furlong

A furlong is one of the many, MANY units of distance we use in English that I don’t understand (see also, yard, acre, fathom, nautical mile… I could go on). One thing I do know about furlongs is that they’re mainly used in horse racing. And the internet has just told me that a furlong is equal to 220 yards, which means NOTHING to me, but is apparently an eighth of a mile – about 201 meters – both of which I do, just about, understand.

Thankfully this post is about words, not how bad I am at understanding how far away one thing is from another thing. We can trace ‘furlong’ back to an Old English word, ‘furlang’, which combines two words:

• the noun (person, place or thing) ‘furh’ meaning ‘furrow’, as in a trench made by a plough to put seeds in (and also my brow when thinking about units of distance)

• the adjective (describing word) ‘lang’, which just means ‘long’.

These two words give us a big clue to what the word furlong was originally used for – and it wasn’t always defined as precisely as it is now. It previously referred to the length of a furrow in a cultivated field. This length was equal to the long side of an acre (that’s me lost again), an area originally defined as the distance a yoke of oxen (there are two oxen in a yoke, apparently) could plough in a straight line before needing a sit down and a cup of tea. Which surely changes depending on how beefy (pardon the pun) your oxen are, right? Presumably that’s why this was later standardised as an area measuring 220 yards by 22 yards, and is now defined as any area measuring 4,840 square yards.

Off to the races

So how did furlongs go from furrows to thoroughbreds? Well, that happened during the 16th and 17th centuries, around the time organised horse racing first emerged in England under the reigns (not reins) of King James I and King Charles II. Of course, people have been racing horses as long as they could sit on them, but largely informally in rural settings. The 1500s and 1600s saw the beginning of organised competitions on open tracks (like Newmarket), and racing authorities needed a reliable way to measure the length of courses. Because the furlong was already established for measuring open land and fields, it made sense to adopt it for tracks too.

Other units that refuse to die

The English language is full of archaic units that have survived within specific industries, sports or legal contexts. Here are just a few of those:

• chain (22 yards/66 feet/roughly 20.1 meters): used for measuring cricket pitches (the distance between the two wickets on a cricket pitch is exactly 1 chain) and railways (Network Rail still measures the entire British railway infrastructure in miles and chains)

• rods, perches and poles (5.5 yards/16.5 feet/5.03 meters): three names for the same measurement, which is used for allotments – a standard UK allotment plot is 10 rods/poles/perches, or about 250 square meters, apparently. It has three names because there were three different types of stick previously used to measure land

• cable (100 fathoms/a tenth of a nautical mile/around 185 meters): used by the Royal Navy and British mariners as a short-range distance measure (e.g., ‘there’s a ship passing 3 cables off the starboard bow, Jim’)

• thou (0.001 inches/0.0254 mm): British automotive mechanics, historic engine restorers and manufacturing machinists use thous for spark plug gaps, feeler gauges and metal foil thicknesses.

Parsecs and plot holes

It seems I’m in good company when it comes to not really understanding measures of distance. In Star Wars: A New Hope, Han Solo says that the Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run ‘… in less than twelve parsecs’. But a parsec is a measure of distance, not time (about 19 trillion miles or 3.26 light years).

No one’s quite sure whether this is a mistake by George Lucas or a deliberate choice to show that Solo was just a big old (hot) bullshitter trying to impress local yokels Obi-Wan and Luke in the Mos Eisley Cantina because he needs their credits. There’s also a theory (which started in the Expanded Universe and was officially made canon in the frankly rubbish 2018 movie Solo: A Star Wars Story) that the Kessel Run was normally an 18-parsec route which went around the Maw, a cluster of black holes. Han’s claim to have made it in less than 12 parsecs is actually a boast about both his ship’s speed and his skills and daring as a pilot because he shaved a third of the distance (and precious time) off the normal route by flying dangerously close to the black holes.

heckle

Today, I think probably everyone thinks heckling is a thing that happens to people on stage, mostly comedians. But it has genuinely surprising origins. And they involve… sheep. Scottish sheep, to be precise.

In the early 14th century, ‘heckle’ (then spelled ‘hechel’) was a noun that referred to a comb for flax or hemp. It came into English from the Middle Dutch ‘hekelen’, which itself is from a root meaning ‘hook’ or ‘tooth’, a nod to the rows of sharp teeth on the combs. The verb followed soon after around 1350, meaning to comb out fibres before spinning them into linen.

Although flax was the main thing being heckled at this point, the same process of combing applied to wool, which is where my sheep come in. Farmers and spinners would literally heckle wool fibres into shape before weaving them into cloth.

So how did it go from combing to shouting at gigs? Come with me to 18th-century Dundee. This was the local centre of the wool trade and therefore full of hecklers, skilled workers employed to comb out wool. These hecklers had a reputation for radical politics, forming themselves into what we’d call a union today, and bargaining for better salaries and perks (mainly booze, apparently). At public meetings they’d bombard politicians with awkward questions, ‘combing through’ their arguments just like they did with those tangled fibres. And by the 1790s, ‘to heckle’ had also come to mean challenging or interrupting a speaker. Fast forward to the 19th century, and the textile sense of ‘heckle’ had pretty much faded away completely.

There you go. From pulling fibres apart to pulling people on stage apart in less than 500 years.

winnow

If you’re one of the many (including me) people who’ve read the adult fairy-tale series (and by ‘adult fairy-tale’ I mean dirty, dirty soft porn) ‘A Court of Thorns and Roses’ by Sarah J Maas, you’ll be very familiar with the verb ‘to winnow’. It’s not filthy, sorry. In the books, winnowing is the ability to transport yourself to a different location using magic. Only some of the Fae in the series can do it, as it takes lots of concentration and strength.

Winnow is a real word, although it doesn’t have anything to do with teleportation. If one of us non-Fae folk winnows, it’s much more mundane, I’m afraid – it means we’re separating grain from chaff using a current of air. That’s a fancy way of saying that you chuck it in the air and let the wind do the hard work, blowing away the lighter chaff while the heavier grain falls back down.

Figuratively, ‘winnow’ can also mean to separate the valuable or desirable part of something from the crap bit, or to sift through and choose stuff that’s useful or valuable. So it’s basically a much quicker way of saying ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’.

‘Winnow’ has its origins in Old English and Old High German. The Old English verb ‘windwian’ meant ‘to fan’ or ‘to blow’. That’s related to the Old High German word ‘winnan’, which means the same. And that word has roots in Proto-Germanic and ultimately derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *wē- or *weh- which means ‘to blow, to move air’. So it’s actually a pretty good verb for a fictional process that involves moving yourself through the air really fast.

PS I realise I sounded a bit snobby when I referred to ACOTAR as ‘dirty, dirty soft porn’. I didn’t mean to – I actually really enjoyed all of them, and leant them to both my mum and my sister (is that weird?). I’m not alone either. The series has sold over 13 million copies, is a New York Times bestseller and has been optioned for a TV series adaptation. (They are super filthy though – especially ‘A Court of Silver Flames’. So if you decide to read them, don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Apparently this is a ‘book trailer’. I didn’t know this is a thing, but I’m here for it.

bellwether

A bellwether is ‘an indicator of trends’. Here’s a very egotistical (and patently untrue) example:

‘Emma’s family and friends often look to her as a bellwether of fashion.’

Bellwether can also mean ‘one that takes the lead or initiative’, which is also not true of my fashion sense.

Nowadays you’re most likely to see the word ‘bellwether’ in political or economic commentary. Here’s an actual example from the Washington Post:

‘Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain and considered a bellwether for the industry, is just the latest to shake up its print offerings.’

So what do trendsetters have to do with bells or, indeed, wethers? Well, to answer that, please come with me to… a sheep farm.

All flocks of sheep have a leader. And shepherds and farmers have traditionally hung a, you’ve guessed it, bell around the top sheep’s neck. A ‘wether’ is a word for a male sheep (nowadays the term specifically means a castrated male sheep) – so the leading sheep is called a ‘bellwether’.

This term for the sheep prime minister has been around since the 15th century. And over time we started to use it to refer to anyone who’s the leader of the pack (or flock), who takes initiative or who establishes trends that are then taken up by others.

If you’re wondering how the sheep choose their leader, they either do that themselves, by letting the most dominant one take the lead, or the farmer does it for them. Why does the farmer want to rig the sheep election? Well, they might do this because one sheep is particularly good at navigating obstacles or familiar with the terrain, and can therefore keep the rest of the sheep on the straight and narrow. Who knew? (Well, all the sheep farmers, obviously.)