline enters (8)
right after feline = cat r
that enters the word alas, which means unfortunately.
The week is a curious thing: the division of our lives into a revolving, unfinishing cycles of seven days. Especially as seven days bears no relation to anything at all.
Some people, rather foolishly, think that seven days is a quarter of the lunar cycle: seven days from new moon to half full, another week to full, another week waning to half, and another week until it disappears. But there's a problem. This system is two days out. Four weeks is 28 days, and a lunar cycle lasts 30 days.
This means that the two systems go out of sync very quickly, and after only seven months they are as far as could possibly be. Time is a useful thing, because we use it. If I lend you some money and want it back after seven moons, we need to both agree on what that means. If one of us is counting 28 weeks and the other is watching the sky, there is liable to be a fight.
Anyhow, I've been reading The Week: An essay on the origin and development of the seven-day cycle by F.H. Colson. It has been something of a revelation.
The week began with the Jews. Efforts to backdate it to Babylon are implausible, largely for the reasons given above. Whatever you may think of the first chapter of the book of Genesis (and opinions, I'm told, vary), the Jews had been resting every seventh day since at least the first half of the first millennium BC. And the Romans thought this was amazing, and weird and crazy.
The Romans looked at the Jews rather in the way that some modern Westerners look at Tibet or India. The Jews were eastern and mysterious and they had this mysterious ancient religion, which was really ancient, and probably contained some really profound kind of ancient wisdom that was really ancient.
So just as rich bored Londoners can suddenly get really keen on some ancient Tibetan practice as a bit of a fad, so the rich bored Roman could bore everybody at the dinner party about how he had taken up resting on the seventh day, and it had really grounded him, and you should try it yourself, because those Jews are just so, so ancient. And did you know they don't have statues of their god because it's a really spiritual religion?
Juvenal made fun of such people in his 14th Satire, although his main target was idle people who do things just because they're fashionable, and then get Much Too Into It. You start with the faddish Sabbath and the new-fangled seven-day week, and the you get carried away, and so do your children.
Some who have had a father who reveres the Sabbath, worship nothing but the clouds, and the divinity of the heavens, and see no difference between eating swine's flesh, from which their father abstained, and that of man; and in time they take to circumcision. Having been wont to flout the laws of Rome, they learn and practise and revere the Jewish law, and all that Moses committed to his secret tome, forbidding to point out the way to any not worshipping the same rites, and conducting none but the circumcised to the desired fountain. For all which the father was to blame, who gave up every seventh day to idleness, keeping it apart from all the concerns of life.
Resting every seven days is a gateway drug.
The important thing here is that the seven-day week spread through the Roman Empire before Christianity did. The Christians existed at the time, but they were still a tiny little sect. The Romans were still basically interested in pagan gods and astrology.
The Romans loved astrology and did everything according to the Seven Planets, which wandered across the sky. So far as the Roman were concerned there were the Fixed Stars (all those ones in the background that never move in relation to each other), and then there were seven things visible with the naked eye that wandered around. They were the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These were wandering stars and in Latin each one was a stella errans, but the Greeks were still around and still speaking Greek and the Greek for wanderers is planetes. Hence planet, which just means wanderer.
Pluto may not be a planet, but the sun is.
So you've got the seven day week and seven planets so of course you put them together. Saturnday, Sunday, Moonday etc. That way you could have an Astrological Week, and if you were planning to start a war or fall in love you could find the Right Day To Do It. The full Latin week went like this:
Sunday = dies Solis = Sun/solar = Apollo
Monday = dies Lunae = Moon/lunar = changeable
Tuesday = dies Martis = Mars/Martian = God of War = martial as in court martial
Wednesday = dies Mercurii = Mercury = mercurial, ephemeral
Thursday = dies Iovis = Jove/Jupiter = jovial
Friday = dies Veneris = Venus goddess of love = to venerate of love something/venereal disease
Saturday = dies Saturni = Saturn = unlucky/miserable/saturnine
The Romans loved their astrological week and even tried to apply it retrospectively to the Jews, who obviously didn't do anything on Saturday because Saturn was unlucky. You can still see the Tuesday to Friday gods in French and Spanish
Mardi Martes Mars
Mercredi Miercoles Mercury
Jeudi Jueves Jove
Vendredi Viernes Venus
And, weirdly enough, all the Roman names survive in Welsh: Dydd-sull, -llun, -marwth, -mercher, -iou, -gwener, -sadwrn.
When the Christians came along they obviously tried to Christianise things. Saturday was the sabbath and Sunday was the Lord's Day, thus the Spanish Sabado and Domingo. But the week spread much faster than Christianity did. It arrived in Northern Europe while they were still pagan. That's why in English (and German) the days were passed over to equivalent pagan gods.
Mars was identified with the Germanic god Tyw (who's actually etymologically related to Zeus and Jove), hence Tuesday.
Mercury was identified with Wodin (whom you've heard of from the Vikings) hence Wednesday.
Thor and Jupiter were both Thunder-Gods, so Jove's Day became Thor's Day/Thursday in English. But in German they're more direct and just call it Donnerstag, which literally means Thunder Day.
(That's the same Donner that you get in the reindeer names Donner and Blitzen, which mean thunder and lightning, which is why the German army's tactic of lightning warfare, was called the blitzkrieg, or just the blitz, which I like to think of as London being attacked by flying reindeer.)
Venus was identified with the female goddess Frigg, hence Friday.
The Northern Europeans didn't use the planets because they weren't into astrology, because it's much too cloudy round these parts. In England you can detect the sun occasionally, in Wales never. The other planets might as well not exist.
But the week was just popular. It spread northward even without planets to pull it there. It is strange to think that there is no seven-day week in Homer, nor in any of the Greek dramatists; and strange to think that this arbitrary seven day cycle has been running without pause for at least two and half thousand years, probably much longer.
It is also strange to think that two thousand years ago people thought that there was a correct day of the week to be in love, as though from Saturday to Thursday you might be quite icy and indifferent and then suddenly perk up on the day of Venus. We moderns would never, ever have such a silly idea.
The nomenclature of England is a foggy thing, cunningly designed to confuse foreigners, who will wonder, in their simple foreign way, why they're consuming a Devonshire cream tea in Devon, why an earl's wife is a countess, why Nottingham had a sheriff, and why the Welsh Marches rather than march.
Thank God that I'm an Englishman, and was therefore born confused, rather than having to become so, like a mere Frenchman.
The explanation though is reasonably simple.
Once upon an Old English time there were shires: Hampshire, Wiltshire, Nottinghamshire etc. The Anglo-Saxons lived in these and kept the Hobbit population under control.
Each shire was ruled for the king by a shire-official, or shire-reeve, or scir-gerefa, or sheriff. That's why there was a Sheriff of Nottingham. He would, in fact, have been sheriff of Nottinghamshire.
The Sheriff was therefore an Important Chap, and the Old English word for an Important Chap was an Eorl, or Earl.
Then, in 1066, the Normans invaded and Frenchified everything. The Normans like their faluting to be high and their pants to be fancy, so they decided to call Shires by the Latinate word county.
The head of a county should of course have been called a Count, but he was already being called an Earl and it was hard to change.
Therefore a Norman might consider himself to be the Count of the County around Oxford, but the peasants all called him the Earl of Oxfordshire. The peasants won in the end, because they were speaking English, which is a much better language than all the others.
So that's why England has counties but not counts; the counts became earls, because that's what the peasants called them. But the wives of the counts never went near the peasants at all, and that's why they're still called countesses.
The wonderful English language had, of course, to be protected from its natural enemies like the Scots who wanted to pronounce every vowel as "ae", and the Welsh, who had a language based entirely on cheating at Scrabble. To do this there were particularly militant border counties called Marches.
An earl in one of these shires could have called himself the count of the county, but he preferred to sound all military and tough and point out that he ran a march. So he called himself a Marquis and he called his wife a marchioness.
A March, by the way, has nothing to do with marching, but it is vaguely related to a bookmark as they both mark your place. Moreover, counts don't count.
Earl Dracula
N.B. I have slightly simplified history so that it conforms more perfectly to etymology. Truth is far preferable to fact. The facts are rarely elegant, and should therefore be ignored.
There's a website where you can buy an Apple Macintosh for 40p. Well, in fact, you can buy three for £1.20. That amounts to the same thing. Also, it's not really an Apple Macintosh, it's a McIntosh Apple; but the one is named after the other.
Back in 1811 a Canadian fellow called John McIntosh started selling a new cultivar of apple, which became known as the McIntosh apple. It is, apparently, a tasty apple. I'm not sure I've ever eaten one but it's one of the top fifteen apple varieties in the United States, so it's got to be all right.
Many years later, there was a man called Steve Jobs who ate a lot of fruit. One day, whilst on a fruitarian diet, he visited an apple farm (presumably he was hungry), and decided that "apple" would be a good name for the new electonic gizmo and fizzbang company that he was starting.
(N.B. There's a myth that it's named after that apple that was found at the scene of the [alleged] suicide of Alan Turing, but that's not true.)
Anyway, there was now a company called Apple, named after apples, and it had employees, including a chap called Jef Raskin. Jef Rasking liked apples as well as working for Apple, and his absolute favourite kind of apple was the McIntosh Apple, so he picked it as the name for the new computer they were working on.
Unfortunately for Jef there was already a tech company called McIntosh Laboratory Inc, and so they had to alter the spelling, and that is how Mr McIntosh's apple became the Apple Macintosh.
The Italian for a butterfly is a farfalla, and so the pasta that looks like a butterfly is called farfalle. One can think of this as beautiful, or one can think of a plate heaped high with dead butterflies. The choice is yours.
It's a lot better than thinking of linguine as a plateful of little tongues, which is rather horrid. Linguine is a diminutive, as is spaghetti. The Italian for string is spago; the diminutive form, the little string, is a spaghetto; and the plural is spaghetti.
Vermicelli are little worms. Orrecchiette are severed ears (well, I assume they're severed, as otherwise there'd be a head on the plate). Fettuccine are pleasanter, they're little ribbons.
Pasta, of course, is just a paste, a dough. It's the same paste that your find in pastels and pasties and impasto paintings. If you mash up a genre into a paste, you get a pastiche.
It can be rather fun to think of linguine al'arrabiata as little tongues in angry sauce, or it can put you right off your meal. As an Englishman, I feel that these Italian secrets should be kept in Italy; they might give me nightmares; so I shall stick to eating good British toad-in-the-hole.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears because I'm hungry.
Sometimes an etymology is so obvious that I can't believe that I've never noticed it, and I marvel at my own duncedom.
The Greek letter omega, as in alpha and omega, was just the big O, the mega-O, O-mega. The shorter O in the Greek alphabet is called called omicron, or small O.
I am/was able to recite the whole Greek alphabet, and I had never noticed.
Another hidden big is Charlemagne, who wasn't really called Charlemagne. He was just a big Charlie. Well, to be precise he was Carl the Great, that was written in Latin as Carolus Magnus and that ended up as Charlemagne.
Big Charlie was the son of Pepin the Short, who is still just known as Pepin the Short. Oddly enough Pepin the Short wasn't actually short; he just had short hair. But that will never change the way I think of him, just as I shall always think of John of Gaunt as a pale, bony man.
Pepin the Short's dad was Charles Martel, except he wasn't really. He was called Charles, and he was nicknamed The Hammer, which, in French, is martel. His influence lives on in the work of the modern poet Stanley Kirk Burrell, who is almost universally known as MC Hammer.
MC is short for Master of Ceremonies. As as shortening it's first recorded in 1790:
It was Tyson's Benefit, and as he is my acquaintance, independent of being M:C:, it was but decent that at least one of us should appear there.
Master is a much older word. It goes back to the Old English maegester, which goes back to the Latin magister (literally meaning bigger one), which is cognate with the Greek mega, which is why omega just means Big O.
Defeated the Umayyad invasion of Aquitaine
N.B. Some people say that MC stands for Mic Controller. They are silly people.
I have, in my solitude, taken up playing the violin. Fiddling while Rome does not burn. I have long suspected that the only thing I truly grasp is nonsense, now it is fiddlesticks.
Violin is the diminutive of viola, and viola come from the Latin vitula which meant stringed instrument, and vitula was named after Vitula, the Goddess of Joy. This is presumably on the basis that playing music makes you joyful, a hypothesis I have disproved by experiment.
The Romans, it seems, exported their vitulas to the Old High Germans. The Old High Germans pronounced the V as an F (quite forgivable as they are similar sounds) and also pronounced the T as a D (likewise forgivable), and the result was that they called it a fidula, and the English ended up calling it a fiddle.
Anyway, the English started fiddling, moving their hands and fingers around whilst trying to summon back the last screams of the dying cat. The result was the more common verb fiddle meaning to move your hands about pointlessly.
So pointless was it all, so very unpointed, that the bows of violins, the fiddlesticks, became by the C17th an exclamation meaning stuff and nonsense, nonsense and stuff.
For some reason unknown to me vaccines have been much in the news of late. It's all the fault of a fellow called Edward Jenner (1749-1823) who had the eccentric idea of preventing smallpox in humans by injecting them with cows, or possibly cowpox.
Cowpox is a demure disease, but, once you had got used to it, you could fight off smallpox, which was a dastardly disease.
The Latin for cow was vacca, and the Latin name of cowpox is variolae vaccinae. So Dr Jenner called his new invention vaccination, which therefore means something like cowification.
The Spanish had a much better idea. Instead of injecting diseased cows into people, they raised cattle, slaughtered them, and then ate them. This is less medically interesting, but much more delicious.
The Spanish were so keen on cow-herding that they discovered a new continent called America and filled it with cows. Because Spanish is derived from Latin, the Spanish word for cow was vaca, and the Spanish word for the men who herded cows was vaquero.
However, the Spanish can't tell the difference between the letter V and the letter B. So when the North Americans imported the word for their own English-speaking cowboys, they called them buckayros, and later buckaroos.
A buckaroo is just a Latinate cowboy. He has nothing to do with a bucking bronco, and everything to do with a vacca.
In 1989 Hasbro produced a children's game called Buckaroo! This involves putting things on a plastic mule, but, etymologically, it should really be a cow.
This is a film about distressed Wykehamists.
P.S. The Spanish word vaqueros also means jeans, as that is what they wore.
And they're variously available in fifteen languages and counting. Well, to be honest, the first three are pretty untranslatable. But the others have been done.
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