mooch

‘Mooch’ has two different meanings depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on. In British English ‘mooching’ is pretty relaxed – it means to wander or loiter aimlessly, often with no particular purpose in mind. We often have a mooch round the shops, for example. Across the pond, however, ‘mooching’ is a bit more sinister. In American English, it refers to someone who takes from others without giving anything in return, AKA a freeloader or sponger. (We do use it in this way over here as well, e.g. ‘he’s mooching off his friends’, although probably not as often...?)

A man, mooching

Whether you’re British or American, ‘mooch’ has been about since the mid-nineteenth century. It’s believed to originate from the Middle English word ‘mocchen’, which meant ‘to loiter or slink about’. This itself likely comes from an Old French word ‘muchier’ or ‘muscher’, meaning ‘to hide or lurk’. There’s also a possible influence from a Dutch word ‘mutsen’, which means ‘to sulk’ or ‘to dawdle’.

I asked ChatGPT why this change happened and it said that people in America have ‘a strong emphasis on self-sufficiency and individual responsibility’ which we Brits don’t. RUDE. So now AI is not only sexist (see previous word of the week, misanthrope), but also xenophobic. That bodes well for the future.

gossip

You know what ‘gossip’ is – trivial chat, usually by women and usually a bit mean, about which celebs are sleeping together, the friend in your group that no one actually really likes (aw) or other people’s bad haircuts. (Also, an awesome indie rock band fronted by the legend that is Beth Ditto.)

But ‘gossip’ originally meant something completely different, and much nicer. It comes from an Old English word, ‘godsibb’, which referred to a godmother or godfather. ‘Godsibb’ was a compound (aka two words smushed together) of ‘god’ (you know what that means) and ‘sibb’, meaning a relative or friend, or kinship.

By the Middle English period (approximately the late 11th to late 15th century), changes in pronunciation meant that ‘godsibb’ had evolved into ‘gossib’. And its meaning had expanded to include close friends and companions, not just godparents. It was often used to describe women’s close and intimate friendships, especially those who supported one another during childbirth.

Later, the term became closely associated with women’s social interactions, and the personal and detailed conversations we have when gathered together to support each other. As these gatherings and conversations became more visible, ‘gossip’ began to be used more specifically to describe talk among women.

By the 16th century, ‘gossip’ had acquired the modern sense of idle or pointless talk or rumour-mongering, especially about other people’s personal or private affairs.

The way that ‘gossip’ morphed from something positive into something negative is called semantic derogation. This is a phenomenon where everyday words, usually related to women or female-associated things, become a pejorative (i.e. a word that expresses negative or disrespectful connotations). Other examples include:

• spinster: this simply meant a woman who spun thread for a living. But we now use it to describe an unmarried older woman who’s lonely and will be eaten by her many cats when she dies

• madam: this used to be a respectful term for a woman of authority. But now it’s mainly used to refer to women who run brothels

• mistress: this was also a term for a woman with control or authority. Now we use it to describe a woman involved with a married man

• diva: now used for women seen as ‘high maintenance’ or demanding, this used to just be a term for a kick-ass female opera singer

• biddy: an annoying or nosy elderly woman. According to ChatGPT, this once meant a young chicken. But according to me, it was originally a shortening of ‘Bridget’, a popular Irish girls’ name – see previous word of the week, ‘biddy’. Either way, it’s sexist

• crone: this originally just meant an old woman, but now has much more negative connotations of ugliness and nastiness.

GRRRR, patriarchy. Here’s some Beth Ditto being awesome to make us all feel better.

lullaby

You know what a lullaby is – a song you sing to a baby that won’t sleep (hello to my nephew). ‘Lullaby’ comes from the Middle English phrase ‘lullen’, which means ‘to lull’, and ‘by’ which means, well, ‘by’ or ‘near’. So it literally translates as ‘to lull near’. We’ve been using the word ‘lullaby’ in English since at least the 16th century.

So far, so straightforward. But, there’s another, more sinister explanation. Before I get into it, I should preface this by saying this is ‘folk etymology’ which is when we change or reinterpret the origin of a word over time, usually due to a popular or widely held (wrong) belief about its meaning (see ‘penthouse’ for an example). So everything after this point is probably bollocks. But let’s just go with it, because it’s much more interesting.

Lilith and snake pal (not the name of the painting) by John Collier

In this explanation, the word ‘lullaby’ comes from ‘Lilith abi’ which means ‘Lilith, begone’ in Hebrew. In some Jewish mythology, Lilith was the first wife of Adam, before Eve (PLOT TWIST). Unlike Eve, who was made from Adam’s rib, Lilith was created from the same clay as he was, which made them equal. Because of this she got a bit uppity – literally – and refused to lie underneath him when they were getting jiggy with it, or have his children. You go, girl.

Because of all this bloody feminism (I bet she wanted equal pay and dresses with pockets too), Lilith was either banished from the Garden of Eden or left of her own accord (I hope it was the second one). In the wilderness around the garden she became a demon who preyed on newborn infants and seduced men in their sleep (using reverse cowgirl, presumably – no missionary for our Lilith). She’s often shown as having wings, or as a snake.

Lilith appears in various Jewish texts, including the Talmud and the Zohar. And depending on who you talk to she’s either a symbol of female empowerment and resistance against the patriarchy, or a dangerous and evil woman who threatens the very order of creation. I think you can probably guess which side I come down on.

Anyway, back to lullabies. For whatever reason, Lilith has got a reputation for stealing babies. One belief is that this is because she was jealous of the attention Adam and Eve gave their children, while another says she could only have demon babies, so she stole human ones to make up for it. Either way, singing ‘Lilith abi’, or a lullaby, was a way to ward off Lilith and protect your babbie from her evil/feminist clutches.

I told you it was better than the real answer.

fizgig

If you’re of a similar age to me, i.e. very young (stop laughing), then you’re probably thinking of the small, but actually quite scary (he’s got two rows of teeth, for chrissakes), dog-like friend of Kira, one of the lead characters in ‘The Dark Crystal’, a film that traumatised an entire generation of children in the 80s (I’m still scared of the Skeksis). Sadly he has a double ‘z’ in his name, so forget him. A single-z fizgig actually has several meanings.

1. A frivolous woman

Ah, a nice bit of everyday sexism (because as per usual there’s no male equivalent). A fizgig can be used to refer to a woman who’s silly, flighty or likes a bit of flirting. No one knows quite where this came from, but it’s possible it originated in 16th or 17th century England. One theory is that it comes from the Middle English word ‘fiche’, which means a small object or trifle. Another theory is that it’s related to ‘fizzle’, as in the hissing or sputtering sound. Either way, it eventually came to be associated with something small, frivolous or trivial, which was then applied to women. SIGH.

BOOOOOORING

2. A firework

A fizgig can also be a type of firework that produces a hissing or sizzling sound. Again, the etymology isn’t clear, but it’s probably onamatopoeic. I find fireworks incredibly boring. That’s not relevant.

3. A type of fishing tool

This type of fizgig has a long pole or handle with a sharp, pointed metal tip at the end, and is used for spearfishing. Fizgigs have been used in this way for centuries and still are in some parts of the world today. Apparently they work particularly well in murky or shallow waters that other types of fishing gear aren’t suitable for.

4. A type of hand-held spinning toy

A fizgig is also a term used to describe a small, hand-held toy made out of wood, metal or bone (ew). It typically consists of a small rod or handle with a pointed end, with a cord or string wound around it. You pull the string to make it spin. Again, no one really knows why this is called a fizgig, although it might relate to that word ‘fiche’ again, or simply be onamatopoeia (again).

So there you have it – four meanings for a word you probably didn’t even know existed in the first place. Don’t say I never give you anything.

penthouse

You know what a penthouse is – the super-expensive apartment at the top of a block which has its own special key for the lift and amazing views (AKA something I’ll never live in). But why is it called a penthouse?

(Obviously there’s also a softcore porn magazine called Penthouse. If that’s what you’re interested in, you might need a different kind of website though – I’m afraid there’s only word porn here.)

Phwoarr, look at the views on that penthouse.

Well, it turns out penthouses haven’t always the purview of poshos. The word ‘penthouse’ has actually been around for about four centuries (so much longer than very tall buildings), and originally referred to any kind of outhouse or structure attached to the outside of a building. It comes from an Old French word, ‘apentis’, which means ‘attached building’ or ‘appendage’. This comes from a Latin verb, ‘appendere’, meaning ‘to hang something up’. That’s where we get other words like ‘pendulum’, ‘appendix’ and ‘depend’ (not ‘penis’ though, surprisingly).

In the 1300s, ‘apentis’ made its way into Middle English, dropping the ‘a’ somewhere along the way. It was still used to describe small structures with sloping roofs that were attached to other larger buildings though. People usually kept things like tools and animals in them, rather than super-rich celebs. Through a process called folk etymology (which is basically when we change a – usually foreign – word due to a mistaken assumption about its meaning, or mispronounce it so throughly and for so long that it becomes something else) the ‘is’ of ‘appentis’ became ‘house’.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century that penthouse took on the meaning it has today. As is often the case, no one seems completely sure how. Rooftop units were seen as pretty undesirable before the invention of lifts, and people tended to stick machinery, and servants, in them. The publisher Condé Nast takes some of the credit for popularising rooftop living. In the early 1920s he bought a building in New York and had the top floor – originally the servants’ quarters – converted into a 5,100-square foot apartment complete with six bedrooms, dining room, drawing room and library, all arranged around a 23 by 43 foot ballroom. Structures like this were often called ‘roof bungalows’ which doesn’t sound half as grand as ‘penthouse’ – so perhaps that’s why they were rebranded. The architect Emery Roth might have been responsible for this – he designed many top-floor apartments with terraces and is credited by his biographer Steven Ruttenbaum as having called these penthouses.

The upshot of all this is that I’m pretty sure that next time you’re in your shed, garage or outside loo, you can legit tell people you’re hanging out in your penthouse.

diaper

I was watching something American with babies in it the other day (possibly ‘This Is Us’?) and the word ‘diaper’ came up. Which started me thinking about why we (and a lot of other English-speaking countries) have nappies, and Americans have diapers. They’re not even close to being the same word. And while there are obviously lots of differences between British and American English, there aren’t that many words that I can think of where we say one thing and they say something completely different (obviously there are exceptions – many of them food-related (zucchini, egg-plant, scallions, etc.) – feel free to put me right in the comments with others).

A Chinese snuff bottle (1700–1800) showing three types of diaper background.

Because it’s American I assumed ‘diaper’ was fairly modern. Wrong. Check this out from The Taming of the Shrew by Billy Shakespeare:

‘Let one attend him with a silver basin
Full of rose-water and bestrew'd with flowers,
Another bear the ewer, the third a diaper,
And say 'Will't please your lordship cool your hands?’

So, it turns out ‘diaper’ is actually a really old word from Middle English (which was spoken from the Norman Conquest in 1066 until the late 15th century). At this point it was a term for a pattern of repeated squares, rectangles or lozenges on fabric, but also on brickwork or paving, and other architectural type-stuff. The word comes from the Greek ‘dia’ for ‘cross’ (as in ‘diamond’ or ‘diagonal’) and ‘aspros’, Greek for ‘white’. So why did a piece of fabric used to wrap up a baby’s bum come to be called a diaper? Well, the first cloth nappies were cut into geometric shapes (as that made them easy to wrap round the bub) – hence, ‘diaper’.

When we colonised North America, the settlers took the word ‘diaper’ with them, where it remained. ‘Nappy’ is actually a much more modern word – it didn’t turn up until the 1920s – and is probably a shortened version of ‘napkin’. Although you wouldn’t want to wipe your face on one.

bug

I happened to be watching a bit of Countdown the other day (I definitely wasn’t skiving) when this came up in Susie Dent’s origins of words segment. And it was such a good story I had to share it. So, of course you know what a bug is. But in this case the bugs I’m referring to aren’t the insect-y ones, but the defect-y ones – like software or engineering bugs. ‘Bug’ in this sense is probably older than you think (turns out technology has been not working properly for a really long time), and goes all the way back to the 1870s. It probably came from the Middle English word ‘bugge’, meaning a bogeyman or goblin, which is also where we get ‘bugbear’ from (a previous word of the week).

Up until the 1940s, the word ‘bug’ in this context was really only known by by engineers, programmers and the like. That’s until Grace Hopper came along, computer pioneer and all-round amazing human woman. After serving in the American Navy, Hopper joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she worked on the Mark II and Mark III computers (used for ballistic calculations and other very complicated computer-y things). There was an error in the Mark II which operators traced to a moth trapped in a relay – an actual real-live bug in the system. It was logged in the log (obviously) book by one William Burke as ‘First actual case of bug being found’ (you can see the actual moth below, which is now in the Smithsonian Museum). Hopper loved to tell the story, popularising the term so much that we all use it today.

nickname

You know what a nickname is, of course – a substitute for someone or something’s proper name. But have you ever wondered who Nick is?

As it’s Christmas, it would be great if the ‘nick’ was St Nick. But, sadly, it turns out there’s no Nick in nickname. It’s a very old word, going all the way back to the early 1300s. And it looked a bit different then, as it was spelled ‘ekename’. This literally means ‘additional name’ from the Old English word ‘eac’, which comes from ‘eacian’ – to increase. So how did it become ‘nickname’? This is down to a process called rebracketing (also resegmentation or metanalysis if you want to get really technical), which is a fancy-dancy way of saying that the ‘n’ of the ‘an’ got moved to the beginning of the noun. So it went from [an][ekename] to [a][nekename], which eventually morphed into ‘nickname’.

This specific type of rebracketing is called ‘false splitting’. Other words that have lost an ‘n’ because of false splitting include:

• a napron ⇾ an apron (the thing you wear when you’re cooking)

• a naddere ⇾ an adder (snake)

• a noumpere ⇾ an umpire (the tennis people).

Another type of rebracketing is when words become split in a way that’s different from how they were built. If you just said ‘huh’, here are some examples which will hopefully help:

• hamburger – hamburgers are called hamburgers because they come from Hamburg i.e. [Hamburg][er]. But because ham is a food, at some point we decided they were made from ham (even though they’re not), and created a new word, ‘burger’. Then we attached that to lots of other foodstuffs (cheeseburger, veggieburger, etc). Ooh, I’m hungry now

• helicopter – this is made up of ‘helico’, from the Greek word ‘helix’ meaning ‘spiral’, and ‘pter’ from ‘pterón’ which means ‘wing’. So it’s actually [helico][pter]. Presumably because ‘pter’ is quite hard to pronouce, we’ve rebracketed it as [heli][copter] and use both of these as parts of other words (helipad and gyrocopter being the only two I can think of at the moment)

• alcoholic – this is actually made up of [alcohol] and [ic], with alcohol being, well, alcohol, and the suffix ‘ic’ meaning ‘relating to’. We’ve rebracketed this as [alco][holic] and added the [holic] bit to anything vaguely addictive (shopaholic, workaholic, etc.).

Well, that was a lot of technical gubbins, wasn’t it? Let’s finish up with some awesome historical nicknames.

Henry the Impotent doing a medieval finger gun

• Viscount Goderich, AKA The Blubberer: Goderich (1782–1859) holds the dubious honour of being the briefest-serving British prime minister ever (who didn’t die in office) at only 144 days. He got his nickname from crying in the House of Commons about people who died in riots against the Corn Laws (which I think makes him sound like quite a nice bloke).

• Ragnar Hairy Pants: This one’s slightly cheeky as Ragnar might not have been a real person, although he does turn up in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which is apparently pretty reliable. I think his nickname’s fairly self-explanatory (he had hairy trousers). His son also had an awesome nickname – Ivar the Boneless – although no-one knows for sure where that came from.

• Charles XIV of Sweden, AKA Sergeant Pretty Legs: He was king of Sweden and Norway from 1818 until he died in 1844, and he had good legs. Nuff said.

• Honourable mentions to: Constantine the Dung-Named (Byzantine emperor from 741 to 775); John The Babymaker (born in 1458 and ruled Cleves – where ‘Anne of’ came from presumably, apparently fathering 63, yep, 63 illegitimate children); and Henry the Impotent (King of Castile from 1454 to 1474, who failed to consummate his 13-year marriage to his cousin, although didn’t have trouble doing it with anyone else apparently).

cobweb

Obviously you know what a cobweb is (AKA things I constantly have on my car’s wing mirrors – how do the spiders stay in there?) But have you ever wondered where the ‘cob’ bit came from? Somewhat disappointingly, ‘cob’ is just an olde-worlde (Middle-English if you want actual facts) word for ‘spider’. It comes from the Old English word for spider which was atorcoppe – ‘ator’ meaning ‘poison’ and ‘coppe’ meaning ‘head’ – apparently those Old English types thought spiders were poisonous which, as far as I can work out, they never have been in the UK.

From ‘atorcoppe’ we got ‘coppeweb’ and then ‘cobweb’. While we’ve stopped calling spiders themselves ‘cobs’ (although J.R.R. Tolkien used it and ‘attorcoppe’ in The Hobbit in 1937), we’ve kept it when talking about their homes – although it might be something that dies out soon as the more pedestrian ‘spider’s web’ becomes more common.

Oh, and an old (from the 1670s) Norfolk term for a misty morning was a ‘cobweb-morning’. Nice, right?

Okay, spider facts. The biggest species of spider in the world is the Goliath birdeater. Despite its name, it very rarely preys on birds (thank god), preferring insects, worms and amphibians. It’s part of the tarantula family and can have a legspan up to 30 cm, a body length of up to 13 cm and weigh up to 175g. Yikes. The good news is that unless you’re in northern South America, you’re unlikely to come across a Goliath birdeater in your day-to-day doings. If you are there, you might also find one on a menu – they’re edible spiders and apparently taste like ‘shrimp’. Think I’ll pass, thanks.

(If you’re feeling brave, do a Google image search for ‘largest spider crab’. If the results don’t give you a little shiver then you’re a better person than me.)