marionette

It’s World Puppetry Day today, which is organised by the Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA). So that’s why I’ve chosen ‘marionette’ as this week’s WOTW (as no one calls it).

A marionette is a puppet controlled from above using wires or strings (so other types of puppets like ventriloquists’ dummies or Sooty aren’t marionettes – except in France, where it refers to any type of puppet). As you can probably guess from the spelling, the word ‘marionette’ comes from French. For some reason we lost an ‘n’ when it came into English, as the OG French term was ‘marionnette’. That comes from an Old French word, ‘marion’, which means ‘little Mary’. This is likely because the earliest marionettes were used to depict biblical events, in which the Virgin Mary was a big star.

How much is that scary puppet in the window?

Puppetry has been around for bloody ages, and some historians claim they actually predate actors in the theatre. In fact, there’s evidence of string operated puppets as far back as 2000 BC in Egypt. But who cares about that when we can talk about HAUNTED PUPPETS?

In 2015 paranormal investigator Jayne Harris filmed a supposedly haunted puppet every night for three months using a timed night vision camera. She was called in after its previous owner, who inherited it from his late father, claimed it tried to CHOKE HIM TO DEATH in the middle of the night. You can read more and see the (slightly underwhelming) video footage in this article.

If that doesn’t convince you, what about Mr Fritz, a disembodied ventriloquist doll’s head, which was caught on camera BLINKING in the middle of the night. Mr Fritz was made by a prisoner at the World War II Stalag II-B concentration camp. His new owner noticed that the door to the case the head was stored in kept opening over night, so he set up a camera to see what was going on. You can see the footage of the blinks in this article (my apologies that it’s from the Daily Mail). HIS LIPS BLOODY MOVE TOO.

Sleep well tonight…

mascot

When you hear the word ‘mascot’, you probably think of someone dressed in an oversized costume running about at a sports event posing for pictures and hugging people. But in fact, the word ‘mascot’ has quite a sinister history, rooted in black magic and witches. OOOH.

Okay, I might have overegged the pudding ever so slightly. The word ‘mascot’ dates back to the 19th century, and comes from the French word ‘mascotte’, which was used to describe a lucky charm, talisman or magical object. This in turn came from ‘masco’, a Provençal (a dialect of southern France) term for a sorceress or witch. That probably comes from the Old Provençal word ‘masca’, meaning ‘mask’ or ‘spectre’. In the late 19th century, we started using the term to refer to a person, animal or object that brought luck or represents a group, like a sports team.

Sports team mascots are often chosen based on symbolism, characteristics or qualities that are supposed to bring positive energy or success. But sometimes they’re just downright scary. Take Kingsley, who represents Partick Thistle, a professional football club from Glasgow, and looks like a squashed sun with the cold dead eyes of a killer. He was designed by Turner Prize-nominated artist David Shrigley and was unveiled in 2015 to coincide with Thistle’s new sponsorship from investment firm Kingsford Capital Management. Reactions to Kingsley varied from ‘Lisa Simpson on meth’ to ‘the haggard face of the Teletubbies’ sun baby’. Kingsley also has the dubious honour of being the only mascot ever to earn a review from the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones, who compared him to the monsters painted and sculpted by the surrealist Joan Miró. It obviously hit home as well, with Kingsley’s web page on the Partick Thistle site reading as follows:

‘There were a lot of mean things said about me when I first appeared, but I’m not too concerned because I know it’s what’s on the inside that counts. I’m a nice guy really – just a bit misunderstood … I might look a bit angry but I’m really very approachable and I love Partick Thistle. So don’t be scared to come and say hello if you see me out and about.’

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

WT actual F

slapstick

Personally, I’m not a fan of slapstick comedy. That whole brand of wackiness just doesn’t really do it for me. But, I have always wondered why it’s called that. Thank god for the internet.

Harlequin – that’s a natty outfit

To find the answer, we have to travel to 16th-century Italy, and the commedia dell’arte (which literally translates as ‘comedy of the profession’ – sounds hilarious, right?), an early form of improvised bawdy theatre performed by a troupe of professional actors, often in marketplaces and town squares. Commedia dell’arte uses stock characters, or ‘masks’, each of which always wear the same costumes and make-up, and use the same physical gestures. The most recognisable of these to you and me is probably Harlequin (also known as the scheming servant Arlecchino), who was accompanied by Scaramouche (still don’t know if he can do the fandango), Pierrot (a sad clown), and star-crossed lovers Isabella and Flavio (who I think are on Strictly Come Dancing), among others. The plays themselves were largely improvised, with the actors using their knowledge of these stock characters and their relationships with each another to create comedic situations and dialogue.

There was often lots of physical comedy in the commedia dell’arte, which is where our slapstick comes in. Actors used a club-like object made of two pieces of wood to produce a loud smacking noise. Originally called a ‘batacchio’ or ‘bataccio’, the Italian word for a knocker on a door, the English gave it the rather more obvious name of ‘slapstick’. Due to the fact that you could hit people with it very gently and still make a loud comedy noise that sounds like you’ve proper walloped them, it was actually one of the earliest theatrical special effects. It wasn’t long before the slapstick became a symbol of any type of highly physical comedy, and the word was then used to refer to that type of comedy itself.

The OG slapstick (still looks quite painful to me)

While you aren’t likely to see anyone perfoming commedia dell’arte in your local market square these days, it’s had a significant influence on the development of modern theatre. Lots of the stock characters and comedic situations continue to be adapted and reused in TV, film and literature. Most recently Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith used it in the Inside No. 9 episode ‘Wuthering Heist’ (with added Tarantino).

Slapsticks themselves aren’t all that common anymore either, except in (super-sinister) Punch and Judy shows – the thing Punch uses to hit everyone (including some casual wife-beating) is a slapstick. And percussionists use them to imitate the sound of slaps, whip cracks, gunshots and so on, too.

berserk

If you go berserk, you go absolutely flipping mental, which I’m currently trying not to do while dealing with a 2,790-page PDF which crashes every two seconds.

‘Berserk’ actually has very old roots – turns out people have been getting furiously angry with PDFs (or the equivalent) for a very long time. It comes from ‘berserker’, the name of a type of Norse warrior who fought with superhuman, savage strength while in a sort of frenzied trance. They dressed in animal skins, usually bear. And that’s where the name comes from – in Old Norse, ber- meant ‘bear’ and serkr- meant ‘shirt’ or ‘skin’. The excellently named Snorri Sturluson, a 13th-century historian, interpreted the meaning as ‘bare-shirt’, speculating that berserkers went into battle in the nuddy (or at least topless). But sadly this has been largely discredited. (Snorri obviously had the same problem as lots of other English speakers who ask others to ‘bare with me’ which has made me angry many, many times.)

The earliest surviving reference to the word ‘berserker’ is in Haraldskvæði, a skaldic poem (one of the two kinds of Old Norse poetry, the other being Eddic poetry) composed by another excellently named individual, Thórbiörn Hornklofi, in the late ninth century. Here’s a little snippet for you:

I'll ask of the berserks, you tasters of blood,
Those intrepid heroes, how are they treated,
Those who wade out into battle?
Wolf-skinned they are called. In battle
They bear bloody shields.
Red with blood are their spears when they come to fight.

No mention of them being topless, sorry Snorri.

When I googled ‘famous berserkers’, one of the ones who came up was Ivar the Boneless. Sadly no one’s completely sure where the name comes from. It’s been suggested that he might have had a condition like osteogenesis imperfecta (also known as brittle bone disease), which makes the fact that he invaded both England and Ireland extra impressive. Another source says it refers to the fact that he couldn’t get it up, which is less so.

Also, he had a brother called Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye who sounds super fun.

This one’s for you, Snorri

amok

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘to run amok’, meaning to run about in an uncontrollable or violent way, much like my dog does when he’s got the zoomies, or got hold of one of my very expensive bras. But have you ever wondered why it’s called ‘amok’? Well, turns out it has pretty bloody origins (which are my favourite kind).

‘Amok’ comes from a Malay word, ‘mengamok’, which means to make a furious and desperate charge. Typically, the person affected by amok (usually a man #everydaysexism) attacked bystanders in a frenzy, killing everyone in sight until he collapsed or was killed himself. I told you it wasn’t very nice.

Amok attacks had around ten victims on average. And according to Malay mythology, these murderous rampages were caused by the ‘hantu belian’, an evil tiger spirit that would enter someone’s body and make them behave violently without knowing what they were doing.

We can thank Captain Cook for first recording instances of amok in Malay tribesmen in 1770 while he was sailing round the world, the big show-off. The word itself first appeared in English earlier than this though, in a translation of a 16th-century Portugese book called ‘The Book of Duarte Barbosa’ by, you’ve guessed it, Duarte Barbosa. Barbosa’s sister was married to Ferdinand Magellan, another big show-off who led the first expedition to sail all the way around the world (although he didn’t actually make it – and apparently his name wasn’t even Magellan). Barbosa accompanied him on this, and both were killed in the Phillipines after trying to convert the wrong guys to Christianity.

Captain Cook also met a sticky end, this time at the hands of a group of Hawaiians. He was clonked on the head with a club by a chief named Kalaimanokahoʻowaha (wow) and then stabbed by one of his servants. It’s a tough game, circumnavigation.

zugunruhe

You can be forgiven for never having come across this word before – it cropped up in a book I’ve just finished reading about how different animals perceive the world (‘An Immense World’ by Ed Yong – well worth a read). Zugunruhe is a German word that means ‘migratory restlessness’. It’s a thing that happens to birds as they start getting anxious when the time for them to start their migration draws near. The symptoms include fluttering wings, sleeplessness and general disruption to the birds’ normal activities. Birds in captivity are affected by it as well – caged birds will launch themselve at the walls in the direction they want to travel in. Sad, right?

As I said, this is a German word, which is made up of ‘Zug’ meaning ‘move’ or ‘migration’, and ‘unruhe’ for ‘anxiety’ or ‘restlessness’. It first appeared in 1707, and is now well recognised in ornithology.

Around one in five of all the world’s bird species migrate. And just before setting off, some have been found to atrophy organs that they don’t need while they’re flying (like their digestive organs), while beefing up those that they need for power (like pectoral muscles and hearts). Amazing.

Here are some more awesome migration facts.

• Bar-headed geese travel from their breeding areas in Mongolia, the Tibetan Plateau and northern China to India. They cross over the Himalayas using less than ten per cent of the oxygen available at sea level (I confess I don’t really understand what this means, but I guess it’s impressive…?), and reach altitudes of up to 23,000 ft (7,000 m). That. Is. Well. High.

• Great snipes put on a lot of weight before their winter migration. Despite this giving them a lack of aerodynamism, they’ve been recorded reaching speeds of up to 60mph (97kmph) over a distance of 4,225 miles (6,800 km). They don’t take any breaks while flying from Scandinavia to sub-Saharan Africa, and arrive much thinner than they started, losing half of their weight en route.

• Bar-tailed godwits (great name for a band) travel from Alaska to New Zealand, and hold the record for the longest non-stop flight of any bird. They fly for over 6,835 miles (11,000 km) without stopping.

• It’s not all about flying either. Adélie penguins trek around 8,077 miles (13,000 km) across ice every year.

• The Arctic tern has the longest migration known in the animal kingdom. It travels 55,923 miles (90,000 km) every year, going from pole to pole. Arctic terns can live for up to 30 years, which someone much cleverer than me has worked out means that a single tern’s migration distance is the equivalent of going to the moon and back more than three times.

Most of the birds on this list are endangered due to climate change and habitat loss. Have a look at BirdLife International or World Animal Protection if you’d like to find out more about ways to protect them and our other furry friends.

picayune

If something is picayune, it’s trivial or paltry. So you could say to someone ‘your opinions are picayune’ (if you’re mean and don’t want the person to realise). You can also use it as a noun, as in ‘our lives don't amount to a picayune in the grand scheme of things’. Which is depressing, sorry.

One silver Spanish real, from the reign of Peter I of Castile (1350–1369).

Picayune is a relatively modern word. In the 19th century, in Louisiana and other southern American states, a picayune was a small coin which wasn’t worth very much. Specifically, it was a Spanish half real – the real (meaning ‘royal’) was a Spanish unit of currency used for several hundred years after the mid-14th century. It was eventually replaced by the peseta in 1868.

The coin’s name comes from ‘picaioun’, a word that means ‘small coin’ in Occitan, a language spoken in French luxury cosmetic shops. I jest, of course (and apologise for the bad joke and product placement – although if anyone from L’Occitane is reading and would like to send me some free stuff, please do. I’m a particular fan of your hand cream) – it was spoken in Southern France. ‘Picaioun’ comes from the Occitan word ‘pica’, which means ‘to jingle’, as in the noise coins make when you have lots of them.

Just in case you don’t know what an aeroplane looks like (this might not be a Cessna though – no idea).

Further investigation into the word ‘pica’ led me to an eating disorder when people crave things that aren’t food. First described by Hippocrates way-back-when, in this context ‘pica’ actually has completely different etymology, and comes from the Latin word for ‘magpie’, a bird believed to eat anything.

This investigation then took me back to France (the internet is a wonderful thing) and one Michel Lotito, an entertainer who was famous for eating things that you shouldn’t. Known as Monsieur Mangetout (‘Mr Eat-All’), over the course of his 57-year lifetime, he ate 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, 7 TVs, 6 chandeliers, 2 beds, a pair of skis, a computer, a waterbed, 500 metres of steel chain, a coffin (with handles), 45 door hinges and even a bloody aeroplane (a Cessna 150, if you’re interested), which took him two years to get through. He was awarded a brass plaque by Guinness World Records to commemorate his abilities, and he ate that too. Lotito died in 2007 after a heart attack – and his death was apparently nothing to do with his ‘unusual’ diet.

ketchup

Think ketchup originated in America? Well, despite the fact that 97% of American households have a bottle of the red stuff in their kitchens, this condiment actually started life on much more exotic shores. The word ketchup comes from a Hokkien Chinese word, ‘kê-tsiap’, which was the name of a sauce made from fermented fish. (While any food with the word ‘fermented’ in it just doesn’t sound appetising, I think this was actually quite similar to soy sauce.)

So how did ketchup migrate? Well, it’s likely that British travellers brought ‘kê-tsiap’ home, before attempting to recreate it in their kitchens and anglicising it as ‘catchup’ (also ‘catsup’). The first written mention of ‘catchup’ is in ‘A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew’, a dictionary of English slang first published in 1698. It has over 4,000 entries and, frankly, sounds awesome.

At some point ‘catchup’ mutated into ‘ketchup’. And the first published recipe for ketchup appeared in 1727, in ‘The Compleat Housewife’, an incredibly popular cookbook by Eliza Smith which went through a massive 18 editions. Ingredients in Smith’s recipe included anchovies, shallots, vinegar, ginger and nutmeg, and involved shaking the bottle once or twice a day for a week before using it. A second recipe for ‘ketchup in paste’ appeared in 1732, written by one Richard Bradley (who was the first professor of botany at Cambridge University, and also published the first recipe with pineapple in it – hopefully it wasn’t a pizza). This still wasn’t the ketchup we know today though – the main ingredient was red beans, and there definitely weren’t any tomatoes in there. Other versions followed, often containing mushrooms (apparently Jane Austen was a big fan of mushroom ketchup), unripe walnuts (YUM) and oysters. At this point ‘ketchup’ was really just another word for ‘sauce’.

Despite having been brought to England in the 1500s from South America, tomatoes weren’t popular as people actually thought they were poisonous (possibly due to the lead from lead pewter plates leaching into them). So it wasn’t until around 1812 that the first tomato ketchup recipe appeared. James Mease, a scientist from Philadelphia, gets the credit for this, although he loses points for calling tomatoes ‘love apples’ (due to their reputation for being an aphrodisiac – which seems somewhat at odds with the whole poison thing, but never mind), which doesn’t seem very scientific, and sounds gross. A little start-up by the name of Heinz then introduced their recipe in 1876, and the red sauce we know today was born. Today Heinz is the best-selling brand of ketchup in the United States, with more than 650 million bottles sold every year.

I still don’t like it though.

kowtow

If you kowtow to someone, it means you agree to do something a bit too easily, or in an obsequious way – AKA sucking up. It now has quite negative connotations, but in days gone by a kowtow was actually the ultimate way to show respect to a superior. It involved bowing or kneeling so low that your forehead was touching the floor (if I did this I wouldn’t be able to get back up again), or even lying fully prostrate on the ground. Apparently a kosher kowtow was three kneelings and nine knockings of your forehead on the floor – and if you can’t hear your skull hitting the ground then you ain’t doing it properly. Ouch.

Vietnamese graduates kowtowing to their teachers in 1897

The word ‘kowtow’ itself comes from Cantonese – it’s a combination of ‘kòu’ which means ‘to knock’ and ‘tóu’ which means ‘head’. In Sinospheric culture (which is a fancy-dancy term for countries in East and Southeast Asia that were historically influenced by China, like Japan and Korea), it was used to show respect for one’s parents and elders, superiors and religious big-wigs, all the way up to the Emperor of China himself. The Emperor wasn’t immune either – apparently he would do a kowtow (possibly not the right terminology) to the shrine of Confucius, and also to heaven (that was it though).

The kowtow caused an international incident in 1793 when Lord George (not Paul) Macartney*, the first British ambassador to China, refused to do a full kowtow to Emperor Qianlong (because, British). He went as far as removing his hat and bowing, but that was it. This pissed off the Chinese no end, especially as every other European ambassador had just got on and done it. The Brits agreed to do a kowtow only if the emperor would do the same to a portrait of King George III (yes, the mad one). Unsurprisingly that was a hard ‘no’. China then rejected every single one of Britain’s diplomatic and trade requests. All for the sake of a bow and not a kowtow. Also, MEN.

Macartney’s first meeting with Qianlong. Hope he sang the Frog Chorus

The term ‘kowtow’ arrived in English in the early 1800s, probably as a result of those failed trade negotiations. Within a few decades its meaning had changed to the ‘fawning’ verb we have today.

The kowtow tradition pretty much disappeared after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911–12. Nowadays in China it’s reserved for paying homage to ancestors at family burial grounds.

* Yes, it is spelled differently but I liked the Frog Chorus joke so I left it in.