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.