gambol

This is inspired by the gorgeous lambs I saw running about this morning while I was walking my dog, Gus. (I also saw two dead ones which kind of ruined my day. Sorry. Anyhoo, moving on…) To gambol is to skip, frolic or jump about playfully, just like those lambs (the alive ones, obviously). It’s light, carefree and unbothered.

‘Gambol’ has been bouncing around the English language since the 1500s. It comes from the Middle French word ‘gambade’, which means ‘a leaping or springing action’. That, in turn, comes from ‘gamba’ which is Italian for ‘leg’. ‘Gamba’ also gave us ‘gambit’ and ‘gamble’ – I’m not going to tell you more about that now though, as I’m going to use both of these as future words of the week. Mean, I know.

One of ‘gambol’s first appearances in print in English was in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’: ‘Full oft he gamboled up and downe.’ So it’s describing a character literally leaping or frolicking around – very much in line with the way we still (occasionally) use the word today. Gambolling – not just for lambs.

Golding’s ‘Metamorphoses’ translation was a big deal in Elizabethan England because it made classical mythology widely accessible in English for the first time. He translated the entire work from Latin into English verse – and in a style that was rhythmic, vivid and packed with dramatic imagery. It was one of the most popular books of the time, and lots of writers drew on it (by which I think we mean plagiarised it) for stories, imagery and language. Shakespeare ‘borrowed’ some scenes and references from ‘Metamorphoses’ for plays including ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘The Tempest’. Luckily for Will, there weren’t any copyright laws then. (To be fair, he did transform those stories into something new, often with better pacing, deeper characters or sharper language. So that’s alright then.)

Golding translated the entire ‘Metamorphoses’ in just over a year – between 1564 and 1567. He mentions in his preface that he worked on it during his ‘leisure time’ while staying at the country estate of his nephew, Edward de Vere (the 17th Earl of Oxford – and one of the people some claim wrote Shakespeare’s plays, though that’s a whole other rabbit hole). Considering the translation runs to over 15 books of Latin poetry – around 12,000 lines – doing that in just over a year, by hand, in rhyming couplets is pretty bloody impressive. Thanks goodness he didn’t have Netflix.

font

Ah, fonts. Most of us have our favourites. In fact, I once had a wonderful evening with a guy in a bar in New York after we got chatting because he had my then-favourite font (Trebuchet) tattooed on his leg. But that’s a story for another time. Back to business – do you know where the word ‘font’ comes from? Well, it actually goes all the way back to the Middle Ages and the early days of printing.

‘Font’ comes from the Middle French word, ‘fonte’, which means ‘something that’s been melted’. That in turn comes from the Latin verb ‘fundere’, meaning ‘to melt’ or ‘to cast’. So what’s with all the melting? Well, it refers to the traditional process of creating typefaces, where individual letters were cast in metal. A printer would use these metal letters to create a page of text, which they’d then cover in ink and press on paper. Each typeface needed a full set of these metal pieces, which were collectively referred to as, you’ve guessed it, a font.

Bonus word of the week – leading. I’m referring to the one pronounced ‘ledding’, which these days refers to the distance between lines of text. It’s called that because traditionally printers would insert strips of lead between lines of type to increase the spacing. Interesting, right?

(Oh, and if you’ve ever wondered how some of the fonts we use every day got their names, have a read of this blog post. It also explains the difference between ‘font’ and ‘typeface’, if you care about such things.)