discotheque

If you ask someone what a ‘disco’ is, they’ll probably talk about light-up floors, flared trousers, mirror balls and dancing round handbags (unless they’re under 35, of course, in which case they’ll likely look at you blankly). Of course, ‘disco’ comes from ‘discotheque’ (or if we’re being pedantic – which is my middle name – discothèque). But long before John Travolta struck that pose in Saturday Night Fever, a ‘discotheque’ was something much less glamorous (although there wasn’t a huge amount of glamour in the sticky-floored Essex nightclubs I was dancing around in the 90s, to be honest – Zeus in Chelmsford, I’m looking at you).

It was, to be blunt, furniture.

The furniture behind the funk

Like 90 per cent of my words of week, to really get under the skin of ‘discotheque’, we have to head back to Ancient Greek.

We start with diskos, which, you can probably guess, means ‘a flat, circular object that you throw’ (think Olympic discuses). Over time, people started using it to describe anything flat, thin and round. Medieval Latin and early European languages went on to use various derivatives of discus to describe dinner plates, platters, round wooden boards and the like (that’s where we get ‘dish’ from, for example).

In the 17th century, the French gave ‘discus’ a glow-up as only the French can, creating the word ‘disque’ to mean any flat, thin, circular object. Fast forward to the 1880s (ish) and Emile Berliner has just invented the gramophone record in 1887 – a flat, circular sound storage format – which he called a ‘disc’, and the French called a ‘disque’.

So where did the ‘theque’ come from? If you remember your GCSE French, you’ll know that the word bibliothèque means ‘library’. French speakers then began using -thèque as a suffix meaning ‘a place or storage case for a collection of things’ (catchy). Stick disque and -thèque and you get discothèque! Well, you don’t – you get disquethèque. But thanks to French grammar rules (and something very complicated involving Greek declensions), it ended up as discothèque (take my word for it). But it was still nothing to do with sequinned bodysuits or Donna Summer at this point – it was simply a library of records. AKA, that bit of furniture I mentioned at the start of this post (which seems like years ago now, sorry).

Panic at the disco

So how did a furniture cabinet turn into a party? The first official discothèque is generally agreed to be Whisky à Gogo (à gogo meaning ‘in abundance’ and names after the novel, later a movie, Whisky Galore), a club that opened in Paris in 1947. They played records on turntables instead of using a live band or orchestra, and because of that, it was described as a discothèque.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the discothèque had spread across Europe and also jumped the Atlantic to the US of A. Of course four whole syllables AND an accent is a lot to deal with, especially when you’re throwing shapes on the dancefloor, so it wasn’t long before ‘thèque’ fell by the wayside and we were left with just ‘disco’. Not long after that, the word expanded from the place where you do your bopping to the entire culture.

So next time you hear a banging bassline and feel the irresistible urge to do the Hustle, remember: you’re not just shaking your booty – you’re celebrating a 2,500-year linguistic journey that started with Ancient Greek field sports and ended with too-tight polyester suits and sequins that were visible from space.

(Oh, and when I was researching this post, I asked Google Gemini to help me understand how ‘discotheque’ went from storage to party. It confidently told me about a woman called Pauline Tézenas du Montcel who opened a venue called ‘La Discothèque’ in Paris in 1947. When I searched for her elsewhere, I didn’t find anything. Gemini then admitted that the awesome-sounding Pauline was ‘a completely hallucinated persona with no historical existence in French nightlife history’ AKA a massive lie. Yet another reason to always employ a human copywriter.)

chaos

As I look around my office/spare room, I see a huge pile of unsorted laundry (one that I keep adding to), papers that need filing, empty cups of tea and a dog attempting to turn the aforementioned pile of laundry into his new bed.

It is, in short, chaos.

‘Chaos’ comes from an Ancient Greek word, χάος (kháos). But if you somehow time-travelled back to the days of togas, epic poetry and gods-impregnating-women-in-weird-ways (I’m looking at you, Zeus), and told the first person you met that your office (and kitchen, and bedroom, and bathroom) was ‘full of chaos’, they’d look at you quizzically. Because to them, chaos wasn’t a mess at all. It was a big old empty space.

To find out why, we need to take a look at Hesiod’s Theogony, a 1,022-line epic poem which he wrote around the 8th century BCE. Theogony is the foundational text for Greek mythology, detailing the origins, genealogy and succession of the gods. And it all starts with Chaos-with-a-capital-C, the very first thing to exist. But Chaos-with-a-capital-C wasn’t the noisy vortex of fire, wind and random rubbish you might be imagining right now. It was, simply, DUM DUM DUUUUMMMM…

… the Void.

No stars, no earth, no sky and definitely no laundry that needed putting away. Just a giant, empty space waiting for stuff to happen. A cosmic blank page, if you will.

(The etymology backs this up – if we trace ‘chaos’ back to its Proto-Indo-European root, we land on *ghen- or *ghei-, which means ‘to gape’ or ‘to yawn’.)

Chaos gets crowded

So how did this empty abyss turn into the ultimate disaster area? Well, we can blame another poet for that (damn poets), but a Roman one this time – Ovid. Ovid took one look at Hesiod’s 1,022 lines and decided that clearly wasn’t enough. His Metamorphoses, which he wrote around 8 CE, was approximately 11,995 lines of dactylic hexameter (yum). And even though his name is literally an anagram of ‘void’, he decided to redefine chaos as a confused, shapeless mass rather than an empty space. Ovid’s chaos involved all the raw elements of the universe – fire, water, earth and air – crammed in together like a university flat-share, fighting against one another in this overcrowded, messy and disorganised space.

‘Chaos’ elbowed its way into Middle English around the 14th to 15th century via Old French and Latin. At first, writers used it in the same sense as Hesiod, i.e. to refer to the void that existed before Creation (this also turns up in Genesis, where the Earth was ‘without form, and void’). But Ovid’s hot mess was far too relatable to stay confined to Roman epic poetry. By the late 16th and early 17th centuries, English speakers had begun using ‘chaos’ to describe any state of utter confusion, disorder or turmoil.

Gus and his new laundry-based bed

The ultimate plot twist: Chaos Theory

Hesiod gave us chaos as an empty void. Ovid rebranded it as a crowded mess. Then 20th-century scientists flipped the word once more. In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz entered numbers into a computer weather simulation built on strict physical laws. He rounded one number down slightly to save time (sort of – it’s more complicated than this, but this is a blog about words, not numbers), fully expecting that doing that wouldn’t really affect the result. Instead, that tiny tweak generated a completely different long-term forecast (AKA the butterfly effect). This proved that a system doesn’t need to be random to produce wild, unpredictable outcomes – it can follow strict, logical rules behind the scenes and still create results that look like a total mess on the surface.

Lorenz originally called this ‘deterministic nonperiodic flow’ (which sounds vaguely perimenopausal) as well as the equally snappy ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’. Thankfully, mathematicians (in my head they all look like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park) later stepped in and rebranded it as Chaos Theory, presumably just because it sounds really cool.

So, the word ‘chaos’ has come full circle, from empty space to jumbled mess to structure inside an apparent muddle. Which means, as I look over at my dog sleeping peacefully in a pile of unsorted laundry, I can take comfort in the fact that it isn’t actually a disaster. It’s just a complex system with a hidden order I have yet to discover. (Or at least, that’s what I’ll be telling myself until I finally put the washing away.)

Dr Ian Malcolm using Chaos Theory to flirt with Laura Dern – much creepier than I remembered

aegis

‘Aegis’ is a fancy-dancy word that refers to the power to protect, control, or support something or someone. It often pops up in the phrase ‘under the aegis of’ (although not in anything I’ve written, I’m pleased to say). For example:

‘The ultimate owner of the best spot on the sofa will be decided under the aegis of the dog.’

Medusa, coming at ya

You’ve probably guessed from the spelling that we nicked ‘aegis’ from Latin. But the word it actually comes from is Greek – aíx. Bet you can’t guess what that means.

I’ll give you a sec.

The answer is, not at all obviously, ‘goat’.

So how did we get from hairy, eat-anything Goaty McGoatface to protection and control? Well, in ancient Greek mythology, the god Zeus (and later his daughter Athena) carried a powerful shield or cloak called aegis, which was made from the skin of Amalthea – a mythical goat that suckled Zeus as a baby. Yep. I mean this is the guy who turned himself into a golden shower (shut up), poured through a skylight and impregnated Harry Hamlin’s, sorry, Perseus’ mum, so being suckled by a goat is frankly one of the less weird things about him. (I should probably say that in early accounts, Amalthea was a nymph who owned a goat whose milk Zeus drank – much less weird, but also less interesting.)

Anyway, back to the shield. This was not just any old goatskin shield – the snake-covered head of the Gorgon Medusa (killed by the aforementioned golden-shower-fathered Perseus) was mounted on it. And because you can never have too many reptiles on your shield, it was also fringed with extra snakes who’d snap at anyone getting too close. The OG biological warfare. (Much like the nymph/goat merging above, Homer described the shield’s fringing as golden tassels, but later artworks depicted them as snakes – and that’s clearly much more exciting.)

Over the centuries, the word ‘aegis’ made its way through Latin and into English where 19th-century printers insisted on snobbishly gluing the first two letters together as ‘ægis’ (called a ligature, fact fans). Along the way it shed both the stuck-together letters, the goat hide and the snakes (dammit!), eventually settling down as an unnecessarily formal synonym for sponsorship, backing or protection.

So, next time you hear someone say they’re acting under the ‘aegis’ of an official authority (or a cavapoo called Gus, if you’re me), remember: they’re really just hiding behind a big-old goat skin.

Alongside ‘Terrahawks’ (look it up if you’re too young to remember it), this scene was one of the scariest things I saw as a child in the 80s.

rhetoric

Nowadays, when we say something is ‘rhetoric’, we usually mean it’s a load of bollocks designed to manipulate whoever’s unlucky enough to be listening to it. But this much-maligned word didn’t always have such a negative meaning. In fact, ‘rhetoric’ used to simply refer to the art of persuasion. Throughout Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ‘rhetoric’ was a prestigious and essential academic discipline, and one of three ancient arts of discourse (also called trivium) along with grammar (yay!) and logic (boo!).

Rhetoric, innit

The word ‘rhetoric’ has a Proto-Indo-European root, *werh₁, which means ‘to speak’ or ‘to say’. This appeared during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, i.e. bloody ages ago (about 6,500 to 4,500 years ago, if you want actual numbers. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the weird notation, the asterisk means the word was never written down, and the small 1 marks a soft throat sound, apparently). *werh₁ evolved into an Ancient Greek word, eírein, also meaning ‘to speak’, which then produced rhētōr meaning a public speaker or orator (although I’m not sure how – it’s something to do with the Greek letter for W vanishing, I think, but much too boring to go into here, which is saying something). To further complicate things, the Greeks then took the root of rhētōr and added the adjective ending -ikē (meaning ‘pertaining to’ or ‘the skill of’) which created a new adjective, rhētorikē, meaning ‘oratorical’. This clearly wasn’t complicated enough though, so they stuck tékhnē (‘art’, ‘craft’ or ‘technique’) on the end to make it mean ‘the oratorical craft’ or ‘the art of the public speaker’.

Understandably, as time passed people stopped bothering with the tékhnē bit, and just used rhētorikē on its own to mean ‘the art of speaking’. This made its way into Latin as rhētorica, then into 12th-century Old French as retorique, and finally into Middle English in the early 14th century as rethoryke or rhetorik.

Annnnnnd relax.

Now we all know too much about rhetoric, let’s have a look at the tools and techniques that people use when they’re trying to be good at it, AKA rhetorical devices. There are bloody loads of these, and they all have very long complicated names, so I’ll just give you a few. I can almost certainly guarantee you’ve used at least some of them in everyday speech.

Complicated name	Sounds like…	Actually is…	In action
Epizeuxis	Something that hangs at the back of your throat	Repeating a word or phrase back-to-back with no other words in between to make a point	‘Location, location, location.’
Anaphora	A shop that sells overpriced makeup	Repeating a phrase at the start of sentences or clauses for emphasis	‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields…’
Tricolon	A bowel complaint	Grouping things in threes to add rhythm and punch	‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
Hyperbole	An American sports event that no one outside America cares about	Deliberate, extreme exaggeration used to make a point or emphasise a feeling, and not meant to be taken literally (and pronounced ‘hy-PER-buh-lee’, confusingly)	‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.’

What about rhetorical questions, I hear you ask in a not-rhetorical way. Yes, rhetorical questions come directly from the study of rhetoric. They’re called that because they were traditionally used to make a point or persuade an audience, with the answer either immediately given by the speaker, or being so bleedin’ obvious that they didn’t need to. In speechmaking, posing a question forces the listener’s brain to process the thought actively rather than just listening (or drifting off…). Rhetorical questions also subtly steer an audience’s thinking without explicitly telling them what to think. Sneaky, huh?

laconic

If you’ve ever had a text from someone consisting entirely of the letter ‘k’, you’ve been on the receiving end of laconic. As an adjective, it describes a way of speaking or writing that uses the absolute minimum number of words to get a point across. No padding, no pleasantries, no ‘I hope this email finds you well’. Just straight to the point, like a cricket ball to the crotch.

But, why ‘laconic’? Well, it comes from Lakonikos – a Greek adjective for anything relating to Laconia, a region on the south-eastern part of the Peloponnese peninsula. Laconia was home to Sparta and (obviously) the Spartans, whose six-packs you may remember from Zack Snyder’s naked chest-fest, 300. The Spartans were not big talkers. And while other Greeks like the Athenians were busy writing philosophy, performing tragedies and inventing democracy, the Spartans were honing an arguably more useful skill: saying a great deal by saying almost nothing.

The most famous example of Spartans being spartanly (yep) with their words comes from Philip II of Macedon. He was a man who loved to open a can of whup-ass (and dad to Alexander the Great), having taken Macedon from a fairly insignificant kingdom to a power that conquered most of Ancient Greece in less than 25 years. Turning his attention to Sparta, he sent a message asking whether he should come as a friend or a foe. The reply was ‘Neither’. He then sent the message:

If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.

The Spartans replied with a single word:

If.

There’s also a story from Plutarch of a Spartan mother sending her son off to battle. After handing him his shield, her farewell advice consisted of five words: ‘Either this or upon this’, meaning ‘Come back with your shield, or on it’ – returning without your shield meant you’d thrown it away to run faster (the ancient Greek equivalent of updating your LinkedIn profile before handing in your notice). Inspiring and absolutely terrifying.

So next time someone accuses you of being curt in an email or a text, tell them you weren’t being rude, you’re just channelling your inner Gerard Butler/Greek warrior. Sparta would be proud. Although they probably wouldn’t say so.

(PS The Philip vs Sparta story would have been great if it ended ‘Philip did not invade Laconia’, which is what ChatGPT told me when I was researching this. When I checked it elsewhere, which thankfully I always do since ChatGPT told me a bunch of lies previously, it turns out that Philip did indeed invade Laconia, devastating large parts of it and kicking the Spartans out. In hindsight, maybe a few more words might have helped.)

cacophony

A cacophony is a big old noise, and an unpleasant one at that. Looking and sounding as chaotic as what it describes, ‘cacophony’ comes from the Greek kakophōnía. That’s a mash-up of kakos meaning ‘bad’, and phōnē which means ‘voice’ or ‘sound’. So it literally means ‘bad sound’. No sugar-coating here.

In classical rhetoric (the ancient art of persuasion through language), ‘cacophony’ referred specifically to harsh or clashing combinations of sounds in speech or writing – phrases that were awkward to say, unpleasant to hear or stylistically jarring. So if a sentence was hard to say out loud or just didn’t flow well, it might be criticised as ‘cacophonous’.

‘Cacophony’ first turned up in English in the mid-1600s, when people were busy developing new types of machinery and opera. So you can see why a word for noisy noises might be useful. Its first appearance in print was in Thomas Blout’s Glossographia, one of the earliest dictionaries (published in 1656 with the subtitle ‘A Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words… As Are Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue’ which I love). There it was used to describe ‘an ill, harsh, or unpleasing sound’.

Despite its unpleasant meaning, ‘cacophony’ has a classy family tree, sharing a root with ‘symphony’ – that’s the same phōnē, but this time combined with sym-, meaning together. Its antonym (a fancy way of saying ‘opposite’) is the lesser-known ‘euphony’, which literally means ‘good sound’.

eclipse

On Monday (8th April), there was a total solar eclipse. Sadly you could only see this if you were in North America – here in the UK it was only a partial (described as a ‘small grazing’ on one website I saw). I didn’t manage to see any of it, but it did get me wondering – where does the word ‘eclipse’ come from?

These days, ‘eclipse’ refers to the partial or complete obscuring of one celestial body by another, or the shadow cast by one celestial body on to another. We also use it metaphorically to describe someone or something being overshadowed by something else.

‘Eclipse’ comes from ancient Greek, from ‘ekleipsis’, meaning ‘an abandonment’ or ‘a failing’, to reflect those poor old ancient Greekies being abandoned or failed by the sun or moon. Over time, the word was adopted into Latin as ‘eclipsis’, then into Old French as ‘eclipse’, before finally making it to Middle English as, you’ve guessed it, ‘eclipse’.

Eclipses have long been viewed with some superstition, and there have been various odd things that have happened during them. Here are just a few.

• The Battle of the Eclipse (585 BCE): One of the earliest recorded instances of an eclipse influencing human affairs happened during this battle between the Lydians and the Medes in what’s now Turkey. According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, there was a total solar eclipse in the middle of the fighting, which both sides took as a sign to stop battling and make peace. So that’s nice. On the flipside, during the Battle of Muye (c. 1046 BCE) in ancient China, a total solar eclipse terrified the soldiers, causing panic on both sides. It’s thought that one side (the Zhou) used this to their advantage to boost morale, claiming it was some sort of divine favour, and went on to defeat the Shang dynasty.

• The death of Henry I (1133): The OG Hazza died from eating a shitload of lampreys, a type of jawless fish (yum), during a feast. His death also coincided with a total solar eclipse which many people took as a portent of his impending demise, or as a sign of divine displeasure at all those poor fish he ate.

• The New Madrid Earthquakes (1811–1812): This was a series of powerful earthquakes – in fact, some of the most powerful ever recorded in the contiguous United States (I had to look up what that means – it’s all the states that are connected to each other, i.e. the 48 adjoining states on the North American continent – so it doesn’t include Alaska and Hawaii). The earthquakes happened during a time of heightened celestial activity, including multiple solar and lunar eclipses. There’s no scientific connection here but it must have brown trousers all round for anyone in the middle of them.

myriad

I once got told off by a client for writing ‘a myriad of XXX’. She said that it should be simply ‘myriad’ whatever it was, because ‘myriad’ is only an adjective (a describing word), not a noun (a person, place or thing). Because I only remember the mean things people say to me, many years later I’ve finally googled this, and it turns out she was WRONG. And in this post I’m going to tell you why. (She’s not a client anymore. Not because of that. Honest.)

Before we get into that, let’s talk about what ‘myriad’ means (although I’m sure you know that already, clever reader). As an adjective – as in ‘he has myriad issues’ – it means ‘innumerable’ i.e. too many to be numbered AKA a buttload. As a noun – as in ‘he has a myriad of issues’ – it means either a buttload again or, specifically 10,000. Why 10,000? Well, in ancient Greek, the word for 10,000 was μυριάς, which was pronounced ‘myrias’. Over time this word evolved and was used more broadly to talk about the concept of a vast or countless number. We then started using it figuratively to describe an indefinitely large quantity or multitude. It was adopted into English as ‘myriad’ in the mid-1500s.

A myriad of bottles

So why was that client so insistent that it was only an adjective? Well, apparently lots of folks were taught this at school. But much like ‘you can’t start a sentence with “and” or “but”’, and ‘you can’t end a sentence with a conjunction’, this is another ‘rule’ that has absolutely no basis in fact. When ‘myriad’ appeared in the English language in the mid-1500s it was as a noun, not an adjective. And it went on to appear as such in works by writers including Milton, Thoreau and Twain – and they did alright with the words. ‘Myriad’ as an adjective didn’t actually appear until 200 years later. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, client.

Petty, moi?