freelancer

I can’t quite believe I’ve never written about the word ‘freelancer’ before, being as I am one, but apparently I’ve missed a trick there. So, why are people like me who work for themselves called freelancers? Well, it all comes down to Sir Walter Scott, Scottish novelist, poet and historian. He used the word ‘Free Lance’ in his most famous work, Ivanhoe (1820), to describe a medieval mercenary: literally a knight whose lance (hee hee) was free for hire, i.e. not pledged to any lord. Here’s a quote showing it in action:

‘ …“Trust me, Estoteville alone has strength enough to drive all thy Free Lances into the Humber.”—Waldemar Fitzurse and De Bracy looked in each other’s faces with blank dismay.—“There is but one road to safety,” continued the Prince, and his brow grew black as midnight; “this object of our terror journeys alone—He must be met withal.”’

Sir Walter (what’s that on the table next to him?)

‘Freelance’ changed to a figurative noun around the 1860s and was recognised as a verb in 1903 by the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s only recently that it’s morphed into an adjective (‘a freelance writer’), verb (‘a writer who freelances’) and an adverb (‘she works freelance’).

As well as coining the word ‘freelance’, we also have Walter Scott to thank for the fact that many of us were subjected to Bryan Adams singing ‘Everything I do’ for 16 weeks (the same length as a domestic pig’s gestation period) in 1991 as part of the soundtrack to Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. That’s because Scott wasn't just a writer; he was a cultural phenomenon who essentially ‘invented’ the way we view the Middle Ages today. Ivanhoe’s romanticised version of knights, chivalry and tournaments sparked a massive Gothic Revival, including a real-life attempt by British nobles to hold a medieval tournament in 1839 (apparently it rained so hard the knights had to hold umbrellas over their armour, proving that the Great British Weather has been ruining days out for centuries). But what does all this have to do with Kevin Costner, Alan Rickman (god rest him), et al? Well, Scott’s responsible for the modern image of Robin Hood, calling him Locksley in Ivanhoe. He was also the first to firmly place Hood in the reign of Sean Connery, sorry, Richard the Lionheart.

Oh, and Scott also ‘found’ the crown jewels of Scotland which had been lost for over 100 years (in a chest in Edinburgh Castle – I can’t help thinking no one else had looked particularly hard). For that he earned a baronetcy, giving him that ‘Sir’. Score.

braggadocio

If you ever watch the news, ‘braggadocio’ might sound familiar. During the 2016 US election, Donald Trump famously used the adjective ‘braggadocious’. At the time, most of us assumed he was talking rubbish as per usual – see ‘panican’ (used during his second term to describe those panicking over his economic tariffs), ‘bigly’ (often interpreted as ‘big league’) and ‘I’ve stopped eight wars’. But ‘braggadocious’ is actually rooted in a word that’s been around for over 400 years (although I doubt DT knows that). And ironically, both the word and its history describe him perfectly.

‘Braggadocio’ is an uncountable or mass noun (exactly what it says on the tin – examples include ‘bravery’, ‘nonsense’ or ‘happiness’) that describes empty, arrogant boasting or a swaggering manner that isn’t backed up by much substance. Despite its Italian looks, ‘braggadocio’ wasn’t born in the olive oil-drenched streets of Florence or Rome – its origins are actually a lot closer to home. It was cooked up in 1590 by the English poet Edmund Spenser for his epic poem, The Faerie Queene, one of the longest poems in the English language at a bum-numbing 36,000 lines and over 4,000 stanzas.

In the poem, Spenser created a character named Braggadocchio – a ‘knight’ who was all mouth and no trousers. He first appears in Book II, Canto iii when he steals the horse and spear of the hero, Sir Guyon. He then spends the rest of the book riding around on his fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry warhorse, pretending to be a legendary warrior while actually being terrified of his own shadow. Why Braggadocio? To give the character an air of pretension (and perhaps to make him sound like the vainglorious characters found in Italian comedy), Spenser took the very English word ‘brag’ and slapped a pseudo-Italian suffix on the end of it. It’s the linguistic equivalent of putting a spoiler on a 2005 Vauxhall Corsa.

Eventually, ‘braggadocio’ escaped the poem and became shorthand for anyone whose mouth is (to quote that literary giant, Limp Bizkit) writing cheques that their ass can’t cash. Whether it’s a stolen horse in an epic poem or a stolen election narrative on social media, ‘braggadocio’ remains the ultimate red flag for a man with a massive ego who’s all wrapping paper and no present.

weird

I had to doublecheck this hasn’t featured as a word of the week before, as it’s a really common adjective (describing word) with an interesting backstory. Amazingly, it hasn’t, so hang on to your (witch’s) hats…

You know what ‘weird’ means. And it turns out people have been being weird for a bloody long time – it first appeared in the 700s as the Old English noun, ‘wyrd’. The word ‘noun’ is the important thing here (a noun being a person, place or thing). Rather than using ‘wyrd’ to describe someone or something like we do today, you’d talk about ‘their wyrd’, meaning the path their life would take: what lay ahead of them and how that might unfold. That’s because at this point it meant ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’. So you could say ‘Her wyrd was to carry on coming up with words of the week’.

Fast forward a few centuries to the 1100s, and the English language was changing fast. For a start, we were all ooh-la-laaing a lot more after the Norman Conquest. And as monastic scribes who were familiar with our Old English spelling system died, the French-trained ones who replaced them didn’t know what to do with all our wyrd spellings. So they started writing them the way they sounded (gasp! Although clearly that didn’t stick). That’s when ‘wyrd’ began to shift. Because it was pronounced with a long ‘ee’ sound, people started spelling it as ‘werd’, ‘weyrd’ and, finally, ‘weird’. At the same time, the noun version was slowly disappearing from everyday speech, and being replaced with an adjective that meant something like ‘linked to fate’.

In the 1600s, our old friend Shakespeare locked in the new spelling and adjectival use when he called the witches in ‘Macbeth’ ‘the weird sisters’. That still didn’t mean odd at this point though – he was using it with its old meaning of ‘tied to destiny’. But because the witches’ scenes were eerie and unsettling, and full of toil and trouble and thumb pricking, the word picked up that mood. Over the next couple of centuries, it shifted from ‘fate-related’ to ‘supernatural’, and then to the softer, everyday sense of ‘strange’ or ‘unusual’ that we use now.

Warning: contains someone puking up a baby’s finger. Shakespeare is WILD.

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.

milquetoast

A milquetoast is a person who’s meek or timid, lacks character or is ineffective. A wimp or a wuss, if you will. I first heard this term in the PS4 game ‘Bloodborne’ where it’s one of the starting classes. If you’re not a gamer then you might not have come across it, although I did also hear it in ‘American Horror Story’ (‘Delicate’, in case you’re wondering) the other day.

Apparently the term is much more common in American English than it is over here. That’s probably because ‘milquetoast’ comes from an American comic strip called ‘The Timid Soul’, which was published in 1924. Created by American cartoonist Harold Tucker (HT) Webster, the comic strip featured a character called Caspar Milquetoast, who was himself named after the American dish milk toast, which is, you’ve guessed it, toasted bread in warm milk. Why America, why?

Webster described Caspar Milquetoast as ‘the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick’. Aw. He’s named after milk toast because it’s light and easy to digest, and good for people with weak stomachs. Caspar was featured in books, films, radio programmes and vaudeville acts, and, according to a 1945 article in ‘Time’ magazine, was as famous as Tom Sawyer, and even more so than Don Quixote. Wow.

HT Webster drew more that 16,000 single panel cartoons in his lifetime. In 1927 a severe case of arthritis meant he could no longer draw with his right hand – so he taught himself to do that with his left, and his career carried on for another 25 years after that. I can’t even paint the nails on my right hand without making a hash of it, so kudos to Mr Webster.

(Credit: H. T. Webster, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)