Eponyms AKA words you didn’t know were named after people

If you’re a regular reader (AKA my mum), then you might remember words of the week maverick, bowdlerise and dunce, all of which are eponyms, or named after people. Well, I thought I’d look into other words which you may or may not already know were named after people. So here are seven of the most interesting. Sadly, they’re all (with one notable exception) named for men, something which perhaps might change in the future (but probably won’t). Sigh.

Bloomers

Let’s start this list with that notable exception.

Blooming marvellous Amelia

When we think of bloomers today, we think of pants. But back in the 19th century, bloomers were women’s garments for the lower body developed as a comfortable alternative to the heavy, constricting dresses they normally wore. And they’re named after a lady called Amelia Jenks Bloomer. Unlike pretty much everyone else on this list she didn’t actually have anything to do with inventing bloomers – in fact she was an American woman’s rights advocate. They’re named after her because they were seen as revolutionary outfits – presumably because they freed up women to do things like wave their arms around or breathe comfortably – and she was one of their strongest advocates.

Amelia was also the first woman to own, operate and edit a newspaper for women. So all in all she was pretty freaking awesome.

Chauvinism

This one’s a bit dodgy, because there’s no proof that the man it’s named after – Nicolas Chauvin – actually existed (he was definitely a character in a play called Cocarde Tricolore (1831), but it’s not clear if that character was based on a real person or not). But I’ve put it in anyway because it’s quite interesting to see how the word has evolved. The story goes that Chauvin, a soldier, was – despite being badly wounded and having no money – still blindly loyal to his leader, Napoleon. And he continued to be, even after Nappers (as no one has ever called him) abdicated. So ‘chauvinism’ came to mean fanatical patriotism, even in the face of overwhelming opposition.

It was first used after ‘male’ in a 1935 play called ‘Till the Day I Die’ by someone called Clifford Odets (nope, me neither).

Mausoleum

A mausoleum is a large burial chamber, usually above ground and reserved for poshos. It’s named after Mausolus, who was a ruler of part of the Greek Empire in the 4th century BCE. When he died he was interred in a spectacular chamber in Halicarnassus, which his wife AND SISTER (ewwwwww), Artemisia II of Caria, called the ‘mausoleum’.

Back in the day Mausolus’ mausoleum (try saying that after a couple of shandies) was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, which is presumably how the word ‘mausoleum’ came into everyday use. It also outlasted all the other wonders, only to be toppled by a load of earthquakes between the 12th and 15th centuries.

Diesel

No relation to Vin Diesel

Diesel is named after the inventor of the diesel engine, Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel. Despite having the most German name ever, he was actually born in Paris in 1858, the son of Bavarian immigrants. He invented and ran the first successful diesel engine in 1897, and gave his name to the fuel that powered it.

Diesel came to a rather sorry end, disappearing from a steamer boat in 1913. He was on his way to London to meet some British Royal Navy bods to talk about powering British submarines with his engines. After having dinner and retiring to his cabin, he was never seen alive again. Ten days later a Dutch boat came across a corpse floating in the North Sea. They didn’t bring it on board because it was gross, but they did retrieve the personal items, which Diesel’s son later identified as belonging to his dad.

Some people think Diesel killed himself because he was having financial woes – he’d left a bag with his wife shortly after he disappeared, alongside instructions not to open it til the following week. When she did, she found 200,000 German marks in cash (around £875,000 in today’s money) and financial statements showing that their bank accounts were pretty much empty. There’s another theory that he was murdered, as apparently he’d refused to grant German forces the exclusive rights to his invention – and don’t forget he was on his way to Blighty to talk to the British Navy. Sadly, it looks like we’ll never know what happened to poor old Diesel.

Leotard 

Jules Léotard – try not to look at his crotch

Jules Léotard (born some time between 1839 and 1870) was a French acrobatic performer. He created a new type of one-piece streamlined garment which made it easier for him to do his trapeze schizz. It also showed off his physique which both the ladies and men enjoyed, so much so that someone by the name of George Leybourne wrote a song about him in 1867.

Jules didn’t actually call his costume a leotard. This came about much later in 1886 (I’m not sure who did call it that, sorry), after he’d died. He didn’t perish from anything trapeze-related BTW – he probably died from smallpox. So that sucks.

Silhouette

Étienne de Silhouette was a French finance minister for Louis XV. In 1759 there was a credit crunch in France (or a crunch de credit – I’m well good at languages) as a result of the Seven Years’ War. Silhouette imposed severe austerity measures on the French people, and his name soon came to be used to describe anything done on the cheap. And because Silhouette’s favourite hobby was, you’ve guessed it, making shadow portraits out of paper – a much cheaper technique than painting someone – these soon took his name. Well, it could have been worse.

A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman

Nope, this isn’t a Tinder profile (if only the quality of available man was that good). It’s the start of a sentence containing some of the different ways you can say the letters ‘ough’. The full phrase is this:

A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.

This is one of the many reasons I salute anyone who manages to learn English as a foreign language. Because there are at least eight, possibly nine, ways you can pronounce ‘ough’ (sources differ as to exactly how many – it also depends if you count place names or not).

The most common pronunciations are:

• ‘oh’ as in though (rhymes with toe)

• ‘uff’ as in rough (like ruffle)

• ‘off’ as in cough (or coffee)

• ‘ooh’ as in through (rhymes with boo)

• ‘ort’ as in thought (as in torture, which hopefully this blog post won’t be)

• ‘ow’ as in bough (or wow, who knew the English language was so ridiculous?).

Why, oh why are there so many?

The short answer is that English words come from all over the bloody place – Latin, Greek, German, Old Norse… you name it, we’ve probably nicked a word from it. So even though two words might be spelt similarly, chances are they’ve come from two completely different roots. Add to that the fact that some of them will have originally been pronounced the same way but changed over time, plus the fact that English is stupid, and you soon realise that all bets are off pronunciation-wise.

Adding insult to injury

Let’s take the word ‘slough’. It has three pronunciations, depending on what you mean:

Photo by Alfonso Castro on Unsplash.

• sl-uff (pronounced like ‘stuff’): to shed something (usually skin, ew)

• sl-ew (rhymes with ‘stew’): a load of mud AKA a swamp

• sl-ow (rhymes with ‘cow’, not ‘low’): the place in England where ‘The Office’ was set.

So you could say the snake sloughed off its skin in the slough near Slough. But why would you?

Speaking of places, ‘ough’ turns up in the names of lots of British towns and villages as well. And they’re all pronounced differently, of course – sometimes even in the same word. For example, there are three parishes in Milton Keynes called (1) Woughton, (2) Loughton and (3) Broughton. And the ‘ough’ is pronounced differently in each one: (1) ‘uff’, (2) ‘ow’ and (3) ‘ort’. And let’s not forget the ridiculousness that is Loughborough. There are two ‘ough’s in that, and the first is pronounced ‘uff’ while the second is ‘oh’. Anyone who’s never heard these spoken out loud doesn’t stand a chance.

Give us a clue

Nope, sorry, I’ve got nothing. Unlike lots of grammar-type things, there aren’t any cutesy mnemonics or shortcuts to this one. Or, god forbid, any actual logic. You just have to know the answer.

---

Well, that’s all clear as slough, sorry mud. After all that confusion, let’s end with a poem (because it’s always nice to end anything with a poem). This one’s called ‘O-U-G-H’ and is by a guy called Charles Battell Loomis, an American author who was born in 1861. Bonus points if you read it out loud in a comedy French accent.

I’m taught p-l-o-u-g-h
Shall be pronouncé “plow.”
“Zat’s easy w’en you know,” I say,
“Mon Anglais, I’ll get through!”

My teacher say zat in zat case,
O-u-g-h is “oo.”
And zen I laugh and say to him,
“Zees Anglais make me cough.”

He say, “Not ‘coo,’ but in zat word,
O-u-g-h is ‘off.’”
Oh, Sacre bleu! Such varied sounds
Of words makes me hiccough!

He say, “Again mon frien’ ees wrong;
O-u-g-h is ‘up’
In hiccough.” Zen I cry, “No more,
You make my t’roat feel rough.”

“Non, non!” he cry, “you are not right;
O-u-g-h is ‘uff.’”
I say, “I try to spik your words,
I cannot spik zem though.”

“In time you’ll learn, but now you’re wrong!
O-u-g-h is ‘owe.’”
“I’ll try no more, I s’all go mad,
I’ll drown me in ze lough!”

“But ere you drown yourself,” said he,
“O-u-g-h is ‘ock.’”
He taught no more, I held him fast,
And killed him wiz a rough!

Xplaining Xmas

It’s that time of year again. Yay! I bloody love Christmas. But I never call it Xmas (unless it’s on a really small gift tag and I can’t fit the whole thing in) because of an innate wordy snobbery against modern, lazy abbreviations (IMO). I’m not the only one – ‘Xmas’ has long been vilified by writing style guides including the BBC, The Times and The Guardian. In fact, the latter says this: ‘Christmas is preferable unless you are writing a headline, up against a deadline, and desperate (or quoting Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody)’. Ouch. And one Millicent Fenwick (who I’d never heard of, but I’ve since realised is pretty darn awesome) said that it ‘should never be used’ in greeting cards in Vogue’s Book of Etiquette (published in 1948).

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

Another reason people don’t like the word ‘Xmas’ is because it’s seen as an evil secular attempt to take the religious stuff out of Christmas (as it removes the ‘Christ’ bit) and commercialise it even more than we do already. Those secular bastards.

But, after doing my usual not-at-all in-depth research, it turns out this is all a load of Christmas balls – ‘Xmas’ does have a religious backstory, and it isn’t a modern abbreviation, as it dates all the way back to the 16th century.

Unwrapping Christmas

Before we get into the ‘x’, let’s start with the word ‘Christmas’. It’s a pretty straightforward one – it’s a concatenation (which is a fancy-dancy way of saying that it’s two words smooshed together) of Christ (as in the big JC) and mass (I don’t know what happened to the second ‘s’). Simple. So when did the ‘x’ sneak in? The answer to this is, a frickin’ long time ago.

My big fat Greek Christmas

In the Greek alphabet, X is the symbol for the letter ‘chi’. ‘Chi’ is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ which is Χριστός (or Christós, which is a bit easier on the eye). So Xmas still means Christ’s mass. It’s basically the same as when Christina Aguilera started calling herself ‘Xtina’, but with less assless chaps.

Early Christians used an ‘X’ to identify each other when they were being persecuted (vague, I know), and it also appears on several Orthodox Christian religious icons. And it’s used as an abbreviation for Christ in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a collection of annals – stop it – in Old English which tell the history of the Anglo-Saxons) way back in 1021. So it’s deffo not new.

(Oh, and apparently people also used to use the abbreviations ‘Xtemass’ and ‘X’temmas’ for Christmas. But it looks like those ones never caught on, thank god.)

Still not convinced?

19th century pin-up Lord Byron (swoon) used the term ‘xmas’ in 1811, as did Samuel Coleridge (in 1801) and Lewis Carroll (1864). And even if it is Christmas, the traditional time for drunken fights, who am I to argue with them?

A very happy Xmas (dammit, I still don’t like it) to you and yours. See you in 2020.

Ch, ch, ch, ch, changes

Words aren’t set in stone (well, except for the ten commandments, BOOM BOOM). Their meanings change over time, depending on how people use them. And there’s nothing wrong with that. So here are five everyday words which started out meaning one thing, but have now morphed into something completely different.

1. Silly

Silly used to mean ‘pious’. It comes from an old English word, seely (which makes you sound like you’re saying ‘silly’ in a comedy/slightly offensive Italian accent if you say it out loud) which meant happy. Here’s how it evolved over time:

Happy

↓

Blessed

↓

Pious

↓

Innocent (we’re up to around the year 1200 now)

↓

Harmless

↓

Pitiable (we’re at the end of the 1300s at this point)

↓

Weak

↓

Foolish (around the 1570s).

This final use was cemented by Sir Billy of Shakespeare. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hippolyta says: ‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.’

2. Nice

I had a teacher at primary school who used to say ‘nice is not a nice word’. I think she probably didn’t like it because we tend to overuse it. But turns out it literally wasn’t a nice word – it comes from the Latin word nescius, which means ignorant, and was previously used to describe stupid people.  

‘Nice’ has actually had loads of different meaning over the years. From about 1300 to the end of the 1600s it mainly meant silly or foolish. But it was also used to describe someone who was ‘very particular’ or ‘finickety’, as well as people who were flash dressers. At some point in the 16th century it took on a more positive meaning, and was used to describe things that were considered ‘refined’.

My primary school teacher was in good company when it came to thinking that ‘nice’ was used too much – Jane Austen evidently thought the same, as shown in this exchange from Northanger Abbey when Henry Tilney says:

‘…and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh, it is a very nice word, indeed! It does for everything.’

3. Naughty

Back in the 14th century, ‘naughty’ meant ‘having nothing’. As in I have naught so I’m naughty. Because adding a ‘y’ to a word generally changes the meaning to ‘characterised by’ – think ‘juicy’, which means that something ‘has juice’ (that sounds a bit gross, sorry). And if you have naught, then you might have to do questionable things, like stealing or prostituting, to try not to have naught anymore. And that, it seems, is how ‘naughty’ took on the meaning it has today.

4. Pretty

Nowadays ‘pretty’ as an adjective means ‘attractive’ and is usually only applied to us ladies. And, as is so often the way (damn you patriarchy!) if it is used for a man it’s often derogatory, as in ‘pretty boy’. ‘Pretty’ first appeared around a millennium ago as ‘praettig’, which means ‘crafty’ (as in foxes, not sewing or origami) or ‘cunning’. This came from the word ‘praett’, which means ‘trick’.  Because being crafty or cunning isn’t always bad, it began to take on more positive connotations of skilful or clever, until we get where we are today. The skilful bit is also where we get the adverb from i.e. ‘pretty cool’ or ‘pretty rubbish’. (In case you fell asleep in English class the day they covered adverbs, they’re words that describe or give more information about verbs, adjectives or other adverbs. Even I nearly fell asleep then.)

5. Bully

Bully = bad, right? Well, yes, it does now. But back in the 1530s it meant ‘sweetheart’. It was used for both boys and girls, and is thought to originate from a Dutch word ‘boel’, which means ‘lover’ (and also ‘brother’ which I’m going to gloss over, because ew). During the 17th century the meaning morphed into ‘fine fellow’. Still nice. But at some point people decided that a ‘fine fellow’ could also be a bit of a dick, which then developed into the idea of a bully (the fact that it has ‘bull’ in it might also have had something to do with this). The old meaning is still just about hanging around in the phrase ‘bully for you’ when someone does something good (although I’ve only ever used that sarcastically).

PS Don’t do bullying kids!

(See also word of the week ‘egregious’ which used to mean really good.)

Take my word for it – Part 1

If you’re a regular reader (hello Dad!) then you’ll know that every week (mostly) I post a word of the week, where I write about a word’s backstory. This has led me down many an etymological rabbit hole on the internet. Sometimes a word will have its roots in ancient languages like Latin, Greek or Middle something-or-rather. Sometimes it’s come to us via someone’s name – like boycott or bowdlerise. And sometimes it’s just fallen out of some random writer’s brain onto a page, and somehow caught on.

So, this time around I thought I’d look into everyday (ish) words that authors created in their own writing, and that have since stuck around.

Butterfingers: Charles Dickens

Dickens first used the term ‘butterfingers’ in The Pickwick Papers.

‘At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations as “Ah, ah!”—“Stupid”—“Now, butter-fingers”—“Muff”— “Humbug”—and so forth.’

It’s no secret that Dickens came up with a lot of words. A couple of his other creations include ‘flummox’ and ‘to clap eyes on [something]’. He didn’t always hit the mark though – some of the terms that didn’t make the judges’ houses include ‘lummy’ (meaning ‘first rate’), ‘spoffish’ (used to describe someone who’s fussy) and ‘gonoph’ (another word for a pickpocket, which possibly didn’t catch on because it sounds like an STD).

Chortle: Lewis Carroll

‘Chortle’ is a portmanteau word, which means it’s two words smooshed together – in this case, ‘chuckle’ and ‘snort’. Carroll came up with it in Alice Through the Looking-Glass:

‘“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy.’

Lots of the new words we get today are portmanteaus – think ‘bromance’, ‘hangry’ and ‘mansplaining’.

In a nice bit of head-fuckery, Carroll coined the term ‘portmanteau’ for these types of words, also in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty says:

‘“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’ and ‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’. You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.”’

‘Portmanteau’ itself is a portmanteau of two French words: porter (to carry) and manteau (a cloak).

*HEAD EXPLODES*

Feminist: Alexandre Dumas Jr

Ironically (maybe? Much like Alanis Morissette, I’m never sure I understand irony), it was a man who came up with the word ‘feminist’. A French man in fact – Alexandre Dumas fils (not the one who wrote The Count of Monte Cristo and The Musketeers – this is his less famous son, hence the ‘fils’). That’s all I’ve got I’m afraid – the internet is very vague about where he actually used it. And some of the articles say it was his dad who came up with it, which I imagine is the Dumas family’s fault for being so unimaginative with their naming conventions.

(Cards on the table, I also found an article which said ‘feminism’ was coined by a radical French philosopher called Charles Fourier. But as this blog post is about authors coining words, not radical French philosophers, I’m attributing it to Dumas. Because it’s my blog, m’kay?)

Gremlin: Roald Dahl

This one’s a slight cheat, as it wasn’t actually coined by Dahl – that honour belongs to the Royal Naval Air Service. But it was Dahl who popularised it in his first book, a children’s story called The Gremlins: A Royal Air Force Story, which was published in 1943. (And I refer you to my point above about this being my blog.)

In the story, gremlins are small creatures that cause mechanical problems in aeroplanes. RAF pilots had been using this as slang since the 1920s, and its earliest print appearance was in a poem published in 1929. There’s a theory that the term itself might come from an Old English word ‘gremian’ which means ‘to vex’.

In Dahl’s story (spoiler alert!), Gus, a fighter pilot and the main character, has his plane destroyed by gremlins. Eventually he convinces the gremlins to join forces with the Brits against the Nazis, and they end up repairing rather than sabotaging aircraft. And after they kick Hitler’s ass, they all live happily ever after.

Blatant: Edmund Spenser

Poet Edmund Spenser coined the word ‘blatant’ in his epic poem The Faerie Queene, which he wrote in 1596. He refers to a ‘blatant beast’ a few times (he obviously didn’t have access to a thesaurus – although even if he had it wouldn’t have been in there as he invented it, durr). The Faerie Queene is an allegorical poem where all the characters represent a quality, and in this case the blatant beast is a thousand-tongued monster, which represents slander.

Lots of authors copied Spenser and used the word ‘blatant’, although to mean different things – mainly to describe noisy people and things. It didn’t settle on its modern meaning (i.e. obvious or conspicuous) until the late 1880s.

No one’s quite clear where Spenser got it from – it might be he took it from the Scottish word ‘blatand’ for bleating, or the Latin word ‘blatīre’ which means ‘to babble’, both of which would fit with a super-chatty beast. Or praps it was just a typo (quill-o?) of one of these and we’re all making a big deal of nothing.

Bedazzled: William Shakespeare

Some sources say that Shakespeare came up with around 10,000 neologisms (which is just a poncy way of saying new words). Which would have made this blog post way too long. And scholars now think that most of these probably already existed – he was just the first person to write them down (obviously this assumes that you believe Shakespeare wrote the plays #conspiracy). He still gets the credit for around 1,700 though which is, y’know, pretty good going. Some of these include: assassination, belongings, eyesore, bandit and lonely.

I’ve gone for bedazzled here, purely because it’s where we get ‘vajazzled’ from. And I just wanted to make a connection between the bard and The Only Way is Essex. I bet somewhere in Stratford a literary skeleton is spinning in his grave…

Having said that, we actually owe our thanks (?) to the American actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, not the TOWIE crew, for coining the word ‘vajazzle’ on a US talk show in 2010.

Oh, I nearly forgot (I was distracted by genital decorations – two words which should never be put together, or Googled) – Shakespeare first used ‘bedazzle’ in The Taming of the Shrew. Katherine says:

‘Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes / That have been so bedazzled with the sun / That everything I look on seemeth green.’

---

The End

PS The keen eyed among you will have noticed that this is subtitled ‘Part 1’. That’s because there are loads more words like this, and I didn’t want to bore spoil you with too many. Read Part 2.

My big fat Greek blog post

Last weekend I was doing a general knowledge crossword with my parents (because I know how to party), and they were both very impressed when I knew the name of the blacksmith of the Greek gods (Hephaestus). They were not so impressed when it turned out the reason I knew it was because I’ve been playing too much ‘Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’ on the PS4, rather than through any reading I’ve done (although I do have a book on Greek mythology by my loo).

My horse in ‘Odyssey’ is called Phobos, which I’ve learnt from my toilet-reading (sorry), is where we get the word ‘phobia’ from – Phobos being the Greek personification of fear. And this got me thinking (thankfully not on the loo this time) about other words we get from Greek myth. So here are my top 10 Greek-y words, along with the myths behind them. (I’ve skipped some of the more well-known mythological Greeks/words like Atlas, Narcissus and Nemesis. Because otherwise this would be a top 13 and that’s just silly.)

Panic

The word ‘panic’ is derived from the Greek god Pan, who you’ve probably heard of because he has a bit of a reputation for debauchery and general naughtiness. So it seems odd that we get a word about uncontrollable fear or anxiety from him. It turns out that cloven-hoofed Pan wasn’t just about cavorting around forests with nymphs – he was said to have the power to send people fleeing from him in fear, which is where we get ‘panic’ from.

Interestingly (kinda), ‘panic’ in English started out as an adjective. So you’d use it to describe other nouns about being scared. Plutarch, for example, wrote about ‘Panique fear’. (You can find out more about this here – if you really want to.)

When he wasn’t scaring/boning people, Pan is also said to have invented panpipes. That must have been a short brainstorming session in the naming department.

Hygiene

This comes from Hygeia, one of the daughters of Asclepius, the god of medicine, and Epione, the goddess of healing. Hygeia’s associated with cleanliness and sanitation, lucky her. One of her four sisters is called Panacea, a word we still use today for a cure-all medicine.

Museum

This one seems obvious now I know it. The word ‘museum’ comes from ‘mouseion’ which is the name for a place or temple dedicated to the Muses. The nine Muses were goddesses of literature, science and the arts. I used to be able to name them all (because I’m really cool). Okay, I’m going to have a go. There’s Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Polyhymnia (religious music or something), Erato (porn, maybe?)… nope, that’s all I got. Hang on a second.

*Googles muses*

Right, so the ones I missed are Euterpe (flutes and lyric poetry), Thalia (comedy and pastoral poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Terpsichore (dance – I’m annoyed I forgot that one, ’cos it’s nice to say) and Urania (astronomy). Oh, and Polyhymnia is actually the muse of ‘sacred poetry’ while Erato looks after ‘love poetry’. Which is probably porn.

Echo

Poor old Echo. She was an oread (a mountain nymph – a divine nature spirit-type thing, usually depicted as a nubile, naked young woman, obvs). Zeus, the horny old bastard, loved cavorting with the nymphs. Echo wasn’t even part of the cavorting – she had a lovely voice, and just used to chat (commentate?) while everyone else was doing the nasty. Hera, Zeus’ long-suffering wife, was understandably annoyed and came down from Mount Olympus to open a can of whupass. Zeus ordered Echo to protect him, which she did. Hera punished her for this by taking away her ability to speak, leaving her only able to repeat the last thing someone said to her. Then Echo died, leaving only her voice behind. I’m not sure why Hera punished Echo when all she was doing was talking and Zeus got away scot-free, but there it is.

Erotic

Bet you’ve got that Madonna song in your head now, right? ‘Erotic’ comes from ‘Eros’, the Greek god of love and sexy time (the Roman equivalent is Cupid, he of chubby man-baby bow and arrow fame). The myths can’t decide whether Eros was one of the ‘primordial gods’ (i.e. one of the first four gods along with Chaos, Gaia and Tarturus), or if he came along a bit later. Some say he was the son of Ares, the god of war, and Aphrodite (even though she was married to crossword clue Hephaestus).

Which brings us on to…

Psychology

As I’m sure you know, the word ‘psychology’ means the study of the psyche, or the human mind. In Greek myth, Psyche was a beautiful woman, so hot that people stopped worshipping Aphrodite and starting worshipping her instead. This pissed off Aphrodite, so she sent her son Eros down with the mission to make Psyche fall in love with someone hideous. Long story short, Eros fell in love with her himself. Unlike most of the other Greek myths, this one has a happy ending – after making her do various tasks, Aphrodite got over her jealousy and granted Psyche immortality.

Hypnosis

Look into my eyes… ‘Hypnosis’ is named for Hypnos, the personification of sleep. He was the son of Nyx (goddess of night) and Erebus (god of darkness). Hypnos and his brother Thanatos (AKA Death – cheery) lived in a cave in the underworld which the sun couldn’t reach. He did get to marry one of the Charites, or Graces, though (minor goddesses of charm, beauty and other nice stuff) so it’s not all bad.

The Roman equivalent of Hypnos is Somnos, which is where we get the word ‘insomnia’ from.

Morphine

The name of the drug morphine comes from Morpheus. Nope, not the bloke from The Matrix – Morpheus is the son of Hypnos and his wife Pasithea, and the god of dreams.

Morphine is a naturally occurring opiate, most famously extracted from poppies. It was first isolated from opium in the early 1800s by one Friedrich Sertürner. He called it ‘morpheum’ in honour of the god of dreams because it made people fall asleep. Poor old Fred experimented on himself, and ended up addicted to morphium and suffering from chronic depression.

Chronology

Chronology comes from the god Chronos, the personification of time. Over time, Chronos has been confused with the Titan Cronus/Kronus who was Zeus’ dad. One of his claims to fame is that he ate his children and castrated his father (can you tell that it’s much easier to find info on Cronus and not so much on Chronos?).

Other words we get from Chronos include chronic, anachronism and chronicle.

Tantalising

So this word comes from Tantalus, a half god, half nymph (apparently there were male nymphs, but I don’t know if they were scantily clad or nubile). Tantalus got an invite to dinner with the gods up Mount Olympus, the lucky bastard. He said thanks by nicking a bunch of stuff, including ambrosia and nectar, which he gave to us mortals. He then, for reasons which I can’t quite fathom but possibly by way of an apology for all the stealing, decided to cook and serve up his son at a banquet for the gods. They found out about it and refused to eat it (and you’ll be pleased to hear they then brought the son back to life, minus a bit of shoulder that a goddess accidentally ate). Tantalus’ punishment for this was to be made to stand in a pool of water under a fruit tree for all eternity. Whenever he tried to take a fruit, the branches raised up so he couldn’t get it. And when he bent down to drink from the pool, the water receded before he could have any. Hence, tantalising. Blimey, that took a long time, didn’t it?

So, there you have it. Right, I’m off to learn some more about Greek mythology. Where’s my controller?

A rumball in the bummock

This time last year I wrote about the origins of six well-known Christmas words. And because I’m not terribly imaginative, this year I’m doing much the same thing, except with obscure ones. So here are six festive words that have fallen out of favour. Unsurprisingly, a lot of them relate to overeating and boozing. Well, that’s what Christmas is all about, right?

1. Ramracketting

To ramracket is to run or jump about playfully at Christmas time. The English Dialect Dictionary defines it as ‘Christmas gambols’. I don’t know about you but I shall be ramracketting like a demon on Christmas day after a couple of shandies.

2. Yulestarn

This is a Scottish dialect word for a bright star in the sky on Christmas night. I realise it just looks like I’ve spelled ‘star’ wrong then stuck ‘Yule’ in front of it, but it’s a real word, honest. You can buy a Yulestarn hamper from Debenhams, if you’re the type of person who does things like that. Apparently it will ‘illuminate your festive celebrations’ just like ‘the Yulestarn star brightens the sky on Christmas night’. #overenthusiastic-copywriter

3. Rumball

Rumball Night is an 18th-century nickname for Christmas Eve. That’s because a ‘rumball feast’ is a big ole meal served the day before Christmas.

There’s also a Rumball Night hamper at Debenhams (I promise I’m not sponsored by Debenhams). Somebody who works at Hampers of Distinction obviously went to a lot of the same websites as I did for this blog post.

4. Bummock

Stop sniggering. This is another old Scottish word. A bummock is a large quantity of booze made for Christmas (although a bummock’s not just for Christmas – you can also make them for other special occasions). A bummock is also an old name for a Christmas party given by landlords for their tenants. I don’t know why. And I’m not sure I want to. 

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that there isn’t a bummock hamper on Debenhams’ website.

5. Bubblyjock

Yet another Scottish one. A bubblyjock is a male turkey. Unlike pretty much all the other words on this list, I’ve managed to find some actual etymology for this one. ‘Bubbly’ apparently refers to the noise a turkey makes, while ‘jock’ is an old word for ‘clown’ (apologies to anyone called Jock who might be reading this). I guess maybe because turkeys are a bit comedy looking…? (Apologies to any turkeys who might be reading this.)

Here’s a poem about a bubblyjock. Don’t say I never give you anything.

6. Crawmassing

Picture the scene. You’ve just finished Christmas lunch (which, if you’re anything like my family, means it’s probably early evening). You’ve eaten your body weight in roast food, and loosened your belt buckle a notch. Okay, two notches. But then you notice that there’s a particularly nice-looking roast potato left on your sister’s plate. And a whole pig-in-a-blanket on your dad’s. So you grab them, add some gravy, and polish them off. This going through the remnants of a Christmas meal is called crawmassing (we got there eventually).

(It’s also used to describe people who beg for gifts at Christmas, but that doesn’t paint such a cheery picture.)

---

So, there you go. Happy Christmas lovely reader. I hope your festive season is chock-full of bummocks, rumballs and lots of ramracketting.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in 2019.

Always the bridesmaid

If you’ve ever used the word ‘disconsolate’, you might have wondered whether you can also be ‘consolate’. Or maybe you haven’t, because you have a life. Lucky for you, I don’t. So, in this post I’m looking at unpaired (awwww) words.

Single and ready to mingle

In grammar, an unpaired word is one that looks like it should have an opposite, but doesn’t. This is usually because it has a prefix like ‘dis’ or ‘un’. Sometimes these types of words come about because the opposite word (called an antonym, fact fans) has fallen out of fashion. Or it might be that it never existed in the first place, for example if we nicked the unpaired word from another language (although that would make for a very short blog post, so I won’t be including those here).

So, without further ado, let’s have a look at five now single words, and their lesser-known other halves.

Incorrigible and corrigible

‘Incorrigible’ refers to a person who can’t change or be reformed. So ‘corrigible’ means exactly what you’d expect – something which can be fixed. It’s usually used for things rather than people, unlike its partner. Iago uses ‘corrigible’ in ‘Othello’: ‘…why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.’ ‘Corrigible’ actually came about after ‘incorrigible’, appearing around about the 15th century, a good 100 years after its opposite number. No one seems to know why it never caught on.

Unkempt and kempt

I’m pretty unkempt at the moment (I’m writing this on a Sunday, okay?). It means to be untidy or dishevelled. ‘Unkempt’ has been around since the 14th century, and ‘kempt’ seems to be a backformation of it, which is just a fancy way of saying that someone knocked off the prefix – in this case ‘un’ – to make the opposite. Having said that, another source I found says it did exist but fell out of use some time in the 1500s, only to make a comeback 400 years afterwards. I don’t know who’s right I’m afraid. What they do all agree on is that both words are derived from the Old High German word ‘chempen’ which means ‘to comb’.

Disgruntled and gruntled

I know this seems like a comedy backformation, but it actually isn’t. ‘Gruntle’ did exist as a word, and it’s actually not the opposite of ‘disgruntle’ – it means to grumble or complain, and also to ‘utter small grunts’ (this makes me happy). This is a rare example of the prefix ‘dis-’ as an intensifier, rather than its more usual use which is to undo the meaning of the word it’s attached to. Ooh, interesting, right? Right?  

Unruly and ruly

‘Ruly’ means law-abiding. It comes from the word ‘rule’ which I enjoy – someone who follows the rules is being ruly. Someone who doesn’t is unruly. These days ‘unruly’ has softened a bit, and is more often applied to children. And hair.

Impervious and pervious

‘Pervious’ seems to have been overtaken by the more recognisable ‘permeable’ these days. It comes from the Latin word ‘pervius’ which doesn’t have anything to do with men in dirty macs – it means ‘having a passage through’. While we can use ‘impervious’ both literally (as in something being impervious to water) and figuratively (someone can be impervious to criticism), pervious, however, only seems to relate to physical things (like rocks), that water can run through.

---

There you have it – five words and their almost forgotten partners. Other words which didn’t make the cut include intrepid and trepid (meaning fearful), feckless and feckful (a Scottish word that means efficient), and innocuous and nocuous (which has now been almost completely replaced by ‘noxious’). So next time you use one of these, spare a thought for their neglected other halves, languishing quietly on the linguistic shelf.

Oh, and ‘consolate’ is a word btdubz (not to be confused with the place where diplomats go – that’s a consulate). It means ‘to console’ or ‘give comfort’. So that’s nice.

WY(M)DKAA or, words you (maybe) didn’t know are acronyms

You probably already know that scuba’s an acronym, right? (It stands for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Well, obvs.) But there are lots of other words we use every day that you might not know are actually short for something (okay, maybe you only use them every day if you work for NASA or are an American police person, but let’s just gloss over that, m’kay?). Here are my top five.

LASER

‘Do you expect me to talk?’

‘No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!’

That’s my favourite laser-based scene from the movies. Anyway, that has nothing to do with this post. Laser’s short for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. This is bound to come up in a pub quiz at some point so I’ve tried to commit it to memory but so far I can only remember ‘light’ and ‘radiation’. Half a point?

TASER

These aren’t all going to rhyme, honest. Even though it looks nothing like a gun, Taser stands for Thomas A Swift's Electric Rifle. This actually has a weirdly nice backstory (considering it’s a not-so-nice thing). Tom Swift is the lead character in a young adult novel called Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle; or, Daring Adventures in Elephant Land (awesome title – although a bit of research reveals it’s now considered horrendously racist, so maybe don’t rush down to Waterstones) which was a favourite of Taser inventor Jack Cover.

Apparently he added in the ‘A’ – Tom Swift doesn’t have a middle name in the book – which is lucky as otherwise we’d all be trying to work out how to say TSER.

GIF

Speaking of working out how to say things, why, oh why, does no one know how to pronounce GIF? I favour a hard ‘g’ myself (like ‘git’) but apparently Steve Wilhite, the creator of the GIF image format, says it’s pronounced with a soft ‘g’, because it echoes the name of an American peanut butter brand, Jif (I don’t know why). Luckily, because lots of people on the internet have too much time on their hands, someone’s put together a whole website on why it should be a hard ‘g’. And here’s someone arguing the exact opposite.

Wars have been fought over less…

Sorry, I almost forgot to say what it stands for: Graphics Interchange Format. Which is much less interesting than the whole pronunciation thing.

SMART car

It’s not because they’re smart and you can fit them in teeny-tiny spaces. It stands for Swatch Mercedes ART apparently. This is because the cars were developed by Swatch (yes, the watch people) and Daimler Benz. They started life as ‘Swatchmobiles’ but this was scrapped (pardon the pun) for a reason I can’t find.

I can’t think of anything amusing to say about this, so here’s a link to some funny pictures of smart cars instead.

BASE jumping

The BASE bit’s short for Building, Antenna, Span and Earth, which apparently is the stuff you can jump off of (although I’m not sure how you can jump off a span or the earth). If you make a jump from each of the four categories you get a BASE number. Whatever that is, I’m never going to get one.

Just in case you’re not clear on what BASE jumping is, here’s a video of some mental people jumping off what I think is an electricity pylon. Warning – contains some NSFW language (well, I’d be swearing too if I was going to jump off an electricity pylon) and dirty fingernails.

A note on acronyms v initialisms (and backronyms)

Loads of us (me included up until a few years ago) use and abuse the word ‘acronym’. An acronym only applies to an abbreviation that you pronounce as a word. So the ones on this list are all acronyms. If you pronounce the individual letters of an abbreviation (like BBC or FBI), it’s an initialism, not an acronym.

There are also things called backronyms, which are when we make words that aren’t acronyms or initialisms into, well, acronyms or initialisms (that’s a horrible sentence, sorry). It’s basically retconning a word, usually for a laugh. ‘Bing’ (the Microsoft search engine) has been backronymed (not a word) as ‘Because It’s Not Google’.

Apparently SOS is a backronym. It doesn’t stand for ‘Save our souls’ at all – the letters were just chosen because they’re easy to transmit in Morse code. WTF, right?

A collection of collectives

Collective nouns aren’t just for animals – there are also collective nouns for people and things. Excited yet? No? Okay, how about this – did you know that ‘a flight of stairs’ is a collective noun? And a ‘baptism of fire’? (Mind. BLOWN.) So, with the help of the lovely little book ‘An Unkindness of Ravens’ by Chloe Rhodes, here’s a list of some of my favourite collective nouns. Because I know how to paaaartaaaay.

A note on the origins of collective nouns

Most of the nouns on this list have been around for yonks. They first appeared in 15th-century manuscripts called ‘Books of Courtesy’. Basically the ‘What not to wear’ of the 1400s, these were manuals on how to be a noble, designed to stop young aristocrats embarrassing themselves by saying or doing the wrong thing at court. One of the earliest of these is the Egerton Manuscript which dates from around 1450, and lists 106 collective nouns. I’m not entirely sure what collective nouns had to do with being a noble, but maybe if you used the wrong one you’d be executed? If so, that’s my kind of grammar police. Anyway, here we go…

A murder of crows

I love how menacing this sounds. And it has pretty menacing origins as well. According to Rhodes, medieval peasants saw crows (along with ravens and rooks) as messengers of the devil with prophetic powers. Seeing a crow on the roof of your house meant that you’d probably die soon (ouch) as well. So far, so sinister. But then it gets really weird. One of the other reasons they might have chosen the word ‘murder’ is after witnessing a crow parliament. This is essentially a crow court, where loads of crows gather together to apparently try one of their own. It quite often ends with the offender being ripped to pieces by its peers. I’m not even joking. Long thought to just be folklore, it’s been witnessed in modern times, as in this article. ‘Murder’ seems like the right choice after reading this.

Crows are also super clever, which possibly makes them even more murdery. They’re one of the few members of the animal kingdom that can recognise human faces, and there’s evidence that they might have their own language. I’m literally terrified of crows now.

A parliament of owls

This is a relatively new one, as it doesn’t turn up in any of the medieval manuscripts that coined most of the collective nouns on this list. In fact, it’s technically wrong – ‘parliament’ was traditionally ascribed to rooks, not owls. We can blame CS Lewis for this – he called a chapter in ‘The Silver Chair’ (my favourite of ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, followed closely by ‘The Magician’s Nephew’) ‘A Parliament of Owls’, as it involves a group of owls getting together to discuss Narnian affairs. He nicked it from a poem by Chaucer, which is called ‘The Parliament of Fowls’ (or ‘The Parlement of Foules’ to give it its proper name – I did try to read it, but then I remembered that I hate Chaucer), where all the birds in the world get together to find mates (hmmm, I could do with organising one of those). ‘Parliament’ has now completely superseded the original (although for the life of me I can’t find out what that was, which shows how ingrained ‘parliament’ is now).

A misbelief of painters

The first human collective noun on my list, a ‘misbelief’ is exactly what it says on the tin – ‘a wrong or false belief or opinion’. It seems that this one came about because painters of the Middle Ages generally tweaked their paintings to flatter the sitter – so they’d flatten a stomach, take out the wrinkles and so on. Apparently as long as they got the heraldry and clothes right, everything else was up for grabs. So it was basically the medieval equivalent of airbrushing.

A superfluity of nuns

This one seems a bit mean, but is probably just factually accurate – when it was coined, there were apparently a shedload of nuns about. Between 1270 and 1536, there were around 140 nunneries in England, several of which were really overcrowded. That’s because going off to the convent was seen as the natural step for nobles’ daughters who’d passed marriageable age, and dads pressured prioresses to take in their girls even if there wasn’t any room at the convent (I’d so be in a convent if I’d been alive then). It might also have been a reference to the fact that the seeds of the Protestant Reformation had been planted – when this first appeared in print it was only 50 years before Henry VIII would do his dissolution thang.

An abominable sight of monks

Unlike the nun-noun, this one is mean. Basically everyone hated monks in the 15th century. They were seen as having ruined all the pagan fun the peasants were having before Christianity took over, and latterly as being too well-off and well-fed (think that guy that Kevin Costner boots out the window in ‘Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves’, although I don’t think he was a monk, but you get the idea) while everyone else wasn’t well-anything. ‘Abominable’ actually means ‘causing moral revulsion’ which makes sense in this context – I confess I didn’t know this and just thought it was something horrible. Or a big old snowman.

A shrewdness of apes

So this one sounds quite nice, right? Wrong. When it was coined, ‘shrewdness’ actually meant wickedness, and was given to apes due to a ‘playful mischievousness’ which 15th century scientists saw in them. As Rhodes points out though, it’s rather nice that now we know how clever they are (apes, not 15th-century scientists), this one still makes perfect sense today, even though ‘shrewd’ now means something else entirely.

An unkindness of ravens

Similarly to crows and their murdering, this one’s down to people being a bit scared of ravens. As carrion birds, their habits aren’t the nicest, and they were also seen as harbingers of death and destruction in medieval Britain. The name might have come from the fact that ancient writers thought they kicked their young out of the nest leaving them to fend for themselves, and also that they left their older birds to die of starvation rather than help them out (which was probably payback for the whole nest-kicking thing). I can’t find any modern evidence for this, so fingers crossed those medieval Bill Oddies were wrong. I did find that an alternative collective noun for ravens is ‘a conspiracy’ though, which is a bit nicer, though still fairly sinister.

---

So, there you have it. If you’re intrigued by the world of collective nouns and venery (that’s the collective noun for collective nouns relating to animals – kinda) then I thoroughly recommend Rhodes’ book. And even if you’re not, it looks very nice on the coffee table.

(I definitely didn’t have to clear mountains of crap off the coffee table before I took this photo.)