rhetoric

Nowadays, when we say something is ‘rhetoric’, we usually mean it’s a load of bollocks designed to manipulate whoever’s unlucky enough to be listening to it. But this much-maligned word didn’t always have such a negative meaning. In fact, ‘rhetoric’ used to simply refer to the art of persuasion. Throughout Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ‘rhetoric’ was a prestigious and essential academic discipline, and one of three ancient arts of discourse (also called trivium) along with grammar (yay!) and logic (boo!).

Rhetoric, innit

The word ‘rhetoric’ has a Proto-Indo-European root, *werh₁, which means ‘to speak’ or ‘to say’. This appeared during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, i.e. bloody ages ago (about 6,500 to 4,500 years ago, if you want actual numbers. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the weird notation, the asterisk means the word was never written down, and the small 1 marks a soft throat sound, apparently). *werh₁ evolved into an Ancient Greek word, eírein, also meaning ‘to speak’, which then produced rhētōr meaning a public speaker or orator (although I’m not sure how – it’s something to do with the Greek letter for W vanishing, I think, but much too boring to go into here, which is saying something). To further complicate things, the Greeks then took the root of rhētōr and added the adjective ending -ikē (meaning ‘pertaining to’ or ‘the skill of’) which created a new adjective, rhētorikē, meaning ‘oratorical’. This clearly wasn’t complicated enough though, so they stuck tékhnē (‘art’, ‘craft’ or ‘technique’) on the end to make it mean ‘the oratorical craft’ or ‘the art of the public speaker’.

Understandably, as time passed people stopped bothering with the tékhnē bit, and just used rhētorikē on its own to mean ‘the art of speaking’. This made its way into Latin as rhētorica, then into 12th-century Old French as retorique, and finally into Middle English in the early 14th century as rethoryke or rhetorik.

Annnnnnd relax.

Now we all know too much about rhetoric, let’s have a look at the tools and techniques that people use when they’re trying to be good at it, AKA rhetorical devices. There are bloody loads of these, and they all have very long complicated names, so I’ll just give you a few. I can almost certainly guarantee you’ve used at least some of them in everyday speech.

Complicated name	Sounds like…	Actually is…	In action
Epizeuxis	Something that hangs at the back of your throat	Repeating a word or phrase back-to-back with no other words in between to make a point	‘Location, location, location.’
Anaphora	A shop that sells overpriced makeup	Repeating a phrase at the start of sentences or clauses for emphasis	‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields…’
Tricolon	A bowel complaint	Grouping things in threes to add rhythm and punch	‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
Hyperbole	An American sports event that no one outside America cares about	Deliberate, extreme exaggeration used to make a point or emphasise a feeling, and not meant to be taken literally (and pronounced ‘hy-PER-buh-lee’, confusingly)	‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.’

What about rhetorical questions, I hear you ask in a not-rhetorical way. Yes, rhetorical questions come directly from the study of rhetoric. They’re called that because they were traditionally used to make a point or persuade an audience, with the answer either immediately given by the speaker, or being so bleedin’ obvious that they didn’t need to. In speechmaking, posing a question forces the listener’s brain to process the thought actively rather than just listening (or drifting off…). Rhetorical questions also subtly steer an audience’s thinking without explicitly telling them what to think. Sneaky, huh?

donjon

I came across this word in a short story by Naomi Novik called ‘Castle Coeurlieu’ which scared the crap out of me, something that’s quite hard to do to this hardcore horror-film watcher. If you haven’t read it, it’s a brilliant, claustrophobic tale about a woman named Isabeau who has to navigate a shifting, predatory castle to save her stepson. If I didn’t sleep on a divan bed that’s full of crap, I definitely would have had to check under it before turning off the lights.

Anyway, back to the donjon. It’s the innermost keep or the strongest tower of a castle – a massive, vertical structure designed to be a final refuge when the outer walls have failed and everything has gone tits up. Think of it as a fortress-within-a-fortress. In Novik’s story, the donjon isn’t a place of safety though – it’s a sentient, hungry labyrinth where, after dark, the rules of time and space are twisted into something other.

‘Donjon’ is an Old French word, which grew out of the Gallo-Roman ‘dominio’, meaning ‘lordship’ or ‘mastery’. That’s because a donjon was all about the physical manifestation of a lord’s power – his (phallic? Probably) ‘dominion’ over the landscape. But over time, the word underwent a bit of a branding disaster. Because the safest place to stash people who pissed you off was in the windowless foundations of these towers, the ‘donjon’ of the elite eventually morphed into the English word ‘dungeon’. From proud prick to pitiful pit.

Donjons were masterpieces of medieval paranoia. Many were built with spiral staircases that turned clockwise as they went up. This gave right-handed defenders plenty of room to swing their swords down at intruders, while the attackers coming up the stairs would bash their sword arms against the central stone pillar. Why no one recruited a left-handed army is beyond me though. (Clearly there were no one women involved in this.)

rival

Ah yes, my favourite novel by Jilly Cooper (I’m not ashamed to admit I love her). A rival is, of course, someone you compete with for the same thing – like the last roast potato at a family dinner or the armrest on an aeroplane. ‘Rival’ comes from a Latin word, rivalis, which literally means ‘one who uses the same stream as another’ (rivus = brook or stream – but not ‘river’, weirdly, which is flumen). But where does the conflict and side-eye come in? Well, just as it is now (and rapidly becoming more so thanks to AI and its thirsty data centres), water was a precious commodity in ancient times. If you and your neighbour were using the same stream, you were naturally competing for that resource. That’s why, in Roman law, rivales were neighbours who had ‘river rights’ to the same water source. Which of course led to lots of argy-bargy about one person taking too much. So it wasn’t long before the word rivalis came to mean ‘competitor’ or ‘adversary’.

As Latin evolved into the Romance languages, rivalis entered Old French as ‘rival’. But the literal watery meaning fell away while the ‘competitor’ meaning took over, specifically in the context of love or honour.

While ‘rival’ existed in Latin and French for yonks, the word didn’t make its debut in English until the late 16th century, first appearing in print in 1577. This was in ‘Holinshed’s Chronicles’ (specifically ‘The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande’), an enormous history of Britain which was a major source of inspo for lots of Shakespeare’s plays (as well as works by Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser). Here it was used in the context of political and military competition. (There’s also a separate, slightly earlier variation of the word – ‘rivality’, meaning the state of being rivals – which turned up in print as early as 1528, but that obviously didn’t make the cut.)

‘Rival’ initially arrived as a noun (i.e. a person, place or thing) in English, and we have Willy S (as per bloody usual) to thank for verbifying it (i.e. turning it into an action – to rival someone). He first did that in ‘King Lear’ (1605–1606) in a now rather suspect reference to Cordelia as a prize for two men to fight over:

My lord of Burgundy,
We first address toward you, who with this king
Hath rivaled for our daughter. 

Not bad for a word that started as a plumbing dispute, right?

treacle

I’m pretty sure you know what treacle is – uncrystallised syrup made during the refining of sugar. Okay, maybe you didn’t know that. But I’m sure you do know that it’s the sticky stuff that we use in many a pudding (my mum makes a killer treacle sponge pudding). Why ‘treacle’ though? Well, it turns out the word itself has distinctly medicinal origins.

As so many of these stories do, this one begins in ancient Greece. The word we’re interested in this time is thēriakos, meaning ‘of a wild animal’. Since lots of wild animals enjoy taking a chunk out of us human beings, thēriakē came to mean ‘antidote against a poisonous bite’. Latin borrowed this as theriaca, and the word eventually made its way through Old French into Middle English as triacle with this meaning. The earliest recorded use of it in English dates to 1340, in a text called ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’ where it refers to an antidote to poisons and snakebites.

(Just a quick aside: the ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’ – literally the ‘again-biting of inner wit’ or the ‘Remorse of Conscience’ – is the title of a confessional prose work written in a Kentish dialect of Middle English. Wikipedia describes it as: ‘Rendered from the French original, one supposes by a “very incompetent translator,” it is generally considered more valuable as a record of Kentish pronunciation in the mid-14th century than exalted as a work of literature’. BURN.)

So how did we get from ‘remedy for painful bite’ to ‘sticky stuff on puds’? Well, theriac recipes often contained honey in large quantities – sometimes three times the weight of all the dry ingredients combined. Because of this, the meaning of ‘treacle’ later became associated with the sticky dark syrup left over from the process of sugar refining. This was probably because of a perceived resemblance to the old medicinal preparations. Or maybe just because it was really sweet.

‘Treacle’ is primarily a British term for what Americans call molasses, even though the two products aren’t actually identical – molasses is typically boiled for longer, creating a thicker, darker liquid with less sugar (and less fun, by the sounds of it). The figurative sense, meaning cloyingly sentimental, does appear in some American writing, but it’s less common than it is in British. Oh, and the pet name (‘Hello Treacle’), beloved of Pete Beale in Eastenders (showing my age there), comes from Cockney rhyming slang, where ‘treacle tart’ means ‘sweetheart’.

havoc

If you’ve ever come home to find your usually well-behaved (well, kinda) cavapoo has decided to redecorate the lounge using the stuffing from three cushions and the contents of the kitchen bin, you’ve seen havoc in action.

As a noun, ‘havoc’ describes widespread destruction, confusion or disorder. It’s the kind of chaos that doesn’t just happen; it’s wreaked. And it turns out that its origins are rooted in a specific – and actually quite terrifying – military command.

In the Middle Ages, ‘Havoc!’ was a formal cry used during a conflict. It signalled that soldiers could start plundering and looting, grabbing whatever the olde equivalent of flat-screen TVs and games consoles was, and generally causing as much mayhem as they liked. The command came from an Old French word, havot, meaning pillaging. During the 14th century, as French-speaking officers gave orders to English-speaking troops, the soft French ‘t’ was gradually hardened into the English ‘k’. This is probably due to something called folk etymology, which is when a foreign word enters a language and people subconsciously ‘correct’ it to something that already sounds familiar to them. In this case, that was hafoc, the Old English name for a predatory hawk – to a 14th-century soldier, the command to start looting and pillaging might have felt conceptually very similar to the action of a hawk swooping down to snatch its prey.

Havoc time (did you just read that as MC Hammer? Maybe that’s just me) was so destructive that it had to be legally regulated. In 1385, Richard II issued the ‘Statutes of War’, which specifically forbade shouting ‘Havoc’ without authorisation under penalty of death. So anyone who lost their head and got overly enthusiastic about being first to the lootfest would quite literally lose it for real shortly after.

The most famous literary appearance of ‘havoc’ comes courtesy of, you’ve guessed it, William Shakespeare. In Julius Caesar, Mark Antony promises to ‘Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war’. Today, we use ‘havoc’ for much lower stakes, though I’m fairly certain my dog still hears the 14th-century call to arms the second the front door clicks shut behind me.

urchin

When you hear the word ‘urchin’, you probably picture a scruffy Victorian street kid saying ‘Please sir, can I have some more?’. But, did you know that the OG urchin had prickles rather than pickpocketing skills? Yep, in Middle English, ‘urchin’ meant ‘hedgehog’. It appears in writing as ‘yrchoun’ or ‘irchoun’, which we borrowed from an Old French word, ‘herichon’. That came from the Latin word for hedgehog, ‘ericius’. That Latin root is also linked to the Proto-Indo-European word ‘ghers-’, which means ‘to bristle’. That’s also where we get ‘horror’ from, which literally means ‘a bristling of the hair’.

From ‘hedgehog’, ‘urchin’ did what words (and Victorian pickpockets, probably) love to do – it wandered. In the 1500s, people started using it figuratively for anyone or anything small, mischievous or misshapen, including hunchbacks, women of bad reputation (rolls eyes), and even goblins and elves. Shakespeare mentions ‘urchin-shows’ in ‘The Tempest’, which refers to the ghostly or spirit-like apparitions that Prospero sends to haunt Caliban:

‘His spirits hear me,
And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch,
Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’ th’ mire,
Nor lead me like a firebrand in the dark
Out of my way, unless he bid ’em.’

It wasn’t long before those meanings of small, ragged, impish and half-wild started to blur together, and the word ‘urchin’ began being applied to children who fit the same image. By the 18th to 19th centuries ‘street urchin’ had become a familiar phrase, especially in urban contexts. Here it is in Dickens’ ‘The Pickwick Papers’:

‘Gabriel had been looking forward to reaching the dark lane, because it was, generally speaking, a nice, gloomy, mournful place … he was not a little indignant to hear a young urchin roaring out some jolly song about a merry Christmas, in this very sanctuary …’

Another urchin also appeared in the 1500s, this time in the sea. This is when the phrase ‘sea urchin’ cropped up, when English speakers spotted those spiky little sea creatures and thought, essentially, ‘there’s an underwater hedgehog’. The link’s completely visual: same shape and same spines, just wetter. Well, kinda.

I trod on a sea urchin on holiday when I was younger, and got a few of its spines lodged in my foot. The locals told me to pee on it, and I still don’t know if that was good advice or just them taking the piss out of the tourists. I’ll leave it up to your imagination as to whether I did or not, but let’s just say I flew home without any sea urchin spines in my foot.

rankle

If something rankles, it irritates you in a way that really gets under your skin. Like neighbours who leave their bins out for a week, people who eat loudly or drivers who don’t park at the back of the box on a street with very limited parking (that last one might just be me). It’s an annoyance that lingers, festers and keeps you muttering to yourself. And maybe sneaking out in the middle of the night to leave a rude note on someone’s windscreen.

‘Rankle’s etymology is quite literal – it came into English from an Old French word, ‘draoncle’, which meant ‘boil’ or ‘festering sore’. Lovely. That comes from a Latin word, dracunculus, which is less gross – it means ‘little serpent’ or ‘little dragon’ (and would have been an ace name for one of the Game of Thrones dragons).

So how did we get from serpents to sores? Well, in the ancient world, apparently people thought some ulcers looked like wriggling little snakes under the skin. I’m not googling this to check though.

When ‘rankle’ first slithered into English in the 14th century as ‘ranclen’, it was all about wounds festering away. Then, over the next couple of centuries, writers started using it in the figurative sense for feelings that behave like sores that refuse to heal. Shakespeare was of course leading the pack, using it as a metaphor for an emotional condition in Richard II:

‘Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more

Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.’

Thanks to our Will, and others like him, when something rankles today, there’s no pus involved. And ‘no pus involved’ is always a good thing, right?

descry

To descry something is to spot it – to catch sight of something faint, distant or difficult to see. You might descry land on the horizon, for example, or a face in the crowd. It’s easy to confuse ‘descry’ with ‘decry’ (although I doubt either of them are coming up that regularly in your daily life), which is understandable – they look and sound similar, but mean very different things. If you decry something then you condemn it, usually loudly and with lots of disapproval.

‘Descry’ and ‘describe’ come from the same Latin root – dēscrībere, meaning ‘to write down’ or ‘to represent’. That Latin word gave rise to an Old French verb, ‘descrier’, which meant ‘to proclaim’ or ‘cry out’ (often in the sense of calling something out that you’ve just seen). That’s where we borrowed it from.

‘Descry’ has been around for a long time, having first appeared in print in 1330, in the Middle English romance Reinbrun. Nope, me neither – it sounds pretty awesome though. Apparently Reinbrun is abducted by some merchants as a child and shipped off to Africa, where he’s presented to King Argus. During his captivity, he gets all buff and turns into a kickass knight. He goes on to rescue Amis, a friend of his father’s, from an enchanted castle controlled by a fairy knight. Sounds good, right? Oh, and just FYI, medieval ‘romances’ don’t actually involve much in the way of snogging – they’re more about heroic adventures, quests, battles and chivalric deeds, often with a bit of the supernatural thrown in. Sadly they’re also in Middle English which means they’re unpossible to comprehenden.

benignant

EF Benson, who looks like he was pretty benignant

If you’re thinking that ‘benignant’ sounds like it’s just stepped off the set of a Victorian drama wearing a waistcoat and holding a pocket watch, then you’d be right. I read it in a ghost story by one EF Benson, who was born in 1867. You might have already guessed that it’s the opposite of ‘malignant’ – it means kind, gentle or benevolent.

Benignant comes from the Latin word ‘benignus’, which is a mash-up (or compound) of ‘bene’ meaning ‘well’ or ‘good’, and ‘gignere’ meaning ‘to beget’ or ‘to produce’. So it’s basically about creating goodness, generating kindness or radiating a beneficent glow. Which makes a change in today’s shitty world, doesn’t it?

Interestingly (to me, at least), ‘benignus’ didn’t just mean ‘nice’ in Latin. It also carried a sense of generosity and nobility, so it was often applied to rulers, gods or generally all-round nice guys. It arrived in English via Old French in the early 17th century, alongside its more popular sibling, ‘benign’.

So why did ‘benign’ stick around while ‘benignant’ got assigned to obscure Victorian ghost stories? Well, ‘benignant’ generally leaned towards describing people, actions or attitudes, while ‘benign’ became the go-to for describing things that aren’t out to kill you (think moles and weather). Not to be cynical, but maybe there just aren’t enough nice people around to make ‘benignant’ more popular…?

Margaret – all that Egyptology sadly didn’t raise a smile

I referred to EF Benson as an obscure writer above, which is a little unfair. Well a lot unfair, actually – he was a prolific English author whose literary output included over 90 works, ranging from sharp social comedies to chilling ghost stories (the one I read was called ‘The Room in the Tower and Other Stories’). Benson was born into a pretty well-to-do family (his dad was the fricking Archbishop of Canterbury), and studied archaeology at Cambridge before turning to writing. He was a keen sportsman and also gay (a combination which sadly still isn’t accepted today), and his books are famed for their dry wit and camp humour. He was also the mayor of Rye in Sussex, which inspired the fictional town of Tilling in his most famous novels. His siblings were pretty cool too – Robert Hugh was another prolific author and Arthur Christopher wrote the words to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Let’s take a moment to appreciate his sister, Margaret (who apparently only got one name, unlike her brothers #patriarchy) though. She was one of the first women to be admitted to Oxford University and went on to become a keen amateur Egyptologist, excavating lots of super-cool stuff, and later writing about it. In fact, her writing and lectures are credited with making Egyptology much more accessible to the general public.

crotchety

If you’re crotchety, you’re a bit cross and fed-up. Not full on angry, but definitely somewhere in the middle of the pissed-off scale.

‘Crotchety’ comes from an Old French word, ‘crochet’, which dates back to around the 12th century, and meant ‘a little hook’. That in turn comes from the Latin word ‘cruciculus’, which is a diminutive (i.e. a word that conveys a smaller or lesser version of something) of ‘crux’, meaning ‘cross’. (I don’t know why the smaller version is much longer and more complicated than the short version, sorry.)

My whole life, I’ve had an irrational fear of getting a fish-hook caught in my cheek.

Around the 16th century, we stuck a ‘t’ in ‘crochet’ to create ‘crotchet’ in English, which still meant ‘small hook’. And that’s where we get ‘crotchety’ from – probably due to the idea that crotchety people’s minds get ‘hooked’ on small, trivial annoyances. This association didn’t become common until the early 19th century (maybe people were just super-chilled before then) which is when we get the first recorded use of ‘crotchety’ in print. According to the OED, the earliest known use was in 1847, in some writing by Benjamin Disraeli, UK PM and novelist.

The musical crotchet (i.e. a quarter note in British English) also shares the same linguistic root – this is due to the hook-like symbols used in early musical notation. And of course, the name of the craft of ‘crochet’ comes from the same place as it involves a little hook (one which I cannot master, despite trying really hard. The last time I tried, I ended up throwing it across the room, where it landed in the dog’s water bowl.).

I got extremely crotchety with ChatGPT while writing this article, as it contradicted itself four times while I was trying to get the facts straight on this etymology. So the moral of this crotchety story is, don’t rely on ChatGPT to write factually accurate articles – hire me to do that instead.

(It did then help me with a particularly complicated knitting pattern though, so we’re friends again now. Not a crochet pattern though, sadly, because I CAN’T DO THAT.)

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.