jargon

As you know (because you’re on my website), I’m a tone-of-voice copywriter. And one of the things I work really hard to avoid/eliminate is jargon (even though one could argue that ‘tone of voice’ itself is jargon…). My particular pet hate is corporate twaddle like ‘leverage’ (just say ‘use’), ‘pivot’ (I think you mean ‘change’), ‘align’ ( or we could just ‘agree’?)… you get the gist. Most of these words are designed for one thing – to make people in suits sound smarter than they are. But jargon actually has the opposite effect. That’s because it’s like a secret code, and excludes anyone who doesn’t understand it (i.e. almost everyone).

With that out of the way, let’s get back to the reason we’re here – where does the word ‘jargon’ come from? Turns out it has a surprisingly avian background.

J’accuse les oiseaux

Come with me on a quick trip to 12th-century France where ye olde French people were using the word ‘jargon’ to describe the twittering of birds. Why? Well, it’s pure onomatopoeia (more jargon, sorry), which is when a word imitates or suggests the sound it describes (other examples include ‘oink’, ‘cuckoo’ and ‘tick tock’).

So how did we get from ‘tweet tweet’ in a French accent to ‘leveraging strategic alignment’? By the late 1300s, ‘jargon’ had crossed the Channel into Middle English, mutating along the way from meaningless twittering into an insult for human speech that sounded like rubbish. It actually turns up in (my favourite, not) The Canterbury Tales to describe a drunk man talking shite:

‘And then he took a sop in fine clarre,
And upright in his bedde then sat he.
And after that he sang full loud and clear,
And kiss’d his wife, and made wanton cheer.
He was all coltish, full of ragerie
And full of jargon as a flecked pie.’

(Translation: Drunk old man marries a much younger woman (sigh), gets pissed to try to boost his ‘stamina’ for their wedding night, then does some drunk singing and can’t stop talking – the ‘flecked pie’ is referring to a magpie BTW, not a steak and kidney.)

Time to call in the professionals

In the 1600s, the meaning of ‘jargon’ changed again. As professions like law, medicine and trade guilds expanded, so did technical terminology – lots of it recycled from Latin – that everyday people couldn’t follow. And it wasn’t long before people started called that ‘jargon’.

This guy’s definitely just said something ‘resonated’ with him.

Another much more exciting type of jargon also arose at this time – ‘thieves’ cant’. This was a cryptolect (I did it again, sorry) or secret language spoken by criminals, beggars, vagrants and itinerant traders across GB from the early 16th century right up to the 19th. It wasn’t a completely distinct language with its own grammar though – instead it was a substitution cipher (bit more jargon there) meaning it swapped standard nouns, verbs and adjectives for metaphors, archaic terms and words borrowed from other languages to hide the meaning from eavesdropping constables or unsuspecting victims. Unlike many other oral dialects that vanished without a trace, thieves’ cant was surprisingly well-documented because lots of writers at the time were fascinated by the criminal underworld.

One term that you probably already know from thieves’ cant is ‘fence’, a word for someone who buys stolen goods. Here are a few more examples that you may or may not have come across:

• ken – house

• bob ken – a house that can easily be robbed

• boozing ken – a pub

• darkmans – night

• glymmer – fire

• cully – a victim.

Same as it ever was

Fast forward to today and we still use the term jargon to describe any language that’s only understood by a small group of people (I had a colleague who used to say jargon is fine ‘between consenting adults’). So the next time someone you work with asks you to ‘circle back on low-hanging fruit to optimise bandwidth’, you can tell them they’re part of a long and storied tradition of talking absolute bollocks. (Oh, and send them my way.)

aegis

‘Aegis’ is a fancy-dancy word that refers to the power to protect, control, or support something or someone. It often pops up in the phrase ‘under the aegis of’ (although not in anything I’ve written, I’m pleased to say). For example:

‘The ultimate owner of the best spot on the sofa will be decided under the aegis of the dog.’

Medusa, coming at ya

You’ve probably guessed from the spelling that we nicked ‘aegis’ from Latin. But the word it actually comes from is Greek – aíx. Bet you can’t guess what that means.

I’ll give you a sec.

The answer is, not at all obviously, ‘goat’.

So how did we get from hairy, eat-anything Goaty McGoatface to protection and control? Well, in ancient Greek mythology, the god Zeus (and later his daughter Athena) carried a powerful shield or cloak called aegis, which was made from the skin of Amalthea – a mythical goat that suckled Zeus as a baby. Yep. I mean this is the guy who turned himself into a golden shower (shut up), poured through a skylight and impregnated Harry Hamlin’s, sorry, Perseus’ mum, so being suckled by a goat is frankly one of the less weird things about him. (I should probably say that in early accounts, Amalthea was a nymph who owned a goat whose milk Zeus drank – much less weird, but also less interesting.)

Anyway, back to the shield. This was not just any old goatskin shield – the snake-covered head of the Gorgon Medusa (killed by the aforementioned golden-shower-fathered Perseus) was mounted on it. And because you can never have too many reptiles on your shield, it was also fringed with extra snakes who’d snap at anyone getting too close. The OG biological warfare. (Much like the nymph/goat merging above, Homer described the shield’s fringing as golden tassels, but later artworks depicted them as snakes – and that’s clearly much more exciting.)

Over the centuries, the word ‘aegis’ made its way through Latin and into English where 19th-century printers insisted on snobbishly gluing the first two letters together as ‘ægis’ (called a ligature, fact fans). Along the way it shed both the stuck-together letters, the goat hide and the snakes (dammit!), eventually settling down as an unnecessarily formal synonym for sponsorship, backing or protection.

So, next time you hear someone say they’re acting under the ‘aegis’ of an official authority (or a cavapoo called Gus, if you’re me), remember: they’re really just hiding behind a big-old goat skin.

Alongside ‘Terrahawks’ (look it up if you’re too young to remember it), this scene was one of the scariest things I saw as a child in the 80s.

redoubt

This is one of the (many) words I’ve seen hanging around, but never really knew what it meant. And it’s nothing to do with doubting again or even being redoubtable (another word I had to look up – it means ‘very strong, especially in character; producing respect and a little fear in others’). A redoubt is a fort, usually made up of an enclosed defensive structure outside a larger fort. Redoubts are meant to protect soldiers who are outside the main defensive line, and can be permanent structures or temporary fortifications. ‘Redoubt’ can also refer more broadly to any safe or protected place, both literally and figuratively.

You could be forgiven for thinking that ‘redoubt’ is a member of the same etymological family as ‘doubt’ or the aforementioned ‘redoubtable’. Both of these come from a Latin verb, dubitare, which means, rather boringly, ‘to be in doubt’. But the English language doesn’t like to play fair, so of course ‘redoubt’ actually comes from a completely different Latin verb, reducere. That means ‘to lead back’, and is also where we get the word ‘reduce’ from.

‘Redoubt’ found its way into English via the Italian word ridotto and the French word redoute. Nobody’s quite sure where the extra, some might say redundant, ‘b’ came from. Some etymologists have guessed, sorry, theorised that it might have been mixed up with another ‘redoubt’ which has since fallen by the wayside. This now-vanished verb does come from dubitare, and meant ‘to regard with awe, dismay or dread’.

In the UK, we have a few redoubts, many of which date back to the Napoleonic Wars. Harwich Redoubt in Essex, Eastbourne Redoubt in East Sussex and Dymchurch Redoubt in Kent are the most famous (or at least they were the first ones that came up on my search engine). As a proud Essex girl, I’m pleased to say that we win the battle of the redoubts – Harwich Redoubt is a massive, 180-foot-diameter circular fort built in 1808, and one of the best-preserved redoubts in Britain. It has a central parade ground, 11 gun emplacements along the battlements and a moat. If you're harbouring any lingering doubts about Essex’s superiority, you can go and visit it – it’s now a museum run by the Harwich Society.

Eastbourne Redoubt was finished in 1810 to cover the beaches of Pevensey Bay. It hasn’t fared as well as its Essex cousin – it used to be a museum, but it’s currently closed to the public due to concerns bits of it might fall off and kill some unsuspecting redoubt enthusiast (AKA ‘structural safety concerns’).

The final member of our trio, Dymchurch Redoubt, was built between 1804 and 1812 to support a chain of 21 Martello towers (small coastal defence forts) that stretched between Hythe in Kent and Rye in Sussex. But, like many of the military’s best-laid plans, by the time it was finished, the invasion threat was over.

Unlike Harwich and Eastbourne, Dymchurch Redoubt is still owned by the Ministry of Defence and is used for military training. It also appears to be falling down, with English Heritage listing it as ‘at risk’. You might be at risk if you decide to go and have a wander round Dymchurch Redoubt too – the area around it is used as a firing range by the military. So if the crumbling masonry doesn't get you, the live ammunition might.

Dymchurch: undoubtably a redoubtable redoubt (photo: Ian Dunster at English Wikipedia)

congratulations

Last week we talked about the origins of ‘anniversary’. To carry on the celebratory theme, I thought this week we’d have a look at why we all shout ‘Congratulations!’ at events involving pulling party poppers and knocking back Prosecco. The good news is that, unlike ‘anniversary’, which has a rather morbid backstory involving martyed saints, ‘congratulations’ is pleasingly wholesome.

Similarly to ‘anniversary’, ‘congratulations’ also comes from Latin. This time it’s the verb congratulari, which breaks down into two rather lovely pieces:

• con-, meaning ‘together’ or ‘with’

• gratulari, meaning ‘to express joy’ (gratulari’s parent word gratus also gave us ‘grateful’, ‘gratitude’ and ‘grace’).

So ‘congratulations’ basically means ‘Hey, I’m expressing joy with you right now!’. Nice (if weirdly formal), right?

‘Congratulations’ appeared in English in the 1500s. Unlike a lot of Latin words which made their way to our shores via France, it was imported directly by Renaissance scholars. These scholars thought English was too simple or ‘barbarous’ (GASP) to handle certain formal ideas (which included partying, apparently), so they nicked Latin words to plug the gaps. When they were looking for an elegant word for sharing joy, they found the Latin verb congratulari. A little bit of Anglicisation later, and we ended up with ‘congratulate’ and ‘congratulation’.

(Sidebar: These scholar-imported Latin words were rightly mocked at the time as pretentious and unnecessarily fancy. Dissenters calling them ‘inkhorn terms’, a slightly weird insult based on the fact that the scholars inventing these words carried their ink around in small containers made from hollowed-out animal horns and attached to their belts.)

At first, ‘congratulations’ was strictly reserved for writing. You’d stick it in a formal letter with an introductory phrase (like ‘I beg leave to offer you my congratulations’ or ‘Allow me to extend my heartiest congratulations’) rather than shouting it across a room while slopping your drink. Over the next few centuries, we ditched the formal preamble altogether and turned it into the exclamation we use today whenever we hear a cork popping.

anniversary

Last weekend was my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Once the inevitable champagne-based hangover had cleared, it got me thinking – why is it called an ‘anniversary’? Well, turns out it actually has a much less celebratory backstory.

Let’s start with the etymology. ‘Anniversary’ comes from Latin and is made up of two roots:

• annus, meaning ‘year’ (which is also where we get words like ‘annual’ and ‘perennial’)

• versus, meaning ‘turned’ (that’s the past participle of the verb vertere – to turn – which gives us words like ‘reverse’, ‘divert’, ‘universe’ and ‘convert’).

Stick them both together and you get the adjective (describing word) ‘anniversarius’, which means ‘returning yearly’ or ‘revolving with the year’. Because it’s an adjective, the Romans slapped it on a bunch of different nouns to show that something happened once every year. For example:

• seasonal farm produce – like wheat, barley or grapes – was called ‘fructus anniversarii’

• politicians served in ‘magistratus anniversarii’ (‘one-year offices’)

• Roman doctors diagnosed seasonal allergies like hay fever as ‘morbus anniversarius’ (‘a yearly returning illness’).

With Latin being the OG language of the Christian church, when early church leaders and scholars needed a word for recurring holy days, they combined ‘anniversaria’ with ‘dies’, meaning ‘day’, to make ‘the annually returning day’. This wasn’t used for happy milestones though. ‘Anniversaria dies’ was for feast days honouring the many, MANY martyred Christian saints or the anniversary of someone’s death. Party time!

In the medieval equivalent of LOL, people couldn’t be bothered to keep writing ‘anniversaria dies’, so they dropped the ‘dies’ altogether and turned it into the noun, ‘anniversarium’ (meaning ‘the annual day’). That eventually made its way into French as ‘anniversaire’, crossing the Channel into English around the 1300s as ‘anniversary’.

Even though the ‘dies’ had gone, it was still wearing a lot of black eyeliner and obsessing about death. If, for example, your Auntie Ethel died on 12 March, your family would pay the local priest to say a special prayer for her soul every 12 March after that. That annual death-day service was called your auntie’s (you’ve guessed it) ‘anniversary’. I’m guessing there probably weren’t any party poppers though.

It would take another couple of hundred years (and the Protestant Reformation) for ‘anniversary’ to get a proper glow-up and become less about funeral prayers, and more about cake, champagne and throwing up in flowerbeds (just me?).

(I mentioned Christian martyrs above. While I was researching – and I use the word ‘researching’ very loosely – this post, I read about Saint Cassian of Imola who taught grammar to school children. When he refused to make a sacrifice to the Roman gods, the local magistrate turned him over to his own students. They stabbed him to death with iron styli, which are basically ye olde biros. Safe to say that was a tough day at the office.)

St Cassian of Imola, about to regret his policy on student participation.

paraprosdokian

It’s another rhetorical device this week. Wait, come back! It’s a good ‘un, I promise, despite the rather alarming spelling. A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the second half of the sentence is so surprising or unexpected, it causes you to reframe or reinterpret the first part. Which is a very long-winded way of saying that it makes you do a double take.

In case you’re still not sure what I’m banging on about, here are some famous examples of paraprosdokian in action:

• ‘I had a wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.’

• ‘There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can't.’

• ‘To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.’

• ‘I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather – not screaming in terror like his passengers.’ (My personal favourite – thanks to Bob Monkhouse for this banger.)

Geddit? Paraprosdokian plays a trick on how human brains process language. As we read or listen to a sentence, our minds predict how it’ll end based on the context. A paraprosdokian deliberately feeds your brain a familiar setup, lets you walk down that path, then pulls the rug out from under you with a surprise twist. (Not sure why there’s a rug on a path, but you get what I mean.)

As you’ve probably already guessed from the spelling, ‘paraprosdokian’ (which is pronounced para-proz-DOH-kee-un, in case you’re planning to try to impress someone with it later) comes from Ancient Greek. It’s made up of three bits:

• para- (παρά), meaning ‘against’, ‘beyond’ or ‘contrary to’

• pros- (πρός), a prefix meaning ‘toward’ or ‘in addition’

• dokian (δοκία) which comes from dokein (δοκεῖν), meaning ‘to expect’, ‘to think’ or ‘to seem’.

Put it altogether and you get ‘against expectation’ or ‘contrary to what was expected’.

In a neat little twist, paraprosdokian isn’t really what it seems though. While ancient Greek rhetoricians may well have used the technique, the term isn’t actually old at all. In fact, it first appeared in 1896, although no one seems to be sure which smartarse actually coined it.

supposably

If you’re already shouting, ‘What? It’s “supposedly”, not “supposably”, you absolute twonk,’ I’m going to stop you right there. Because ‘supposably’ is indeed a word, albeit one that’s fallen out of fashion. It’s an adverb (a word that modifies or describes a verb) meaning ‘as may be supposed or imagined’ or ‘conceivably’. So it basically describes something that’s feasible.

In both sound and sense, it sounds incredibly similar to ‘supposedly’, I know. But there is a subtle difference: ‘supposedly’ means ‘according to what is generally assumed, reported or believed’. It carries a bit more doubt – if you say, ‘Emma supposedly knows what she’s talking about’, you’re basically saying I’m talking out of my arse (which may or may not be true).

With that sort of settled, here’s ‘supposably’ in action (also featuring a guest appearance from ‘supposabilities’!):

‘We have sometimes been surprised, that, connected as poetry and painting are, as sister arts, so little use should have been made of the painter’s study, or of those incidents which very supposably—as supposabilities are allowed at the theatre—may happen in the course of an artist’s life.’
—The New Monthly Magazine (London, UK), June 1829

Unsurprisingly, both ‘supposably’ and ‘supposedly’ trace their roots back to the late Middle English verb ‘suppose’, meaning, you’ve guessed it, exactly what it does now – to think, assume or imagine. Middle English grabbed that from the Old French supposer and ultimately the Latin supponere, meaning ‘to place under’ or ‘substitute’. ‘Supposedly’ is the OG, having first appeared in English around the 1610s, while ‘supposably’ arrived a bit later, around the end of the 18th century (roughly 1795).

So now you know – ‘supposably’ is a real word. Go forth and embrace the supposabilities!

bunkum

The English language has a lot of words for ‘talking a load of crap’ – balderdash, claptrap, waffle, baloney, guff, bull, poppycock… I could go on. ‘Bunkum’ is yet another one of these monikers for spouting a bunch of rubbish. But unlike its counterparts, it has a uniquely well-documented origin. Come with me to early 19th-century America, and specifically to the United States House of Representatives.

On 25 February 1820, lots of old white men (some things don’t change) were tensely debating whether to allow Missouri to become a state. Now, my American history is patchy at best, but I understand from the internet that this was controversial because Missouri was a slave-owning state. And letting it join could set a precedent for allowing slavery across the entire western frontier.

The debate had been raging in the House continuously for nearly a month. Various congressmen had delivered lengthy, dramatic speeches each day, and every conceivable argument for and against slavery had been repeated. It was all going in circles and everyone was desperate to stop talking and start voting.

Enter Felix Walker, representative for Buncombe County in North Carolina. In a moment of apparent madness, he decided that this was the perfect time to start a long, rambling speech. When his exasperated colleagues tried to cut him short by interrupting, shouting and generally trying to drown him out to force the vote, he insisted he wasn’t trying to persuade Congress, but ‘speaking for Buncombe!’. Walker’s colleagues immediately saw through this blatant publicity stunt to impress voters back in North Carolina, and he was shouted down after only a sentence or two.

(Photo: ML ’Mitch' Gambrell / HMdb.org)

Not long after this, the phrase ‘speaking for Buncombe’ caught on in Washington as a way to describe a politician giving an empty, bombastic speech meant solely for pats-on-the-back and electioneering rather than to make any actual political points (sound familiar…?). In the 1830s and 1840s, the spelling shifted phonetically to ‘bunkum’, and the term moved from meaning ‘political bollocks’ to ‘general bollocks’. A writer called Thomas Chandler Haliburton then popularised the term internationally in his Sam Slick collection (which I’ve never heard of, but which was apparently Canada’s first international best-selling novel). Then in the late 19th century, ‘bunkum’ was shortened to ‘bunk’, which is where we get the verb ‘debunk’ from.

Now, don’t feel sorry for Walker. As well as being a supporter of slavery, according to historical accounts, he knew he was going to be cut off – he simply wanted to make sure he was seen trying to speak for the people. Later, he handed his massive 4,879-word (yup) speech straight to local newspapers who published the whole thing as if he’d delivered it in full. So he was able to send copies home and impress his voters without actually having read any of the words on the floor.

Despite this, there’s something quite satisfying about the fact that Felix Walker – slave-owner, defender of human bondage and white supremacist – is now remembered as a funny historical footnote who gave us the word ‘bunkum’. Fingers crossed, many of the modern-day racist politicians we continue to allow into the limelight will be remembered for similarly stupid moments.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the House of Representatives eventually struck a deal called the Missouri Compromise: Missouri joined as a slave state while Maine joined as a free state to keep the power equal. A geographical boundary line was then drawn to decide where slavery could and couldn’t exist in the future.)

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?

gauche

‘Gauche’ describes someone or something that’s awkward, tactless or lacking social graces. If you did any French at school, you probably remember that ‘gauche’ is French for ‘left’, and that’s exactly where we get this word from. But why does ‘left’ translate to using the wrong fork at dinner or calling without texting first (shudder)?

(Before I get into this, apologies to any members of the left-handed community, which includes my mum, for what I’m about to say.)

A bit of Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgment showing Christ waving his arms in the air like he just don’t care, sorry, I mean separating the righteous from the damned with his right and left hands.

Historically in Europe, being left-handed was associated with being clumsy or downright evil. This was down to the fact that 90% of people are right-handed, and us humans have always had a tendency to view anything outside the ‘norm’ with suspicion. It’s down to language too (handy for me) – the word ‘sinister’ literally translates to ‘on the left side’ in Latin, while ‘dexter’, meaning ‘right’, implies skill and cleverness, and has given us words like ‘dexterous’.

Many major religious and spiritual traditions heavily favoured righthandedness too. It all kicked off with poor old Eve (of course), who, according to later medieval legend (it actually doesn’t specify in Genesis), was created from Adam’s left side – and we all know how that ended up. According to one online source I found, the Bible has over 100 favourable references to the right-hand alongside 25 unfavourable ones to the left-hand. For example, in Psalm 118, it says ‘The right hand of the Lord is exalted: the right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly’. And the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew describes how God will divide nations on Judgment Day ‘as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats; and he shall set the sheep [the good guys AKA the righteous] on his right hand, but the goats [the damned] on the left’. Poor old goats.

Lefties don’t fare much better in Islam either – in the Middle East, the left hand is seen as dirty, mainly due to the custom of using it to, well, wipe your bum. (There’s a theory that this is where we get ‘cack-handed’ from, though the origins are thankfully shrouded in mystery.)

So, after centuries of religious bias, linguistic snobbery and literal witch-hunts, ‘left’ had ended up with quite a bit of baggage. And when 18th-century English aristocrats started pinching French vocab to sound cultured (the earliest recorded use of ‘gauche’ in English is in a letter by one Lord Chesterfield in 1751), they adopted ‘gauche’ as a snappy insult for anyone lacking high-society polish – turning a simple direction into a go-to phrase for being a total social disaster.

candidate

I’m sure you know what a candidate is – someone who’s being considered for a job, position, award, honour, and so on. It doesn’t always have to be a person either, for example, ‘that wall is a prime candidate for a fresh coat of paint’ (said no-one ever, but you get the idea). But, why are these people (and walls) called candidates?

As usual, we need to take a quick trip back to ancient Rome for the answer. ‘Candidate’ comes from the Latin word candidatus, which literally means ‘clothed in white’. That’s because in ancient Rome, men running for public office (and it was only men, sadly – women were legally barred from holding public office, voting or joining the Roman Senate) wore a special bright-white toga called a ‘toga candida’. This brilliant white wool was supposed to symbolise purity, honesty and transparency of intention. Hmmm. The toga's name came from the Latin verb candere, meaning ‘to shine’ or ‘to be glowing white’ – that’s also where we get words like ‘candid’ and ‘candle’ from.

Someone wearing this white toga was referred to as a candidatus AKA ‘a white-robed person’. Over time, we stopped using the term to describe the clothing and started using it to refer to the person seeking office themselves. ‘Candidate’ entered Early Modern English in the 17th century straight from the Latin, eventually broadening to mean anyone applying for a position, award or political office.

(Slightly unpleasant aside – if you’ve ever had thrush, you might know that the fungus that causes it is called ‘candida’. That also comes straight from candidus, due to the fact that it grows in creamy-white colonies. Yuck. Thrush’s full Latin name is Candida albicans, with albicans coming from the Latin albicō meaning ‘to become white’. So that means our fungus is effectively called ‘whitey white’. I do love an etymology tautology.)

enormity

Me, you and almost everyone else in the English-speaking bit of our planet uses ‘enormity’ to mean ‘really bloody massive’. But, did you know that me, you and almost everyone else in the English-speaking bit of our planet is actually using it wrongly? That’s because, originally, enormity had nothing to do with size.

‘Enormity’ comes from a Latin word, enormitas, which means ‘out of rule’ or ‘irregular’. So for centuries, ‘enormity’ meant a grave wickedness, an outrageous crime or a monstrous evil – nothing to do with size. Here’s an example from Mary Shelley (#Legend) in Frankenstein. Victor is at the trial of Justine, the family servant falsely accused of murdering Victor's young brother, William. Victor describes the hostile crowd in the courtroom like this:

Mary Shelley – she wrote Frankenstein when she was 18, for gawd’s sake.

‘Yet she appeared confident in innocence and did not tremble, although gazed on and execrated by thousands, for all the kindness which her beauty might otherwise have excited was obliterated in the minds of the spectators by the imagination of the enormity she was supposed to have committed.’

Shelley is using ‘enormity’ to refer to the sheer, monstrous wickedness of the murder poor old Justine was accused of. In short, ‘enormity’ isn’t supposed to be about how big something is, but how bad it is. (Spoiler alert – it did not end well for Justine.)

So why are we all getting ‘enormity’ so wrong? Well, just because it sounds so similar to ‘enormous’. While the two words do share a distant ancestor (norma, meaning ‘carpenter’s square or rule’), they had completely different meanings in Latin. ‘Enormous’ came from enormis, which meant ‘out of rule’ in a physical sense, like ‘abnormal’, ‘unusually shaped’ or really freaking massive. By the 19th century, ‘enormous’ had firmly come to mean just ‘huge in size’ though. And because the only noun form for ‘enormous’ was ‘enormousness’ which sounds a bit stupid, people’s brains naturally made a leap to ‘enormity’ in the same way as ‘generous’/’generosity’ and ‘pompous’/’pomposity’, for example.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, everyone, including writers, politicians and journalists, was using ‘enormity’ to describe physical bigness of good or neutral things, e.g. the enormity of the universe. Language purists fought back hard though – and for decades, style guides fiercely insisted that using ‘enormity’ to mean size was an uneducated blunder. But much like how everyone is now using ‘myself’/’yourself’/’ourselves’ wrongly (which drives me absolutely NUTS and ruins every episode of The Traitors), it was contagious. And because language is nothing if not democratic, if enough people use a word wrongly for long enough, it officially becomes right. By the mid-to-late 20th century, dictionaries updated their entries to include ‘immensity’ or ‘great size’ as a secondary definition. And today, it’s fully accepted in standard English.

Well, almost: this is from The Guardian’s online style guide:

‘It might sound a bit like “enormous”, but enormity refers to something monstrous or wicked, such as a massacre, and is not just another word for “big”.’

The Economist and The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage also take similar hard lines on the word ‘enormity’. So if you, like me, are a fully signed up member of the pedant brigade, you might want to stick to ‘immensity’ for big stuff from now on.

villain

A villain is a bad guy (or gal – it is the 21st century after all). But, it didn’t always mean that. In one of the English language’s greatest plot twists, back in the day it simply referred to a farmworker.

So how did a villain evolve from a humble peasant to the ultimate baddie?

Our story starts, as it so often does, with a Latin word. In this case, that’s villanus. This came from villa, which meant a country estate, farm or, well, villa. From there we got the noun villanus, which was simply someone who worked on a country estate i.e. a farmhand or peasant.

As Latin evolved into Old French in the Middle Ages, the word became vilein or vilain and was used to describe a feudal serf, both male and female. These vileins were bound to the land and their lordly masters. The word still didn’t have any connotations of evilness or moustache-twirling though – it was just a legal and social status.

We actually have the Brits to thank for the semantic shift from farming to foul play, which says a lot about our medieval class attitudes. When the Normans conquered us in 1066, they brought Old French with them, including the word ‘vilein’. And because all the wealthy, aristocratic poshos looked down on everyone else, over time, they started using ‘vilein’, which had now become the more familiar ‘villain’, to describe someone with ‘the characteristics of a peasant’. To them that meant churlish, crude, untrustworthy and generally vulgar (think Baldrick in Blackadder).

By the 1300s and 1400s, the word had moved away from farming and describing a person’s social status to casting aspersions on their moral character. By the time Shakespeare was writing in the late 1500s and early 1600s, it was firmly established as a malicious antagonist. Take this, from Much Ado About Nothing:

‘In this, though I cannot be said to be
a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I
am a plain-dealing villain.’

There you have it. Villains didn’t start with a thirst for world domination, but with a pitchfork and low social standing. This word’s evolution is a stark reminder that for a long time, the English language was shaped by the classist attitudes of the rich and powerful elite.

pedigree

If, like me, you’re a dog person, you probably associate the word ‘pedigree’ with overly pampered pooches – or the word ‘chum’. Of course, we also use it to describe anything with a snooty background, like royals or break-the-bank wine. But if we peel back the layers of history, the origins of the word ‘pedigree’ are actually quite unglamorous. And French.

Lovely Bella, sadly no longer with us

Our story begins in Anglo-Norman French, somewhere around the early 15th century. Without Ancestry.com or online DNA tests, medieval genealogists drew up family trees to prove who’d fathered who and who owned which chateau. They would draw a three-pronged symbol – three lines radiating from a single point – that connected parents to their offspring. That three-lined diagram looked very similar to the footprint of a large bird, specifically, a crane. So the term ‘pié de gru’ was born, which literally translates as ‘foot of a crane’. (Now, if you remember your GCSE French, or you’re familiar with the scary French Duolingo chouette, you might be thinking ‘sacre bleu, the French word for “foot” is “pied” not “pié”, you plank’. And you would be right – but, back in the medieval period, spelling was a bit of a free-for-all, and it was routinely written that way. Later, poncy scholars who wanted to make the word look closer to its original Latin root stuck a ‘d’ on it.)

Anyway, I digress. As you can probably guess, over the centuries, English speakers did what we do best: we stole the French phrase, chewed it up and spat it out as ‘pedigree’. By the late 16th century, the new spelling had stuck, and the word shifted from describing the physical diagram on a parchment to meaning the ancestral line itself. By the 18th century, the term expanded beyond human aristocrats to include the selective breeding of horses and cattle, eventually landing us where we are today – with certificates for purebred poodles.

My previous dog, Bella, was a purebred dachshund who did indeed come with a certificate. (I’d like to emphasise that I didn’t buy her – I took her on after her previous owner, my great aunt, passed away.) I adored Bella but, as well as that certificate, she came with all sorts of health problems – including terrible back issues due to years of selective breeding to produce that distinctive sausage shape. It’s a sad fact that the pursuit of the ‘perfect’ pedigree has left a tragic legacy across the canine world – as well as dachsies with dicky backs, we also have pugs who can’t breathe properly, German Shepherds with broken hip joints, Shar-Peis with severe skin infections, Great Danes with failing hearts and deaf Dalmatians (I could go on…). Breeding for a specific look often comes at a massive cost to dogs’ quality of life – so if you’re looking to get a dog, remember that rescue is the best breed.

nightmare

You know what a nightmare is (my dog has diarrhoea at the moment, so I’m literally living in one, as is my carpet) – a scary dream or, more broadly, a crappy real-life situation (not necessarily poop related). But what does a horse have to do with waking up in a cold sweat after dreaming you’re naked while about to play piano at the Albert Hall (just me?)?

Well, absolutely nothing, because the ‘mare’ of ‘nightmare’ isn’t anything to do with lady ponies. A mare is actually a malicious entity in Germanic and Slavic folklore. It sits on your chest when you’re sleeping, bringing on bad dreams. Most scholars trace the word ‘mare’ back to the Proto-Indo-European root mer-, which is associated with crushing, pressing and oppressing. That’s also where we get ‘mortar’ from (as in ‘pestle and’) as well as morsel, because you crush food with your teeth. This isn’t the only theory as where it came from though – there are a few others including that it stems from the Greek term ‘moros’, meaning ‘doom’.

The shape-shifting mare is often depicted as female (isn’t it always?) and has magical abilities to haunt her victim, as well as being able to shapeshift. She didn’t just target humans either – according to Nordic and German folklore, she often took horses out for midnight joyrides, leaving the poor beasts exhausted, terrified and covered in sweat by sunrise. She even targeted trees, particularly twisted, stunted pines growing on coastal rocks in Sweden, which are still known as ‘martallar’ or ‘mare-pines’.

Johann Heinrich Füssli’s 1781 painting The Nightmare

So, how can you keep this scary hag from putting her bum on you in the middle of the night? Well, medieval Europeans had some truly chaotic solutions. Depending on where you lived, you could ward her off by:

• leaving your slippers upside down next to your bed (seems far too easy)

• reciting a holy prayer/poem to trick her into counting all the stars in the sky before she could get close to you (more complicated)

• hanging a mirror over your horse’s manger to scare her with her own reflection (this happens to me a lot, with both mirrors and my phone’s front-facing camera).

If you managed to spot a mare wandering around the morning after an attack, German lore suggests the ultimate passive-aggressive move: politely invite her over for a nice breakfast. Not because she’ll want to avoid the awkward morning-after kitchen chat, but because almost every ancient culture has rules about hospitality. Once you share a meal with someone – even a demon – they can no longer harm you without bringing a massive curse down on themselves.

Well, at least the mare got a free brekkie out of it.

churlish

I don’t normally advocate for violence, but if someone calls you ‘churlish’, you should at the very least stand on their foot. That’s because it means they think you’re rude, boorish (another good insult) and generally lacking in basic social graces.

But what even is a churl?

Historically, being churlish was nothing to do with helping yourself to the last roast potato or jumping the queue in Marks & Spencer. ‘Churl’ traces its lineage back to the Old English word ‘ceorl’, which simply meant a a ‘free man’ AKA a peasant who wasn’t a slave, servant or serf.

This meaning applied up until around the 14th century. But, history books – and dictionaries – are written by the winners, which in many cases means the richey-rich. And because the wealthy elites assumed that anyone of low birth must naturally have a foul disposition and awful manners, ‘churlish’ mutated from a simple description of socio-economic status into an insult meaning ‘vulgar’ and ‘ill-bred’. Chaucer cemented the meaning in his Wife of Bath’s Tale (which contains an unashamedly sex/body-positive woman, something that’s still all-too-rare rare these days, sadly):

He nys nat gentil, be he duc or erl,
For vileyns synful dedes make a cherl.

(He is not noble, be he duke or earl,
  For churlish sinful deeds make a churl.)

Ironically, while the word ‘churl’ skidded down to the arse-end of the social scale, a first name derived from the same source remained prestigious enough to be used by many European royal families, including our own: Charles.

kiki

To have a kiki means to host a casual gathering with close friends for a good old gossip, catch up and lots of laughs. It’s both a noun for the party itself and a verb for the act of doing the chatting. Linguistic and cultural historians generally believe the word ‘kiki’ is onomatopoeic, mimicking the sound of laughter or the whispering of friends sharing gossip. I first heard it in the Scissor Sisters’ song ‘Let’s Have a Kiki’ (2012) which you can listen to below (warning, contains LANGUAGE).

‘Kiki’ might sound like modern internet jargon, but it’s actually been around for a long time. It originated within the Black and Latino LGBTQ+ house and ballroom culture of New York during the late 20th century (which apparently is a long time ago now). For those unfamiliar with this underground subculture, it was a community created by queer and transgender people of colour. They formed their own alternative families known as ‘houses’ led by older mentors called house mothers or house fathers who gave them shelter and support. These houses would compete against one another at vibrant community events called balls where members would walk a catwalk, dress up in competitive categories and face-off in a highly stylised form of dance called vogueing (and yes, that is where the Madonna song came from, specifically after she saw dancers like Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Xtravaganza voguing in NYC clubs).

In the early 2000s, a distinct, youth-lead offshoot called the kiki scene appeared. This was a network of younger houses and smaller balls designed specifically to give teenagers a less intimidating, low-pressure space to socialise, look after each another and practise their dance moves. Obviously, I’m far too old, White and British to be part of a scene like this but it sounds amazing (and a nicer place for young people than the hell that is social media. Or the school discos I went to). Long live the kiki!

freelancer

I can’t quite believe I’ve never written about the word ‘freelancer’ before, being as I am one, but apparently I’ve missed a trick there. So, why are people like me who work for themselves called freelancers? Well, it all comes down to Sir Walter Scott, Scottish novelist, poet and historian. He used the word ‘Free Lance’ in his most famous work, Ivanhoe (1820), to describe a medieval mercenary: literally a knight whose lance (hee hee) was free for hire, i.e. not pledged to any lord. Here’s a quote showing it in action:

‘ …“Trust me, Estoteville alone has strength enough to drive all thy Free Lances into the Humber.”—Waldemar Fitzurse and De Bracy looked in each other’s faces with blank dismay.—“There is but one road to safety,” continued the Prince, and his brow grew black as midnight; “this object of our terror journeys alone—He must be met withal.”’

Sir Walter (what’s that on the table next to him?)

‘Freelance’ changed to a figurative noun around the 1860s and was recognised as a verb in 1903 by the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s only recently that it’s morphed into an adjective (‘a freelance writer’), verb (‘a writer who freelances’) and an adverb (‘she works freelance’).

As well as coining the word ‘freelance’, we also have Walter Scott to thank for the fact that many of us were subjected to Bryan Adams singing ‘Everything I do’ for 16 weeks (the same length as a domestic pig’s gestation period) in 1991 as part of the soundtrack to Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. That’s because Scott wasn't just a writer; he was a cultural phenomenon who essentially ‘invented’ the way we view the Middle Ages today. Ivanhoe’s romanticised version of knights, chivalry and tournaments sparked a massive Gothic Revival, including a real-life attempt by British nobles to hold a medieval tournament in 1839 (apparently it rained so hard the knights had to hold umbrellas over their armour, proving that the Great British Weather has been ruining days out for centuries). But what does all this have to do with Kevin Costner, Alan Rickman (god rest him), et al? Well, Scott’s responsible for the modern image of Robin Hood, calling him Locksley in Ivanhoe. He was also the first to firmly place Hood in the reign of Sean Connery, sorry, Richard the Lionheart.

Oh, and Scott also ‘found’ the crown jewels of Scotland which had been lost for over 100 years (in a chest in Edinburgh Castle – I can’t help thinking no one else had looked particularly hard). For that he earned a baronetcy, giving him that ‘Sir’. Score.

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.)

procrastination

I think all of us probably struggle with a bit of procrastination from time to time. It’s when you put off doing something, usually work, by doing something else. Like spending hours creating a colour-coded revision plan meaning there’s no time left for revision (I definitely did that). Or spending three hours scrolling through food blogs to find a super-healthy recipe leaving no time to go to Tesco so you have to order a pizza (yup, also me). Ironically, this word that describes the act of avoiding work actually has a very hard-working linguistic history.

This is an AI-generated image, which should be obvious from the fact that it looks like the man has eaten a third of his cup. I apologise for using AI, which I hate, but posts with images are usually more popular, and I couldn’t find anything on Unsplash for ‘procrastination’.

‘Procrastination’ entered the English language in the mid-16th century from the Latin procrastinationem. It’s made of three parts:

• the prefix pro-, meaning ‘forward’ or ‘forth’

• crastinus, meaning ‘belonging to tomorrow’ (from cras, the Latin word for, you’ve guessed it, ‘tomorrow’)

• -ation, a standard suffix that turns a verb into a noun describing an action or process.

Put it all together, and you get, literally: ‘The action of putting forward until tomorrow.’

Procrastination isn’t always the bane of creativity. For example, Leonardo Da Vinci was the patron saint of unfinished projects, taking 16 years to finish the Mona Lisa. The good news is that he didn’t just sit around colour coding his paintbrushes or scrolling through the renaissance equivalent of TikTok. He ‘productively procrastinated’ by studying (among others) optics, light and human anatomy. And that meant that when he finally returned to the painting, he’d mastered a technique called sfumato (smoky blurring) that he hadn’t been able to do previously. So if he’d actually finished the enigmatic painting on time, it likely wouldn’t be the masterpiece it is today.

Another notorious historical procrastinator was Queen Elizabeth I, who apparently drove her advisors nuts taking her time over signing death warrants and marriage treaties. The good news is that by procrastinating on executing Mary, Queen of Scots for nearly 20 years, Lizzie avoided a premature war with Catholic Europe. By the time she finally did sign the warrant in 1587, England was militarily stronger and better prepared for the eventual Spanish Armada. So that procrastination kept England out of a potentially bloody – and expensive – conflict that could have gone on for decades. Oh, and by not choosing a husband, Liz made sure every country in Europe was concentrating on getting in her pants rather than on invading her queendom.

So next time you find yourself doing anything but the thing you’re supposed to be doing, fret not – you’re not being lazy, you’re just applying Elizabethan diplomacy.