Blockbuster

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.

Crimean Clothes

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.

Quaquaversal Artillery

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

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

Some Shakespeare Criticism

The following comes from George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here. MacDonald Fraser, who would become famous for the Flashman books, was an officer of the Border Regiment and fought in Burma during the Second World War. Late in the campaign, just before the battle of Pyawbee, he records this little anecdote:

I got two paperbacks from home which I had requested: Henry V, which we had done in my last year at school and for which I had developed a deep affection, and Three Men in a Boat - not that I was a devotee of Jerome's, but I had felt that comedy and a reminder of the beauties of the English countryside wouldn't come amiss. I had also thought that it might be acceptable when passed round the section, but I didn't expect any takers for Shakespeare, intellectual snob that I was. The result was instructive. 


I was laying on my groundsheet, renewing acquaintance with Jerome and the tin of pineapple, when Sergeant Hutton squatted down beside me.


"W'at ye readin', then? W'at's this? 'Enry Vee - bloody 'ell, by William Shekspeer!" He gave me a withering look, and leafed over a page. "Enter Chorus. O for a muse of fire that wad... Fook me!" He riffled the pages. "Aye, well, we'll 'ev a look." And such is the way of sergeants, he removed it without by-your-leave; that's one that won't be away long, I thought.


I was wrong. Three days later it had not been returned, and having exhausted Jerome and the magazines, I was making do with the Fourteenth Army newspaper, SEAC, famous for its little cartoon character, Professor Flitt, a jungle infantryman who commented memorably on the passing scene. And I was reading a verse by the paper's film critic


I really do not care a heck
For handsome Mr Gregory Peck,
But I would knock off work at four
To see Miss Dorothy Lamour


when Hutton loafed up and tossed Henry V down beside me and seated himself on the section grub-box. A silence followed, and I asked if he had liked it. He indicated the book.


"Was Shekspeer ivver in th'Army?"


I said that most scholars thought not, but there were blanks in his life, so it was possible that, like his friend Ben Jonson, he had served in the Low Countries, or even in Italy. Hutton shook his head.


"If 'e wesn't in th'Army, Ah'll stand tappin' [I'm a Dutchman]. 'E knaws too bloody much aboot it, man."


This was fascinating. Hutton was a military hard case who had probably left school long before 14, and his speech and manner suggested that his normal and infrequent reading consisted of company orders and the sports headlines. But Shakespeare had talked to him across the centuries - admittedly on his own subject. I suggested hesitantly that the Bard might have picked up a good deal just from talking to military men; Hutton brushed the notion aside.


"Nivver! Ye knaw them three - Bates, an' them, talkin' afore the battle? Ye doan't get that frae lissenin' in pubs, son. Naw, 'e's bin theer." He gave me the hard, aggressive stare of the Cumbrian who is not to be contradicted. "That's my opinion, any roads. An' them oothers - the Frenchman, the nawblemen, tryin' to kid on that they couldn't care less, w'en they're shittin' blue lights? Girraway! An' the Constable tekkin' the piss oot o' watsisname -"


"The Dauphin."


"Aye." He shook his head in admiration. "Naw, ye've 'eerd it a' afore - in different wurrds, like. Them fower officers, the Englishman an' the Scotsman an' the Irishman an' the Welshman - Ah mean, 'e's got their chat off, 'esn't 'e? Ye could tell w'ich wez w'ich, widoot bein' told. That Welsh booger!" He laughed aloud, a thing he rarely did. "Talk till the bloody coos coom yam, the Taffies!" He frowned. "Naw, Ah nivver rid owt be Shekspeer afore - Ah mean, ye 'ear the name, like..." He shrugged eloquently. "Mind, there's times Ah doan't knaw w'at th' 'ell 'e's talkin' aboot -"


"You and me both," I said, wondering uneasily if there were more passages obscure to me than there were to him. He sat in for a moment and then misquoted (and I'm not sure that Shakespeare's version is better):


"There's nut many dies weel that dies in a battle. By Christ, 'e's reet theer. It's a good bit, that." He got up. "Thanks for the lend on't, Jock."


I said that if he'd liked it, he would like Henry IV, too. "Falstaff's bloody funny, and you'd like Hotspur -"


"'Ev ye got it?"


I apologised that I hadn't, and promised to write for it. By way of a trailer I told him as much as I remembered of Hotspur's "When the fight is done" speech, but I'm no Sean Connery, and although he nodded politely I could see I was a poor substitute for the written word.


He went off, leaving me to reflect that I had learned something more about Henry V, and Shakespeare. In his own way Hutton was as expert a commentator as Dover Wilson or Peter Alexander; he was a lot closer to Bates and Court and Williams (and Captains Jamy and Fluellen) than they could ever hope to be. And I still wonder if Shakespeare was in the Army.

Of course, by this rationale Shakespeare was also a king and, for that matter, an occasional woman. He would have been a prolific murderer and almost permanently suicidal. Some sort of allowance should, and never is, made for imagination. It's terribly unlikely that Shakespeare was in the army, or on the throne, or transgendered. However, his imagination was first rate.

In particular, his was an imagination not easily seduced. His wars are as horrid as they are heroic. Even in Henry V, which has its bellicose moments, he maintained terror among the valour and horror in the heroics.

I feel a trifle bad reproducing so much of a book, so run and buy it from Amazon here.

Another family Christmas turns sour

The Etymology of Ranks

The Antipodean wrote to ask why the army contains many majors and no minors. This ignores child soldiers, but is a good excuse for running from the bottom brass through to the top.

The modern ranks were only arranged a few hundred years ago. This means that many of the etymologies make no sense at all. Heads outrank horse-servants, and biggers are smaller.

A corporal has nothing to do with corporal punishment. He comes, via caporale and capo, from caput, the Latin for head*. This is odd as a corporal is the lowest and least of non-commissioned officers.

A sergeant is simply a servant, and is therefore superior to the head.

A lieu-tenant is simply French for a place-holder, or a substitute. The idea is that if I can't be present in person I can send a somebody to take my place and to act with my authority. American lieutenants are loo-tenants, because they're incontinent. English lieutenants are left-tenants, because they're all socialist. French lieutenants have women.

A captain, like corporal, derives from the Latin caput, meaning head.

Major is Latin for bigger. A major was originally a shortening of sergeant-major or bigger servant and his rank has been steadily rising. In Catch-22 a chap whose name is Major Major Major is promoted to the rank of major through an administrative error: thus becoming Major Major Major Major.

A colonel is, literally, a colonnade. A colonnade is a line of columns and a colonel is the chap marching at the head of a column. In a nutshell, colonels have nothing to do with kernels, and there is no truth in them.

Generals are, in general, the general head of the army. It is a shortening of captain general, which was formed along the same lines as attorney general and Estates General and other post-positive adjectives. Generals are therefore generic and genetic, ruling over a genus of soldiers.

I have always wilfully misunderstood Hamlet's line about a play being "caviar to the general" as referring to a gourmandising soldier. The phrase actually means that, just as caviar is disliked by the general public, but loved by gourmets, so the play he refers to is unpopular with the hoi polloi, but appreciated by those who know about such things. I am certain that Shakespeare must have used the phrase himself, before giving it to Hamlet.

Fields Marshals are not, etymologically, martial. Martial comes from Mars, the god of war and relates to martians. Marshals, on the other hand, are mare-skalkaz or horse-servants. Thus putting them, etymologically, below corporals, which shows how logical the army is. It also makes Marshall Ney's name even more amusing.

And soldiers themselves: the word derives, as I have already mentioned, from salt. This means that, if you're an officer, you have salty privates.

Incidentally, what do you get if you drop a grand piano on a barracks?

A flat major.

Now repeat with a pit-shaft.




*Although some say that the reverse is true.

Wagering the Wages of War

You can't really wage anything other than war. You can try, but it sounds rather odd. Indeed the phrase waging war gets stranger the more you look at it. A wage war should be similar to a pay dispute, or what job advertisements so euphemistically refer to as a competitive salary.

There is a connection between all these different wages, and indeed to wagers. But you have to go back to the fourteenth century.

A wage was, originally, a pledge or deposit. It was something given in security. From this wage you quite easily get to the modern wager: it is merely the stake, or deposit, thrown down by a gambler. It's also reasonably simple to see how money given in security could end up meaning money given as pay. And war? That's a trifle stranger. It involves trial by combat.

In medieval law it was considered quite reasonable to settle a legal dispute by duelling to the death. Though somebody had to die, lawyers fees were, at least, kept to a minimum. In Latin that was vadiare duellum; in English you waged [pledged yourself to] battle.

Not war. Battle. It was, after all, a technical legal term for the violent and slicing resolution of individual arguments. You wagered your body in mortal combat. However, it's easy to see how the sense of waging battle extended from the promise of violence to the act, and then expanded from the battle to the war.

This last shift in meaning could reasonably be described as wage inflation.

The Inky Fool solving a wage dispute

Taliban Classes

Taliban means students, but class means called to battle.


Taliban means students. There's an Arabic word tālib, meaning student, and, if you make that into a Pashtun plural, you get taliban. This is because the Taliban were, originally, just a small group of religious students who wanted to clean up Kandahar. They then got carried away, as capering students often do, and invaded Kabul.

Class, on the other hand, means those called to fight. There was a Proto Indo European word *kele, that meant, shout. From that the Romans got the verb calare, meaning call to arms. The early Roman population were always getting called to arms. When there were calared, the male population would form up as a c[a]lassis, and set off to find some Sabine women to rape.

The Roman king Servius Tullius divided the Romans into six classes so that he could tax them more efficiently, and so classis then came to mean a group. A classis could still be a military group like an army or a fleet, in the same way that an English division can still be military. But class could just be a part of a whole. Thus a school or a society could be broken up into classes, and the animal kingdom could be classified.

Incidentally, the reason that they are classified ads, is that they are arranged by subject, just as the Roman subjects were arranged for battle.

The Inky Fool found cross-dressing was much less fun in Kabul

Batman, Batman, Batmania!

Batman is, of course, the name for a military officer's servant. The term derives from the old word bat meaning a packsaddle. In America, where they're far more logical about such things, the equivalent position is referred to as a dog-robber.

Batman is, of course, a unit of measurement found in Asia. Batman has varied wildly in value over the centuries and was finally redefined as 10kg when Turkey basted itself with the metric system.

Batmania is, of course, the original name of the Australian city of Melbourne. John Batman, a syphilitic farmer from Sydney, persuaded some of the natives to lease some land to him for an annual rent of two hundred handkerchiefs, a hundred knives, a hundred pounds of flour, fifty scissors,  forty blankets, thirty mirrors, thirty axes and six shirts. He then named the new settlement after himself: Batmania.

The rent was clearly exorbitant and the governor cancelled it a few years later, shot anyone who disagreed, and renamed the town Melbourne after the Viscount Melbourne who was prime minister at the time.

Batmania isn't as mad as it sounds to our surprised ears. After all, Tasmania is named after Abel Tasman.

There are no other known meanings of the word batman.

John Batman

Became a hat-man.

He said, "It's rainier

In Batmania."

Die Hard 57

This week's posts will be devoted to nineteen-eighties action movies. It is a sad fact, but true, that a small minority of people can watch Arnold Schwarzenegger (or whoever it happens to be) shooting somebody in the face with a big gun without appreciating the underlying philological complexities.

Once upon a time, in 1702, a chap called William Coward wrote a book called Second Thoughts about the nature of the soul. The point at issue was the soul in Hell. If Hell is purely physical suffering (flames, pitchforks up your bottom etc) then how does a metaphysical soul suffer? Moreover, what about people who can take physical suffering? What about people who laugh at pain? Presumably, they'll be tough enough not to mind Hell.

Thus we see by common Observation in Men condemned to die ignominiously at the Gallows, with what Impudence, and strange effrontery they bear their Sufferings; nay, even when they ought to have a check and remorse of Conscience for fear of an immediate Judgement or punishment for their Sins by God Almighty

John Broughton, chaplain to the Duke of Marlborough, read Second Thoughts and didn't like it one bit. He got so angry that he wrote a point-by-point rebuttal, which he published under the catchy title Psychologia or An Account of the Nature of the Rational Soul. Broughton mentioned that passage from Second Thoughts and summed it up thusly:

...he urges the Case of those that die hard, as they call it, at Tyburn...

And that is the first die hard ever recorded. It should be noted that hard here means tough or stubborn. The condemned man does not struggle or try to live. He is, instead, impudent and shows no fear.

The phrase would have stuck around in the obscurity of the gallows were it not for another fellow called William Inglis exactly a century later. Inglis was fighting the French at the Battle of Albuera, when he was hit by a four pound piece of grapeshot, which went through his neck and shoulder and lodged in his upper back.

Minor injuries like this, though, could not shut Inglis up, nor did the fact that the 57th Foot Regiment, which he was commanding, was being slaughtered seem to bother him. Instead he sat amongst his beleaguered men shouting again and again: "Die hard, 57th, die hard."

Astonishingly, Inglis survived and the 57th won the battle. Inglis became a hero, his exploits became famous, and the 57th Foot Regiment were nicknamed the Die-Hards.

Thus the phrase became famous and was taken up by all and sundry, especially conservative political factions who used it as an adjective. Those Tories who opposed Home Rule at the beginning of the twentieth century were die-hard conservatives. All it then required was for Alan Rickman to put on a funny accent and the rest is cinematic and linguistic history.

I don't know where Bruce Willis stands on the nature of the human soul. I should like to know what he thinks, but Mr Willis maintains a sphinx-like silence on the matter.

40 STORIES OF SHEER PHILOLOGY!

Torpedoes and Turtles

The Latin word for being tired or numb was torpere. From this verb they got the adjective torpid, which is still with us today. And that would be the end of the story were it not for electrical fish.

That there are electric eels is commonly known (and therein, if anybody would listen to me, lies the solution to the world's energy problems. All electrical devices from mobile phones to aeroplanes would have a small fish tank attached and... but I digress). There are kinds of ray that can produce electricity, in fact they can produce 220 volts of the stuff, which is quite enough to knock you out, and therefore make you torpid.

In English they were once called numb-fish or cramp-fish, but the educated Latin name is torpediniformes, with the major family being the torpedoes. As Lawrens Andrewe put it in his snappily titled The noble lyfe & nature of man, Of bestes, serpentys, fowles & fisshes y be moste knowen (1520):


Torpido is a fisshe, but who-so handeleth hym shalbe lame & defe of lymmes that he shall fele no thyng.

Marlowe refers to a chap as a "vile torpedo". There was an eighteenth century dandy called Beau Nash who was awfully witty but had trouble writing well. "He used to call a pen his torpedo for whenever he grasped it, it numbed all his faculties." This is a shame as Nash was very charming. When he died his wife went to live in a hollow tree near Warminster.

Anyway, in 1776 the Americans were revolting. The British Navy sailed to New York, but so revolting were the Americans that the Brits decided to stay in the channel and blockade the harbour. The Americans did not like this and there was a fellow called Bushnell who invented a submarine with which to attack the blockading British boats in the most unsporting manner.

Bushnell couldn't decide what to call his submarine: he seems to have been in two minds between the American Turtle and the Torpedo. In shape it resembled both.

It should be noted at this point that the OED, Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica are all wrong. I checked. There is a lovely contemporary account of Bushnell's machine to be found here and here. The idea of the submarine, called the Torpedo, was that it had a "magazine or powder" attached to it that it would screw to the hull of the British flagship. The revolting Americans were foiled by the ship's hull, which was copper-bottomed.

The torpedo trying to attach a mine

But the Americans were not to be deterred. Another inventor called Fulton took up where Bushnell left off (Bushnell for some reason ran away to the South and took on a new identity). It was Fulton who decided to call the explosive device a torpedo. He also decided to change it a bit. Rather than the submarine getting right up to the ship it didn't like, it would instead fire a harpoon at it. The explosive device, now called a torpedo, would be attached to the harpoon by a rope and contain within it a timer. So the submarine would pop up, harpoon the ship, and disappear before the charge went off. Full account from 1809 here.

Fulton's torpedoes didn't work either. Decades passed during which the torpedo was fitted with a motor and other such improvements, but nothing was sunk with a vile torpedo until 1878 when a Russian ship sank an Ottoman one.

And that, dear underwater reader, is how tired and numb came to mean fast and explosive.

The Inky Fool in the bath

Champagne, Campaign, Campus, Camping and Camping it Up

Vin de Champagne originally meant wine from the countryside, as in the modern French campagne. It was only in the eighteenth century, after the English had worked out how to bottle fizzy drinks, that it took on its modern meaning of a Bottle of Bubbly, and contracted itself to those wines produced in the region around Épernay.

There's a bit in Horatius by Lord Macaulay where the Etruscans are approaching and:

From all the spacious champaign
To Rome men took their flight.

A couplet that confused me terribly as a child. All it meant was that the Etruscan army was advancing across the countryside and the country folk were running away.

This advance would, of course, have happened during the summer. During the winter troops have to hole up and wait for the snows to depart. Then, with the thaw, they set out on the campagne, which is why they are on campaign, literally on the countryside.

Of course, back in Roman times it wasn't called campagne. Campagne comes from the Latin Campus, meaning field. Fields have many uses. For example, you can put university buildings up in a field and that is the campus where young humans go to learn (hippopotamuses are confined to the hippocampus).

You can, if you are an army on campaign, simply pitch your tent in a field and that is called a camp. This is what the Etruscan army would have done. Thousands of Etruscan men would have spent their night in a field while their wives, lovers and catamites remained in Etruria.

The sexual frustration of thousands of womanless men would have been somewhat assuaged by the prostitutes who made a living by following the army around and offering their bodies to indiscriminate lewdness for hire. These indiscriminate ladies were the camp followers.

Nobody is quite sure of the next bit, but those camp followers, meaning harlot, seems to have been shortened to camp meaning tarty, illicitly sexual etc etc etc. This then got switched from queen of the night, to queen, to queer, gay*.

And so you get to camp fellows camping it up, which now means the outrageous chap in the bar on Old Compton Street with a glass of pink champagne.

An obviously heterosexual champagne drinker

*N.B. Alternatively, camp comes from the C18th French se camper, meaning to pose. Nobody's quite sure and the OED cautiously writes "Etymology obscure".

Some Winds

In 1274 Kubla Khan tried to invade Japan. He got an awful lot of soldiers and had just landed them and was getting ready for a nice battle when it started to rain and the wind began to blow. So, rather than risk their being marooned, the troops were ordered back into the boats. This was a mistake because the wind was very strong indeed and all the ships sank.

Not to be deterred Kubla tried again in 1281 and this time an even bigger typhoon raged for two days straight and spoiled everything. The Japanese were now convinced that Japan was being saved from invasion by "Divine Winds". The Japanese for divine was Kami and the Japanese for wind was Kaze and so the defenders of Japan in the 1940s were called Kamikazes.

Kubla was forced to return to the mainland and concentrate on pleasure domes.

The Chinook helicopters, of which the RAF do not seem to have enough, are named after a spring breeze that blows in North Western America and melts the snow away.

The Mistral blows southward through Provence. It's name comes from the Latin magister, meaning master, for this is a dominant wind. It gives you a headache and (I once heard but cannot confirm) that in Medieval French law if the mistral had blown for three days that would be considered a defence for murdering your wife.

The Simoom (which is alluded to in Edgar Allen Poe's Berenice) is an Arabic wind, formed on the uplands and driven down to the lowlands where the pressure increases its temperature in quite incredible and incomprehensible ways. In 1859 there was a simoom in Santa Barbara, California. The morning was a pleasant twenty-something (70s F) degrees and then at noon the temperature shot up to 54 degrees, or 133 degrees Fahrenheit, where it remained for the next few hours.

The people hid in their houses. The animals died on their feet.

It can be hot in the Lake District, damned hot

How To Name A Secret Weapon

So you're designing a terribly secret weapon and you have to think of a name for it. If you give it a name that actually describes the weapon that would be something of a mistake. A dastardly foreign spy would hardly need to investigate a weapon called "Laser for shooting down carrier pigeons".

Yet you have to call it something, otherwise the workers in the factory will become curious. So you give it a misleading name: let's say "Water Carriers for Russia". You take the plan to Winston Churchill, who happens to be Lord of the Admiralty at the time (1915)* and you explain how very clever you've been with the name. Winston laughs in your face and points out that this would get shortened to "WCs for Russia" and suggest a Muscovite latrine.

'Um,' you say, scratching your head and knitting your furrowed brow. 'What about.... What about Water Tanks for Russia?'

The name is agreed on, but, being cumbersome, is soon shortened to tank.

The Inky Fool can and will defend himself

*You, by the way, are Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Swinton