By And By

A by-way is a little path aside from the main road. A by-product is a less important product aside from one's main aim. So I had always assumed that a by-law was a little law aside from the laws of the land. I was wrong.

If you want to know about the by in by-law you should investigate in Derby, Whitby, Rugby, Grimsby, Selby, Ashby Puerorum or any of the towns in the north eastern quarter of England that end with the letters -by.

Why are all those towns in the North East? Because they were all named by the marauding Vikings who ravaged and raped and pillaged their way around England until Alfred the Great made them stop. In fact, you can work out the line of the Vikings' farthest advance by simply pulling out a map of Britain and searching for the -bys.

By was simply the Viking word for town, and if you go to Norway or Sweden it's still the word that those unrepentant marauders use. So what do you call a law that only applies in this town? That's right, you call at it a by-law.

P.S. The media maelstrom that is The Etymologicon continues. Not only was I on the radio again last night way past my bedtime, but there's a piece in today's Daily Mail. The book will be lolling in the shops on Thursday. And, if you're in another country or can't make it to a bookshop, you can order it with free shipping to anywhere in the world from this website.

A Churl on a Gentleman

For as long as I can remember I have known the old drinker's rhyme:

Beer and wine:
Feeling fine.
Wine and beer:
Oh dear.

There are even equivalents in other languages, although I can't now remember what they are. However, I did find a rather lovely alternative in Brewer's: Don't put a churl on a gentleman.

Churl is an old word for a fool, and before that it meant peasant, and before that, way back in the days of Old Norse when it was spelled karl, it just meant man. That's also where we get the names Carl, Charles, and (oddly given that it means man) Caroline.

Even more oddly, Charlemagne is a variant of Charles/Carl and because of that the Czech word for king is kral, the Polish is krol, and the Lithuanian is karalius. So a churl is, etymologically, both a man and a woman, a peasant and a king.

And, for what it's worth, I've always said:

Beer, wine and whisky:
Feeling frisky.

Would it be churlish to point out that this song is about an eleven year old?

Twinters, Bidents and Conundrum-Makers

A twinter is a two-year-old cow. It's a dialect term that is a shortening of two-winters. A two-year-old sheep, on the other hand, is called a bident. A bident is one short of a trident, which is three-toothed fork. The idea is that after two years a sheep, apparently, has two rows of teeth and is therefore ready to be sacrificed. This causes me concern as today is, in a way, my second birthday. I am a twinter and bident.

Inky Fool is two years old today. The earth has completed its weary journey around the sun twice since first I posted on the subject of branding. And just to emphasise the pointlessness of it all, the planet is now back where it started.

Inky Fool, though, is not. Inky Fool has gained many lovely readers, such as you*. Moreover, Inky Fool has a book - The Etymologicon - that will be coming out in a week's time and is already available on Kindle.

And as it is my blog-birthday, I shall simply quote the following for no reason other than the fact that I like it. It's from Dialogues of Dead (1699) by William King.

Hesychius. Why so they are! But can there be more Wit than in an Etymology, of which you are full from all Languages?


Gouldman. Etymologies may indeed furnish Materials for Quiblers, Punsters, and Conundrum-Makers, but these sorts of Wit are as much out of use as hammer'd Money.

Finally, I should apologise. There was no post yesterday. I thought there was. I wrote one and I believed that I had clicked on PUBLISH POST. Mind you, I'll believe anything.

The birthday party

*Well, I assume you're lovely. Are you? Answers in the comments, please.

Sacralgia and Kippers

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh has this to say about kippers:

Adam ate some breakfast. No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings.

Now, if you want to make a great smell for your deity what you need is burnt bone, and apparently (I've never sacrificed anyone myself) the best bone to do this with is the os sacrum, the sacred bone. It's at the bottom of your spine and the Romans believed that it was the part that the gods really liked. That's why it's called the sacrum to this very day.

If you have a pain in your sacrum, it's called sacralgia. What I like about this is that, etymologically, sacralgia means sacred pain, but really it means a right pain in the arse. But if you told somebody that they were being a sacralgia, they would never realise.

This makes sacralgia a very useful word.

The Inky Fool regrets his choice of restaurant.

Currying Favour and Curried Horses

It's a little odd that even at the finest of Indian restaurants you can't order a curried favour. In fact, currying favour gets odder the more you look at the phrase. That's because favour isn't favour. It's a horse.

Once upon a time, six or seven hundred years ago there was a French allegorical poem called the Roman de Fauvel. It's about a horse called Fauvel who leaves his stable, moves into the biggest room in his master's house, and installs a custom made hayrack.

The point of the allegory is that the second the horse appears to be in charge everybody suddenly wants to be his friend. People come from far and wide to groom Fauvel.

For some reason this story was immensely popular and got translated into English, with the name Fauvel unchanged. However, the English word for grooming a horse was currying. It's a verb that is, apparently, still used in equestrian circles*. Thus a phrase developed. Anybody who sycophantically went round trying to be nice to a lord was said to be currying fauvel.

However, once the old French allegory had been forgotten, the idea of currying fauvel started to look rather odd. What the hell was a fauvel? Nobody knew any more.

Confusion about the phrase lasted until 1560 when the Geneva Bible came up with this line:

He thoght by this meanes to courry fauour with the worlde

It makes sense. Nobody knew what a fauvel was, but everybody knew that a sycophant wants a favour. So every since then favours have been curried and patronage has been vindalooed.

And here is the original favour being curried.

*I have never moved in equestrian circles myself. I can't seem to maintain a stable relationship.

P.S. There's an article about my book, The Etymologicon, in today's Sun.

The Telegraph

Some words pop up long before you think they would. The periodical Nature mentioned a marvellous maze of internetted connections in 1883. Computers have been employed since 1613 (when they were people who computed). The telegraph has been around since 1794. It was invented by a French chap called Claude Chappe and it consisted of wooden posts that could be moved around and thus form a distant vision or, in Greek, a tele-graph.

All of which is a long way round of saying that today's Sunday Telegraph (available at all good agents of news) has two lovely articles about Inky Fool and the book The Etymologicon: a leader that can be read here, and an article that is behind this link. In the papery version of the paper (from Greek papyrus) they can be found on pages 13 and 27.

This makes me inordinately and exorbitantly proud.

The Inky Fool could not afford a mobile phone.

Authentic Authors

A couple of weeks ago I was in a pub. There is nothing unusual about that. The pub had two beers available on tap, and on the taps were those little armorial plates that tell you the name and the ABV and other such urgent information. What struck me, though, was that one of the beers described itself as original, and the other described itself as authentic.

I, of course, made a fuss. I told the barman that I made a point of only drinking beers that were both. I tried to haggle a reduction, failed and got drunk anyway. However, even in my beers, it occurred to me that I didn't really know what authentic meant. Did it mean real, extant? In which case it would hardly need to be pointed out. Did it mean not fake? Who fakes beer?

So, I fled to a dictionary, and of course authentic, etymologically, means something that is by an author, and therefore has authority. So authentic is, or was, roughly a synonym for authoritative and referred to books.

It should be remembered here that in the medieval period there were writers and there were auctors. Auctors were the only ones who had auctorite and whose words were therefore auctentyke, from which we get authentic.

I have to therefore concede that T-shirts could be authentic or knock-off copies. I would also note very, very strongly, that as I am an author The Etymologicon (which comes out in only a few days time now) will definitely be authentic, although it unfortunately contains no beer.

Pre-order it here. Please.

Me in the pub