havoc

If you’ve ever come home to find your usually well-behaved (well, kinda) cavapoo has decided to redecorate the lounge using the stuffing from three cushions and the contents of the kitchen bin, you’ve seen havoc in action.

As a noun, ‘havoc’ describes widespread destruction, confusion or disorder. It’s the kind of chaos that doesn’t just happen; it’s wreaked. And it turns out that its origins are rooted in a specific – and actually quite terrifying – military command.

In the Middle Ages, ‘Havoc!’ was a formal cry used during a conflict. It signalled that soldiers could start plundering and looting, grabbing whatever the olde equivalent of flat-screen TVs and games consoles was, and generally causing as much mayhem as they liked. The command came from an Old French word, havot, meaning pillaging. During the 14th century, as French-speaking officers gave orders to English-speaking troops, the soft French ‘t’ was gradually hardened into the English ‘k’. This is probably due to something called folk etymology, which is when a foreign word enters a language and people subconsciously ‘correct’ it to something that already sounds familiar to them. In this case, that was hafoc, the Old English name for a predatory hawk – to a 14th-century soldier, the command to start looting and pillaging might have felt conceptually very similar to the action of a hawk swooping down to snatch its prey.

Havoc time (did you just read that as MC Hammer? Maybe that’s just me) was so destructive that it had to be legally regulated. In 1385, Richard II issued the ‘Statutes of War’, which specifically forbade shouting ‘Havoc’ without authorisation under penalty of death. So anyone who lost their head and got overly enthusiastic about being first to the lootfest would quite literally lose it for real shortly after.

The most famous literary appearance of ‘havoc’ comes courtesy of, you’ve guessed it, William Shakespeare. In Julius Caesar, Mark Antony promises to ‘Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war’. Today, we use ‘havoc’ for much lower stakes, though I’m fairly certain my dog still hears the 14th-century call to arms the second the front door clicks shut behind me.

refurbish

If you refurbish something, you renovate, refresh or rejuvenate it to make it look new again, like furniture or phones. Although I could definitely do with some refurbishing…

My personal issues aside, where does the word come from? You undoubtedly already know that the prefix ‘re’ means ‘again’, so added to ‘furbish’ it means ‘to furbish again’. But what’s furbishing? Well, it appeared in Middle English in the 14th century from an Anglo-French word, ‘furbisshen’, a verb which originally meant ‘to polish’. Its lineage stretches even further back than that though, to ‘furben’, an Old High German word which also meant ‘polishing’. There was obviously a lot of stuff that needed a shine back in the day. (Oh, and in case you’re not up on your ancient languages, High German was spoken roughly between 500 AD and 1050, and was the earliest stage of the German language. And Anglo-French words are words that originated from the French language as it was used in medieval England after the Norman Conquest.)

Over time, ‘furbish’ developed an extended sense of ‘renovate’ just in time for English speakers to coin ‘refurbish’ in the 17th century with the same meaning. Its first appearance in print was in 1611, in Randall Cotgrave’s A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. Cotgrave was an English lexicographer (AKA ye olde Susie Dent), and his bilingual dictionary was seen as groundbreaking at the time – that’s because as well as basic translations and explanations of French words in English, it also included idiomatic expressions, phrases, technical terms and even recipes. Cotgrave’s work contributed to the development of bilingual dictionaries and language-learning resources, and influenced how dictionaries were compiled for centuries. Think of it as the 17th-century version of Duolingo, but without the passive-aggressive owl.

Back to ‘refurbish’. It’s an example of an unpaired word, i.e. one that looks like it should have an opposite, but doesn’t anymore. This usually happens because the antonym (a fancy way of saying ‘opposite word’) 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. Other examples of unpaired words include disgruntled, unruly and impervious. If you’d like to know more about whether you can actually be gruntled, ruly or pervious, head to the blog. Spoiler alert – you totally can.