gamut

You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘run the gamut’, which sounds like something torturous in The Hunger Games. Don’t worry though, a thing that runs the gamut is actually just something that covers every possible point in a range. So if you’re feeling all the feelings, you can be described as having ‘run the gamut of emotions’.

But WTF is a gamut?

Guido of Arezzo laying down some phat beats

Allow me to take you back to the 11th century to meet a monk called Guido of Arezzo. Guido’s favourite thing to do was to organise sounds (obviously – well, I guess he didn’t have Netflix). He also spent a lot of time teaching Gregorian chant to young monks, and as part of this he developed a way to teach his singers to remember the musical scale more easily. He named the very lowest note in his scale ‘gamma-ut’. This was from ‘gamma’, the Greek letter used for that low note, and ‘ut’, the first syllable of an ancient hymn Guido loved. Over time, ‘gamma-ut’ was shortened to, you’ve guessed it, ‘gamut’, and people began using it to refer to the entire musical range of notes.

As musical theory evolved, so did ‘gamut’. It grew beyond music to mean a full scope or range of anything, which is why we get to run gamuts today in any arena we like.

I confess that I’ve done Guido a bit of a disservice above, as he wasn’t just a singing teacher. In fact, he’s known as the father of modern musical notation. Guido’s most significant contribution was to develop a musical notation system that allowed notes to be written down and read consistently. He also created the basis of the four-line staff, which positioned notes at fixed heights to show their pitch more clearly than earlier systems. This eventually led to the five-line staff we use today.

He didn’t stop there either. Guido also invented the solfège syllables, AKA ‘do-re-mi’. He originally used ‘ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la’ from a Latin hymn for St John the Baptist, and maybe just because he seemed to like an ‘ut’. This helped singers remember pitch relationships more effectively, and revolutionised teaching music by ear.

Guido’s inventions allowed people to share music in written form across Europe. So it’s pretty safe to say that without him, we wouldn’t have most of the music we have today. Or that song from The Sound of Music.

anapodoton

This popped up on a recent episode of quiz show ‘Only Connect’. The four things the people had to find a connection between were:

• ‘Fine intellects’

• ‘Mention Satan’

• ‘If headwear is the right size’

• ‘While kitty’s not here’.

The answer was ‘Paraphrased anapodoton’.

If you didn’t see the episode (and maybe even if you did), you’re probably thinking ‘Huh’? Maybe it’ll be clearer if I un-paraphrase these anapodotons:

• ‘Great minds’

• ‘Speak of the devil’

• ‘If the cap fits’

• ‘While the cat’s away’.

If you’re still thinking ‘WTF’, an anapodoton is a term used in language to describe a situation where we leave part of a sentence unsaid, but the listener or reader knows exactly what we mean. So you start a phrase, but you don’t finish it because the ending is implied. Here’s another example which (weirdly) cropped up on fact-based podcast ‘No Such Thing as a Fish’ a couple of days later: ‘Don’t count your chickens’. You know the rest without anyone having to say it i.e. ‘... before they’ve hatched’ (although on that podcast, one of the presenters had never heard the second half. Cue much piss-taking). And that’s anapodoton.

The word ‘anapodoton’ comes from Greek, as lots of language-related terms do. ‘ana-’ means ‘back’ or ‘again’, and ‘apodoton’ means ‘that which is given’. So it’s basically something being left ‘given back’, or unsaid.

Despite its somewhat inaccessible name, anapodoton is a handy little trick in language that lets us skip the obvious bits of a sentence, trusting the other person to fill in the blanks. It’s interesting because it shows how much meaning we can convey without actually saying everything. And it highlights how important context and common knowledge are when it comes to understanding each other – something that’s often missing on social media, for example.

More importantly, next time you find yourself trailing off halfway through a familiar phrase and leaving someone to fill in the blanks, you can smugly say ‘And that was anapodoton’.

Just in case you’re wondering, the ‘Only Connect’ anapodotons end like this:

• ‘Great minds think alike, but fools seldom differ’

• ‘Speak of the devil and he will appear’

• 'If the cap fits, wear it’

• ‘While the cat’s away, the mice will play’.

This first one’s really interesting as the full phrase doesn’t really mean what we think it means (to misquote ‘The Princess Bride’). It actually implies that dimbos can also agree on things. I found a few more like this where the second half has been lost over time which has led to a change or simplification in meaning. Like:

• ‘Blood is thicker than water ... [but] the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.’ I’m not surprised we dropped the second half of this – not exactly catchy, is it? While we usually interpret the first half to mean that family bonds are the strongest, the full phrase suggests that bonds we choose (like friendship) can actually be even better. Aw.

• ‘The customer is always right … in matters of taste.’ This is often attributed to early 20th-century department store owner Harry Gordon Selfridge. Over time we’ve lost the nuance of ‘taste’ in the second half, so now it simply means the customer is always right. But the actual phrase is saying that’s only the case for subjective things like style or choice. Which changes the meaning completely. OOH.

• ‘Actions speak louder than words, but not nearly as often.’ The truncated version tells us that action is better that words. Fine. But the full phrase adds that while actions are more powerful, they don’t happen as often as words, making words just as good. Which is lucky for me.

spondulicks

‘Spondulicks’ (also spelled ‘spondoolicks’ or ‘spondulix’) is a slang term for money, which I’m almost certain Delboy Trotter used more than once. It first emerged in the United States in the mid-19th century, where it quickly gained popularity, even appearing in a New York Times article in 1857. Its exact origins are unknown, but there are a couple of theories about its etymology.

The first one, and the most widely accepted, is that it comes from the Greek word ‘spondylos’, meaning vertebra or a type of shell. What do shells have to do with money? Well, they were often used as currency in ancient times, and even as late as the early 20th century in some regions. (I read this in a fab book called ‘Spirals in Time: The Secret and Curious Afterlife of Seashells’ by marine biologist Helen Scales – nice bit of nominative determinism there.)

Cowrie shells were among the most widely used shells for currency across various cultures and regions, including West and Central Africa, India, Sri Lanka, China, Thailand and The Maldives. There’s even a cowrie shell called cypraea moneta or money cowrie. Why cowries? They’re hard and durable which makes them good for lots of handling, and they also come in relatively uniform sizes and shapes, so they’re easy to count and use as a standardised form of money. They’re also really pretty.

The second theory for ‘spondulicks’ is that it comes from the Latin word ‘spondere’, which means ‘to promise’ or ‘pledge’. This one’s less popular though.

When I asked ChatGPT for a list of slang words for money it gave me the usual suspects including ‘bucks’, ‘cash’, ‘dough’, ‘quid’ and ‘moolah’, but also some others I’ve never heard of. These included ‘cheddar’, ‘cabbage’, ‘simoleons’ and ‘bones’. Who knew?

Makes me laugh every single time.

misanthrope

A misanthrope is a noun (person, place or thing) that describes someone who doesn’t like or trust their fellow humans, and avoids human society. They tend to be cynical and pessimistic, and are often loners. Hmmm, maybe I’m a misanthrope... Anyway, my issues aside, you can also use misanthrope as an adjective (a describing word) – so someone can be ‘misanthropic’.

‘Misanthrope’ has its origins in Greek. It combines two Greek words: ‘misos’, meaning ‘hatred’, and ‘anthropos’, meaning ‘human being’ or ‘person’ (‘anthropos’ is also where we get the word ‘anthropology’ i.e. the study of the cultural, social, biological and evolutionary aspects of human life and behavior). Put them together and ‘misanthrope’ literally means ‘hater of humanity’.

When I asked ChatGPT what ‘anthropos’ meant, it said ‘human being or man’. I called it out for being sexist, and it apologised and corrected it to ‘human being or person’. I then asked it for some examples of misanthropes in fiction. The results were all male, and in books by male authors (Holden Caulfield from ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ by Salinger, Meursault from ‘The Stranger’ by Camus, Scrooge from ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Dickens, Ahab from ‘Moby-Dick’ by Melville and Gregor Samsa from ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Kafka). When I pushed it for some female misanthropes by female authors, I got Miss Jean Brodie from ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark, Edna Pontellier from ‘The Awakening’ by Kate Chopin and Mildred Montag from ‘Fahrenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury. The latter is clearly a MAN. I said that and it apologised again and gave me Miss Havisham from ‘Great Expectations’ by well-known female author Charles Dickens. SIGH. It’s a shame that even brand-new technology already has sexism baked in.*

This is why I’m a misanthrope. Also, litter.

* As an experiment, I also asked ChatGPT who the five greatest tennis players of all time are. I got three men and two women, which I’ll let slide as I didn’t give it an even number. It then described Federer as ‘one of the greatest tennis players of all time’ and Williams as ‘one of the greatest female tennis players of all time’. I DESPAIR.

anodyne

Someone said this to me on the phone the other day, and I realised I didn’t know what it meant (look, I don’t know ALL the words, guys). If you already know what it means, well done you. If not, we mainly use anodyne as an adjective (AKA a describing word) to refer to something that’s unlikely to offend or cause discomfort. So basically something that’s a bit meh. We also use anodyne as a noun (person, place or thing) for a medicine or substance that relieves pain.

Anodyne has been around in English since the 16th century. We nicked it from the Latin word ‘anodynos’ which is itself derived from the Greek word ‘anōdunos’. Both of these mean ‘painless’ or ‘free from pain’. So that’s where the literal meaning for painkiller comes from. And over time ‘anodyne’ has evolved a more figurative meaning for something that’s very middle of the road and doesn’t cause any upset.

A painkiller that certainly isn’t anodyne is general anaesthetic, which knocks you out for operations or if you’re trying to get BA Baracus on a plane*. But did you know that, even though we’ve been using them for hundreds of years, no one actually knows how general anaesthetics work? Scientists have worked out that they put you to sleep by reducing communication between your brain cells, but that’s pretty much all they know. That’s not at all scary. And my apologies if you have any kind of procedure coming up and didn’t know that.

*Dated reference.

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?

barbarian

You know what a barbarian is – someone who pillages villages (and other places that don’t rhyme). The word has an origin that you might not know though. It comes from ancient Greece where the term ‘barboros’ was used to refer to any non-Greek-speaking bunch of people, or anyone those high-falutin’ Greeks thought inferior. ‘Barboros’ is literally based on the sound ‘bar-bar’ which is the Greeks taking the piss out of other languages by imitating what sounded like gibberish to them. I imagine it was probably accompanied by a ‘blah-blah-blah’ hand gesture as well.

Over time, the term ‘barbarian’ evolved to cover not only linguistic differences, but also cultural, social and perceived intellectual disparities between the Greeks and everyone else. It wasn’t long before the Romans picked up on the term, using it to describe non-Romans, particularly those outside the Roman Empire.

My favourite historical barbarians are the Vandals, a Germanic tribe who played a big part in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Believed to have originated from the area around modern-day Poland and Ukraine, in the early 5th century AD they established a powerful kingdom in North Africa. They also formed alliances with other groups, including the Alans, an Iranian nomadic tribe with the best name ever.

In 455AD, under the rule of King Genseric, the Vandals invaded Rome. There’s a story that they ended up in the imperial wine cellars. Instead of looting them as they were supposed to do, they decided to have themselves a little tipple. As anyone who’s gone to the pub after work for ‘just one drink’ has experienced, this ended up in a raucous party that including parading around the city streets wearing posh Roman clothes, and even crowning one of their own as the ‘Vandal King of Rome’. We’ve all been there.

Although the Vandals sacking of Rome wasn’t as devastating as earlier barbarian invasions (like the one by the Visigoths in 410AD), it did show the rest of the world that the Empire was in trouble. Combined with their conquest of North Africa (an important source of grain and revenue for the Romans), the Vandals were the beginning of the end for the Romans.

Despite this, the Vandal kingdom in North Africa didn’t last an awful lot longer. It fell in 534AD when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I got the better of our tribe in the Vandalic War. Their most enduring legacy is probably (as I imagine you’ve guessed) the word ‘vandalism’, which is based on their reputation for looting and generally making a big old mess.

aegis

I was watching an American medical drama called ‘New Amsterdam’ the other day (I love me an American medical drama – ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is my absolute fave). During a courtroom scene with a patient with some mental-health struggles, a judge said ‘I’m not willing to to release you into your own aegis’. My first thought was of course, ‘why not use a word that everyone can understand, silly legal person?’. And my second was, ‘I wonder where “aegis” comes from?’ Well, it turns out it has quite an interesting backstory.

In the context of the silly legal person, ‘aegis’ simply means ‘protection, sponsorship or support of a person, group or organisation’. Its other, much more fun, definition is ‘a shield or breastplate associated with Zeus and Athena’. And that’s where our etymology comes from.

In Greek mythology, aegises also included cloaks, and were often described as powerful and protective. Some of them featured the head of the Gorgon, she of the bad snake-hair day. The word itself comes from a noun, ‘aigis’, which means ‘goatskin’. This is probably just because cloaks were often made of goatskin, but it might (it probably isn’t TBH, but I wanted to tell this story) be something to do with the mythical goat Amalthea. Rhea, Zeus’ Ma, hid him in a cave to protect him from his father Cronus, who was a bit of a nutter known for eating his own children (someone call social services). Amalthea nursed (yep, fed) and cared for the infant Zeus in the cave. Hence, goats = protection.

Aegis made its way into English in the 18th century in the sense of those protective shields or cloaks. It later evolved into the idea of protection, sponsorship or support, and a silly legal term.

To say thanks for looking after him in that cave, Zeus later transformed one of Amalthea’s horns into the Cornucopia, or Horn of Plenty, which could provide an endless supply of food and drink. I’m not sure how this worked logistically – surely it would need to be detached from Amalthea’s head to provide all that chow? That doesn’t seem like much of a thank you.

Zeus – DTF

Zeus was also a bit of a dirty old (and young) man. One of his favourite things to do was to transform himself into something else to have sex with both mortals and immortals. This included transforming into a swan, a bull and a shower of gold. I’m definitely not going to try to work out the logistics of that…

sarcophagus

Tis the season for ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties, with Halloween (or Hallowe’en if we’re being grammatically correct) just around the corner. So the word of the week is also jumping on the spooky bandwagon with ‘sarcophagus’.

A sarcophagus is a type of stone container or coffin, usually made of limestone, marble or something similar. They were particularly popular in ancient Egypt as people believed that bodies should be preserved, and sarcophagi were good protection for those mummified remains.

The word itself actually has Greek origins. It comes from ‘sarx’ (σάρξ) meaning ‘flesh’, and ‘phagein’ meaning ‘to eat’ or ‘to consume’. So sarcophagus actually translates as ‘flesh eating’. Yum. Why? Well, the term was originally used to refer to a particular type of limestone that was believed to decompose or consume the flesh of the deceased more quickly. And unlike the Egyptians, many religions saw this as a good thing as it would speed up the journey to the afterlife.

The word ‘sarcophagus’ was adopted into Latin as ‘sarcophagus’ (which was very unimaginative). From there it passed into various European languages, including our own, keeping its meaning as a stone coffin or tomb, but losing the whole flesh-eating bit.

One of the most famous sarcophagi in history belonged to Tutankhamun, or King Tut, whose mummy was discovered in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter in the Egyptian Valley of the Kings. Tut was actually entombed in a series of ornate sarcophagi, with the innermost one being made of solid mother-flipping gold.

Tut facts:

• he was only around 18 or 19 years old when he died, so didn’t actually get to do much pharaoh-ing

• no one really knows what killed him – theories include complications after a leg injury or a genetic disorder

• a few people died after the discovery of Tut’s tomb giving rise to the legend of the ‘Curse of the Pharaohs’ (and lots of terrible horror films). One of those was Lord Carnarvon, a financial backer of Carter’s expedition who died from an infected mozzie bite shortly after the tomb was opened. His half brother also died not long afterwards (of blood poisoning) as did his secretary, and two other members of the expedition. Howard Carter didn’t shuffle off for another 17 years or so though, so it wasn’t a very good curse.

lemma

A lemma is a term or phrase that’s being defined or explained. Huh? Here it is in action – when you look up a word in a dictionary or, more likely these days, type a word into a dictionary search bar, the word you’re typing is called a lemma.

Lemma has its origins in ancient Greek. It’s derived from the Greek word ‘λῆμμα’ which means ‘something taken’, ‘an assumption’ or ‘a proposition’. It’s the noun (person, place or thing) form of the verb (doing word) ‘λαμβάνω’, or ‘lambanō’, which means ‘to take’.

The plural of lemma is either ‘lemmas’ or, if you’re feeling a bit arcane, ‘lemmata’. And it’s also where we get the word ‘dilemma’ from – which is ‘lemma’ in the sense of a proposition, with ‘di’ meaning ‘two’ at the start – two propositions.

All of this emma-based etymology caused me to ask ChatGPT what my name means. He told me it comes from the Germanic word ‘ermen’ or ‘irmin’, which means ‘whole’ or ‘universal’. He went on to say that Emma is ‘a classic name that carries a sense of timelessness and elegance’. Fingers crossed he wasn’t just buttering me up before he steals my job and brings about Judgement Day.

If you’re not a fan of ‘lemma’, another word for a term being defined is a ‘definiendum’. It’s fun to say, and will deffo make you sound like a smarty pants. You’re welcome.

tragedy

You know what a tragedy is – a sad or traumatic event. It’s also a genre of literature, art or performance that deals with serious and sad themes, and probably everyone dies at the end.

The word ‘tragedy’ has a bit of a tragic backstory as well. Brace yourselves…

(It’s not that bad really. I’m just building the tension.)

Don’t mention Greek plays

‘Tragedy’ comes from the Greek word ‘tragōidia’, which is a combination of ‘tragos’, meaning ‘goat’, and ‘ōidē’, meaning ‘song’ or ‘ode’. This is linked to ancient Greece (although you probably could have guessed that), where tragic plays were an important part of cultural and religious festivals. These plays often dealt with serious and weighty themes, and were accompanied by a chorus of people who sang and danced (seriously and weightily, presumably).

So that gives us the song/ode bit – but what about the goat? Well, those ancient Greekies often sacrificed a goat or two during these performances to honour the god Dionysus, who was associated with theatre (also, wine and fertility). I hope they waited till the interval so they didn’t put the actors off.

That was all a bit depressing, wasn’t it? Sorry about that. Here’s some Steps to cheer you up. Good luck not doing the dance.

ambigram

An ambigram is a word, phrase or symbol that you can read from different orientations or perspectives, usually in at least two different ways. So the word or symbol is still legible when you rotate it or look at its reflection, and might reveal a different word or phrase.

If you’ve lost interest after this convoluted explanation, let’s look at a couple of examples:

SWIMS

This is a rotational ambigram, which means it reads the same when rotated 180 degrees (i.e. upside down).

NOON

This can be designed as a mirror-image ambigram – so if you look at it in a mirror, it reads MOON.

Image from https://www.johnlangdon.net/works/angels-demons, © John Langdon

To make them work, ambigrams are often done in fancy-dancy calligraphy, which means they’re popular as logos and tattoos. Dan Brown used this in his rubbish book ‘Angels and Demons’ where the Illuminati’s symbol is an ambigram (that was designed by John Langdon, who has loads of cool ambigrams on his website).

Ambigrams aren’t the same as palindromes, which are defined as words, verses or sentences that read the same backwards as they do forwards. So ‘deified’ is a palindrome. But ‘noon’ is both a palindrome and an ambigram (head explodes).

Ambigram is a portmanteau (a word made up of two other words), in this case a combination of ‘ambi-’ from the Latin word ‘ambidexter’ meaning ‘both’ or ‘on both sides’, and ‘-gram’ from the Greek word ‘gramma’, meaning ‘grandma’. Not really, it means ‘letter’ or ‘written character’.

The term ‘ambigram’ was coined by Douglas R. Hofstadter, an American scholar of cognitive science, physics and comparative literature, in the early 1970s. He’s known for his interest in puzzles and visual art, and exploring patterns in language. He introduced the concept of ambigrams in his book ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid’, which was published in 1979. Such was his influence that he even gets a mention in ‘2010: Odyssey Two’ by Arthur C. Clarke (the sequel to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’), when scary (especially now) AI HAL 9000 is described by the character Dr Chandra as being caught in a ‘Hofstadter–Möbius loop’ (I tried to find out what this actually means, but it was far too complicated for little ole me).

Hofstadter also created his own law (I want a law!), which is ‘It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’. This basically means that any task or project will probably take longer than you thought, even if you take into account Hofstadter’s law that it’s likely to take longer than you thought (second head explosion).

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, Leonard Hofstadter in The Big Bang Theory wasn’t named after our Doug, but after Robert Hofstadter, an American physicist who won the 1961 Nobel Prize in physics. He was Douglas’s dad though (that’s one talented family).)

cenobite

I’m a big fan of horror films – the schlockier the better. And I’ve recently been trying to catch up with 80s video-nasty classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Evil Dead and, most recently, Hellraiser (although I gave up after Hellraiser 2, as the internet tells me the nine (yep) sequels get progressively worse). Hellraiser is based on ‘The Hellbound Heart’, a novella by Clive Barker, who also wrote and directed the first film.

Pinhead. He got pins in his head

Even if you’ve never seen Hellraiser, you’re probably familiar with Pinhead, the primary antagonist. Pinhead and his pals are called the cenobites, and are part of ‘The Order of the Gash’. They’re demonic beings who were once human but have been transformed by their experiences in the afterlife, and now look pretty damn gross (in fact, Pinhead’s probably the least minging). The cenobites live in an alternate reality called the Labyrinth or the Leviathan’s Domain, and their favourite thing is inflicting pain on humans who summon them (some accidentally, some on purpose). They do that using a puzzle box called the Lemarchand Configuration, which opens a dimensional fissure.

The Hellraiser cenobites all look a bit BDSM as they wear various combinations of leather and chains, often with bits of their own skin thrown in, ewww. The original novella and first two films have them as morally ambiguous (‘demons to some, angels to others’) but later films and comics make them more straightforwardly sadistic.

After all that, it turns out that Barker didn’t invent the term ‘cenobite’, and it originally had a much more benign and less BDSM-ey meaning. It started out as a word for the followers of Pythagoras (he of the theorem), who founded a commune in Italy for philosophical study and also for the ‘amicable sharing of worldly goods’ (sounds like a cult to me – call your dad). ‘Cenobite’ first appeared in English in the 17th century where it referred to a member of a monastic community who lived in a common house under a common rule (i.e religion). It can also refer to any person in a communal or shared living situation (like a commune). The word itself comes from the Greek ‘koinos’ meaning ‘common’, and ‘bios’ meaning ‘life’.

A group of monks living in this type of community is often referred to as a cenobium. And cenobitic (or coenobitic if you want to make it really hard to spell) monasticism is the opposite of eremitic monasticism, which is when you’re a hermit (like me).

Back to Hellraiser. Pinhead’s nickname was created by the Hellraiser production crew and then picked up by fans, although Barker hated it. In ‘The Scarlet Gospels’ he’s simply known as ‘The Hell Priest’, which is much less fun. In the first eight films, he’s played by an actor called Doug Bradley. But for the (not-very-good) 2022 remake, the character’s played by Jamie Clayton, a female actor and model. This is actually truer to the original novella, where he’s described as having a voice that’s ‘light and breathy – the voice of an excited girl’. Other cenobites that regularly appear in the Hellraiser franchise include Chatterer, whose name comes from the constant clicking of his teeth, The Female, whose only attribute seems to be ‘woman’, and Butterball, who’s really fat (but wears cool shades).

‘We have such sights to show you…’

myrmecophilous

If you’re described as ‘myrmecophilous’, then you’re associated with, benefited by or fond of (hopefully not in a weird way) ants. It’s a scientific term that describes the positive relationships ants have with other species like butterflies, crickets, beetles and mites, all of which help them be good at staying alive (that’s the science). For example, butterflies belonging to the family Lycaenidae (which is almost 6,000 species worldwide), are myrmecophiles. In return for protection from predators, some caterpillars have developed dew patches, small button-like spots on their backs, that ooze a thick sugary fluid that the ants go nuts for, while others have a nectar gland that pumps out the same sweet goodness (sounds gross, I know). So the ants get their fix, and the caterpillars get bodyguards (even if they are all hopped up on sugar).

The word myrmecophilous has Greek roots. ‘Myrmec’ means ‘ant’, while the ‘phile’ ending comes from ‘philos’, which means to love. Like extremophile, galanthophile and lots of other nasty words we won’t mention here.

Okay, ant facts.

• There are over 12,000 ant species worldwide.

• The bullet ant is said to have the most painful sting in the world – it feels like being hit by a hammer. Just kidding, it feels like a bullet, obviously.

• A single ant can carry 50 times its own bodyweight. And they even work together to move stuff they can’t manage on their own.

• Ants can be found on every single continent except Antarctica, which is mental considering it’s the only continent that literally starts with ‘ant’.

• The biggest ants’ nest ever found is over 3,700 miles wide. Yep, you did read that right. Called the ‘Argentine Ant Supercolony’ (good name for a band), it goes from northern Italy through the south of France, and out to the western coast of Spain. Many ant experts think it’s actually much much bigger than this and stretches across the globe – that’s because Argentine ants from opposite sides of the world recognise each other (which I think basically means they don’t try to kill each other), leading them to think they all live in one utterly ginormous colony. Here’s hoping they don’t rise up and take over the world… actually maybe that would be better.

• I ate a stir-fry in a restaurant in Cambodia that had ants in it (as an ingredient – it wasn’t a really dirty restaurant) – although I didn’t realise until I was about halfway through. I thought they were saffron or something like that. It was very nice, but once I did realise, I couldn’t finish it.

quiddity

The most popular sport in the wizarding world, it’s played on broomsticks, and involves each team… I jest, of course. Quiddity is a philosophical concept that describes the thing that makes something what it is – its essence. So you could write: ‘Emma’s weekly posts capture the quiddity of complicated words in straightfoward prose.’ Oh really? How kind of you to say, thank you so much.

It’s nothing to do with HP. But there are no good pictures for ‘essence’.

Now, my two major word-of-the-week sources (which are Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster), disagree on the meaning of quiddity. The one above is Merriam-Webster’s definition, which is the one I’m going with because it’s easiest to understand. But according to Wikipedia, quiddity is a bit more complicated, and describes the properties that a particular thing shares with others of its kind. This makes it the opposite of something called ‘haecceity’ or ‘thisness’ (which apparently is an actual word) i.e. a positive characteristic of an individual that causes it to be this individual, and no other. See why I’m going with the first one?

Quiddity comes from a Latin word, ‘quidditas’. That’s a translation of a Greek phrase ‘to ti en einai’ , meaning ‘the what it was to be’, which sounds like something a drunk person would say.

Quiddity can also refer to a small and usually trivial criticism or complaint, or to a quirk or eccentricity in someone's behaviour or personality. Hamlet uses it in this way in, well, ‘Hamlet’ in his graveside speech, referring to a lawyer: ‘Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures.’

That’s not a very fun note to end on, so here’s a quidditch joke:

Why should you never have sex with a wizard?

Because you might catch Hogwarts, and they never stop quidditching.

(I didn’t say it was a good joke.)

psychomanteum

I’ve been listening to a podcast on BBC Sounds called ‘The Witch Farm’ about Heol Fanog in Wales, a real-life haunted house (I highly recommend it – the podcast, not the house – and the previous one called ‘The Battersea Poltergeist’; unless you scare easy, in which case maybe don’t listen to either of them). In a recent episode, the presenter, Danny Robins (whose response to anything scary is always ‘Bloody hell’) set up a psychomanteum. This involved him watching several scary films while depriving himself of sleep for 36 hours. He then sat and gazed into a mirror, then nearly shit his pants when he saw a shadowy figure in it. The point of this was to prove how easy it is to trick the human brain into thinking it’s seen a ghost.

The word psychomanteum was invented by a guy called Raymond Moody. After a near-death experience he built one in Alabama, called the Dr John Dee Theater of the Mind (named after Queen Elizabeth I’s astronomer and famous occultist). Here he carries out (he’s still going) experiments where he gets people to summon visions of ghosts by staring into a mirror in a dimly lit room.

Despite the newness of the word, psychomanteums and mirror divination (called catoptromancy, fact-fans) have actually been around for yonks. A psychomanteum (although it’s not called that) is mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey (written in the 8th century BCE) when Odysseus gazes into a pit filled with the blood of sacrificed sheep and eventually sees his dead mum presumably berating him for killing a bunch of innocent barnyard animals. And in the 1950s, a psychomanteum was excavated at Ephyra in the western Greek province of Epiros. It was a subterranean complex containing fragments of a giant bronze cauldron which was probably gazed in by ancient Greeks looking to contact long-dead relatives. Spooky, right?

cathedral

I live in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, which is a cathedral town. Not a city – contrary to what a lot of people think, a town doesn’t immediately become a city just because it has a big ole church in it. In fact, Suffolk doesn’t have any cities in it at all. It’s not alone in this – there are actually nine others which are also city free. Want to have a guess at which ones? Answers at the bottom of the post…

Bury St Edmunds Cathedral (photo by DAVID ILIFF. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0)

Anyway, I digress. A cathedral is called a cathedral because it contains a cathedra, which is basically a nice chair (or throne) for a bishop. Originally the Latin word cathedra didn’t have any religious connotations though – it literally just meant ‘armchair’, and was a term usually reserved for a chair specifically for ladies. I’m not sure what makes a chair female – maybe it gets paid significantly less than the men’s chairs?

The origins of ‘cathedra’ go way back to ‘kmt’ (you can tell that’s an old word because it doesn’t have any vowels in it), a Proto-Indo-European word meaning ‘down’ or ‘with’. It’s thought that the Proto-Indo-European language, or PIE, was spoken from 4500 BC to 2500 BC (I told you it was old). This went into Greek as ‘kata’, meaning ‘down’, and soon fused with ‘hedra’, which comes from another PIE root ‘sed’, ‘to sit’. This created ‘kathedra’ for ‘seat or bench’. When words went from Greek to Latin, the ‘k’s often changed to ‘c’s (which is something to do with how they’re pronounced I think) – hence, ‘cathedra’. And with the Catholic church’s penchant for Latin, it wasn’t long before it made it into their lexicon (losing its femininity along the way, of course).

Time for Bury St Edmunds facts. Did you know…

1. The single largest witch trial in England was held in BSE in 1645. It led to 18 women being executed by famous witchfinder general Vincent Price, sorry Matthew Hopkins, sorry utter sexist bastard. The site of the trial is now a Premier Inn hotel, and the places where the witches were executed are now a garden centre and a golf club.

2. Bury St Eds featured prominently in Armando Iannucci’s film The Personal History of David Copperfield. Dickens himself stayed in The Angel Hotel in town three times during his life. You can even sleep in the same four-poster bed as he did in room 215 (although presumably they’ve changed the sheets since then).

3. Measuring just 15ft by 7ft, The Nutshell pub is officially the smalled pub in Britain. Opened in 1867, it has a mummified cat hanging over the bar which was discovered behind the walls during renovations. Mummified cats were often placed in the walls of newly built homes to ward off unwanted spirits back in the day. There are also several mummified cats in our local museum – I’m not sure why we love them so much here.

Some mummified cats (and mice). Sorry

So, did you guess the other city-less counties? They are: Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Dorset, the Isle of Wight, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Rutland (also Britain’s smallest county), Surrey and Warwickshire. Buckinghamshire was on the list until quite recently, but the Queen made Milton Keynes a city at part of the Platinum Jubilee Civic Honours, whatever they are.

pognophile

Spoiler alert

Any word with ‘phile’ on the end immediately looks vaguely threatening, doesn’t it? Luckily, in this case, it’s fairly innocuous. A pognophile is someone who (hopefully in a healthy way) really likes beards. It has a pretty wide definition, and can include anyone who loves growing their own beard, beards on other people and even those who study beards (because apparently that’s a thing).

Etymology wise it’s quite a straightforward one. ‘Pogon’ is the Greek work for ‘beard’, while ‘phile’ is a suffix we put on the end of words to show that someone loves the thing that comes before it (if that makes sense). ‘Phile’ comes from another Greek word, ‘philos’ which means ‘to love’. If you’re scared of beards, you’re a pognophobe, poor you.

The longest beard in the world belonged to one Hans Nilson Langseth (born in 1846), a Norwegian man whose facial hair was a whopping 17 feet and 6 inches long (that’s 5.334 metres in new money). If you fancy having a go at beating his record you should probably get started now though – it took him 60 years to grow it that long. Apparently beard hair dies once it gets past about five feet. So you have to mat the dead hair at the end into dreadlocks to make it strong enough to keep growing. Ewww, I bet there was all sorts of crap in there. And somebody probably knows exactly how much crap there was in there, as the beard (sadly now sans Hans) is in the Smithsonian. You can see a picture of it in all its glory (and still attached to Hans) here.

peristeronic

No, I haven’t spelled (spelt?) ‘prehistoric’ wrong. If something or someone (god forbid) is peristeronic then it means it or they relate to or resemble a pigeon.

The etymology is pretty straightforward – the ancient Greek word for dove or pigeon is ‘peristera’. Both of these birds come from the columbidae family. We get a couple of nice words from that as well:

• ‘columbarium’ – another word for a pigeon loft or a dovecote (I wonder why pigeons get lofts but doves gets cotes? Seems a bit racist), and also any type of vault which has niches for storing urns in it

• ‘columbine’ – which means of or relating to a dove, in innocence, gentleness, colour and so on. It’s also the name of one of the stock characters in commedia dell’arte (a form of popular theatre from 16th-century Italy that Inside No. 9 used as a basis for an episode that most people – including me – didn’t understand).

Time for pigeon facts. Pigeons are monogamous and mate for life. Mum and dad pigeons share parental responsibilities equally, meaning they’re already far more evolved than most humans (and I bet there’s no gender-pay gap). They’re also pretty clever. Aside from their awesome navigational abilities – an Oxford University study found that pigeons use manmade landmarks as signposts and often fly along roads and motorways, even changing direction at junctions – they can apparently recognise all 26 letters of the English alphabet and solve problems (I think I need a pigeon assistant).

GI Joe. He’s not dead, he’s resting.

Homing pigeons were used extensively during the First and Second World Wars for communication and reconnaissance. In fact, pigeon USA43SC6390, AKA GI Joe, saved the lives of the inhabitants of an entire Italian village, and the British troops who were occupying it, on 18 October 1943. Air support had been requested to deal with German soldiers in the village (called Calvi Vecchia). GI Joe flew 20 miles in 20 minutes to deliver a message that the British 169th (London) Infantry Brigade had captured the village, arriving just as the planes were getting ready to take off to bomb the target. He saved the lives of at least 100 men. GI Joe was given the Dickin Medal (which sounds rude but isn’t) for ‘the most outstanding flight made by a United States Army pigeon in World War II’.

I’m not crying, I’ve just got something in my eye.

‘Feed the birds’ from Mary Poppins – the dirty old bird lady always makes me well up.

matutolypea

I can guarantee you’ve had matutolypea at some point in your life. Don’t panic – it’s not some horrible internal disease or toe fungus. It’s when you wake up in the morning feeling grumpy and out of sorts. So it’s basically a posh way of saying that you got out of bed the wrong side.

A very old figurine that may or may not be Hakuna Matata, sorry Matuta Mater (from Wikipedia).

Etymology wise, despite its grand appearance, matutolypea is actually pretty straightforward. It’s a word of two halves. The ‘matuto’ bit comes from ‘Matuta Mater’, an ancient Roman goddess of the dawn. She was worshipped on the western and southern edges of the Roman empire and would later matutate (this is a bad play on words, sorry) into the slightly better-known Aurora. The second part of matutolypea comes from the Greek word ‘lype’, which means ‘grief or sorrow’. So it basically translates as ‘morning mourning’, which is pleasing (unless you’ve got it, or live with someone who does).

Even with these impressive classical roots, ‘matutolypea’ seems to be a fairly modern word, first turning up in print in the 1990s. Sadly, you won’t find it in any mainstream dictionaries either (but that’s never stopped me before).

Despite Matuta being largely forgotten when it comes to goddesses, we get lots of other morning-type words from her name, some more well known than others. They include ‘matins’ which are morning church services, ‘matinee’ for an afternoon performance and ‘matutinal’ which means something is happening in the morning (these have come to us via the French word ‘matin’, which I’m sure you’ll remember from school means ‘morning’).

Your challenge for this week is to say something like this to as many people as you can:

‘Don’t talk to me for at least an hour until my matutolypea subsides.’

And feel free to let me know their reaction in the comments.