August August

Welcome, dear reader, to August, the most august month of the year. The month is stressed on the first syllable and the adjective, meaning grand, is stressed on the second. But they both derive from exactly the same place.

Gaius Octavius Thurinus was posthumously adopted by Gaius Julius Caesar and changed his name to that of his new dead dad. Then, in 27 BC, the Roman Senate awarded him the honorific name Augustus, meaning venerable - something akin to your majesty. That's the word from which we get the word august, meaning grand.

So Gaius Octavius Thurinus ended up being called Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus. Then in 8 B.C. the Roman decided to rename the month Sextilis in his honour. And that's where we get the month of August.

For some reason the month is a trochee - August - and the adjective is an iamb - august. Another word from the same root is augment which is also stressed on the second syllable.

The point about all these stressed syllables is that you can arrange them in patterns, for example stressed and soft syllables alternating. So, in iambic pentameters:

Augustus's augustness was augmented
The day the month of August was invented.

I am monarch of when I survey

My right there is none to dispute

To September's first day from July

You will find that my name is the root.

Pot-Fury and Ale-Passion

I have very little to say today, except that pot-fury is the excitement brought on by inebriation and ale-passion is an old word meaning hangover. That's passion in its original sense of suffering, as in the passion of Christ. Ale-passion is mentioned in the 1593 Bacchus Bountie in the following context:

Fourthly, came wallowing in a German, borne in Mentz, his name was Gotfrey Grouthead; with him he brought a wallet full of woodcocks heads; the braines thereof, tempered with other sauce, is a passing preseruatiue against the ale-passion, or paine in the pate.

I'm now off to find a bunch of woodcocks.

Do you eat the beak as well?

Merdurinous

Merdurinous means composed of dung and urine, and if you can't find a use for that word, you have too few enemies. Merdurinous is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, which makes it a particularly satisfying word to say or shout. I've tested.

It was coined by Ben Jonson in a poem called The Famous Voyage, which I thoroughly recommend you read. It's a mock epic about two men who take a boat up the Fleet River in London. The Fleet River wasn't exactly a river, it was more of a ditch, and in effect an open sewer and the smelliest stinkiest place in Elizabethan London.

Jonson's poem is about two men who sail up it for a bet, just to see if their noses can take it. There's also an informative little digression of fast food in renaissance London, which shouldn't be read by any cat lovers:

Cats there lay divers had been flayed and roasted
And, after mouldy grown, again were toasted;
Then selling not, a dish was ta'en to mince 'em,
But still, it seemed, the rankness did convince 'em

The Fleet River has now been covered over and filled in, but the name survives. When people refer to the British press as Fleet Street, it's a metonym for the street that was once a river.

Jonson's full poem is here.

The truth about Fleet Street

Fanfreluching, Biscoting and Synonymia

Way back in the mists and fogs of time, (before standardisation of measurement) weights and distances and everything else would vary from country to country. For example, the leagues around Paris, which were marked by stones at the roadside, were much shorter than those everywhere else. Rabelais (C16th) had an ingenious explanation for this and I'm going to reproduce the whole thing here, simply because of the extraordinary words that were invented by the (C17th) translator, Thomas Urquhart. I shall put them in bold, just for fun.

...in old times countries were not distinguished into leagues, miles, furlongs, nor parasangs, until that King Pharamond divided them, which was done in manner as followeth. The said king chose at Paris a hundred fair, gallant, lusty, brisk young men, all resolute and bold adventurers in Cupid's duels, together with a hundred comely, pretty, handsome, lovely and well-complexioned wenches of Picardy, all which he caused to be well entertained and highly fed for the space of eight days. Then having called for them, he delivered to every one of the young men his wench, with store of money to defray their charges, and this injunction besides, to go unto divers places here and there. And wheresoever they should biscot and thrum their wenches, that, they setting a stone there, it should be accounted for a league. Thus went away those brave fellows and sprightly blades most merrily, and because they were fresh and had been at rest, they very often jummed and fanfreluched almost at every field's end, and this is the cause why the leagues about Paris are so short. But when they had gone a great way, and were now as weary as poor devils, all the oil in their lamps being almost spent, they did not chink and duffle so often, but contented themselves (I mean for the men's part) with one scurvy paltry bout in a day, and this is that which makes the leagues in Brittany, Delanes, Germany, and other more remote countries so long.

I'm quite sure that you can guess at the meanings as efficiently as the OED does. What I particularly love in this passage is that the saucy and preposterous verbs are all presented in pairs, and that the second verb of each adds nothing significant to the meaning. Chinking and duffling are, I assume, pretty much the same thing. This rhetorical figure, called synonymia, is very beautiful if used sparsely and sparely.

Synonymia is also used on the nouns of the passage: "brave fellows and sprightly blades" and "as weary as poor devils, all the oil in their lamps being almost spent".

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some important fanfreluching to attend to. I may even attempt to biscot a biscuit.

There was a French-Canadian children's programme called Fanfreluche.

Don't ask me why.

The End

Not of this blog, but of the dictionary. It suddenly occurred to me to wonder what was right at the back of the OED. So I pulled out volume twenty and flicked past zonkey (the offspring of a zebra and a donkey), zygology (the study of fastenings), and Zyrian (pertaining to the Komi people of Siberia) and got to zyxt, which is an obsolete piece of Kentish dialect meaning you see.

And with that the English language comes to an end.

It would also get you 23 in a game of Scrabble.

A zonkey

The King James Bible

I always seem to be pointing out phrases that come from the Bible, but where as I do them one by one, this chap has combined one hundred such phrases and made them rhyme.



It's rather an astonishing achievement, and I only know about it because it was e-mailed to me by an antipodean reader to whom I tip the blogger's bowler.

The Four Corners of the Earth

And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.

So said Isaiah (11v12) and it's rather odd, because at first sight it would appear to contradict the newfangled theory that the earth is round. When you think about it more, though, it becomes yet odder, because it seems to suggest that the earth is not simply flat, it's square.

So did the ancient Hebrews believe that the earth was square? No. The Hebrew word here is kanaph which means, among other things, quarter. It's the four quarters of the earth: North, South, East and West.

So were the sixteenth century translators of the Bible twisting things to make it look as though the earth was square? No. Back then corner didn't have to mean corner in the modern sense. It could also have this definition from the OED:

...a region, quarter; a direction or quarter from which the wind blows (obsolete)

Winds could come from different corners, meaning quarters or points of the compass. So in the gulling scene in Much Ado About Nothing you can get this exchange:

LEONATO No, nor I neither; but most wonderful that she should so dote on Signior Benedick, whom she hath in all outward behaviors seemed ever to abhor.


BENEDICK Is't possible? Sits the wind in that corner?

It's hard to find any civilisation that ever definitely believed the earth was flat. Not only did the ancients know it was round, but a clever chap called Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth with an error of only 2%.

The Medievals knew it too. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville* (C14th) says clearly that "the world is quite round" and "those men who live right under the Antarctic Pole [star] are foot against foot to those who live right below the Arctic Pole [star], just as we and those who live at our Antipodes are foot against foot." Because antipodes means foot against foot.

Mandeville then writes:

I have often thought of a story I have heard, when I was young, of a worthy man of our country who went once upon a time to see the world. He passed India and many isles beyond India, where there are more than 5,000 isles, and travelled so far by land and sea, girdling the globe, that he found an isle where he heard his own language being spoken. For he heard one who was driving a plough team say such words to them as he had heard men say to oxen in his own land when they were working at the plough. He marvelled greatly, for he did not understand how this could be. But I conjecture that he had travelled so far over land and sea, circumnavigating the earth, that he had come to his own borders; if he had gone a bit farther, he would have come to his own district. But after he heard that marvel, he could not get transport any farther, so he turned back the way he had come; so he had a long journey! Afterwards it happened that he went to Norway, and a gale blew him off course to an island. And when he was there he knew it was the island he had been in before and heard his own language, as the beasts were being driven. That could well be, even if men of limited understanding do not believe that men can travel on the underside of the globe without falling off into the firmament. For just as it seems to us that those men there are under us, so it seems to them that we are under them.

The truth is out there.

*One of my favourite books.