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.

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.

laconic

If you’ve ever had a text from someone consisting entirely of the letter ‘k’, you’ve been on the receiving end of laconic. As an adjective, it describes a way of speaking or writing that uses the absolute minimum number of words to get a point across. No padding, no pleasantries, no ‘I hope this email finds you well’. Just straight to the point, like a cricket ball to the crotch.

But, why ‘laconic’? Well, it comes from Lakonikos – a Greek adjective for anything relating to Laconia, a region on the south-eastern part of the Peloponnese peninsula. Laconia was home to Sparta and (obviously) the Spartans, whose six-packs you may remember from Zack Snyder’s naked chest-fest, 300. The Spartans were not big talkers. And while other Greeks like the Athenians were busy writing philosophy, performing tragedies and inventing democracy, the Spartans were honing an arguably more useful skill: saying a great deal by saying almost nothing.

The most famous example of Spartans being spartanly (yep) with their words comes from Philip II of Macedon. He was a man who loved to open a can of whup-ass (and dad to Alexander the Great), having taken Macedon from a fairly insignificant kingdom to a power that conquered most of Ancient Greece in less than 25 years. Turning his attention to Sparta, he sent a message asking whether he should come as a friend or a foe. The reply was ‘Neither’. He then sent the message:

If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.

The Spartans replied with a single word:

If.

There’s also a story from Plutarch of a Spartan mother sending her son off to battle. After handing him his shield, her farewell advice consisted of five words: ‘Either this or upon this’, meaning ‘Come back with your shield, or on it’ – returning without your shield meant you’d thrown it away to run faster (the ancient Greek equivalent of updating your LinkedIn profile before handing in your notice). Inspiring and absolutely terrifying.

So next time someone accuses you of being curt in an email or a text, tell them you weren’t being rude, you’re just channelling your inner Gerard Butler/Greek warrior. Sparta would be proud. Although they probably wouldn’t say so.

(PS The Philip vs Sparta story would have been great if it ended ‘Philip did not invade Laconia’, which is what ChatGPT told me when I was researching this. When I checked it elsewhere, which thankfully I always do since ChatGPT told me a bunch of lies previously, it turns out that Philip did indeed invade Laconia, devastating large parts of it and kicking the Spartans out. In hindsight, maybe a few more words might have helped.)

braggadocio

If you ever watch the news, ‘braggadocio’ might sound familiar. During the 2016 US election, Donald Trump famously used the adjective ‘braggadocious’. At the time, most of us assumed he was talking rubbish as per usual – see ‘panican’ (used during his second term to describe those panicking over his economic tariffs), ‘bigly’ (often interpreted as ‘big league’) and ‘I’ve stopped eight wars’. But ‘braggadocious’ is actually rooted in a word that’s been around for over 400 years (although I doubt DT knows that). And ironically, both the word and its history describe him perfectly.

‘Braggadocio’ is an uncountable or mass noun (exactly what it says on the tin – examples include ‘bravery’, ‘nonsense’ or ‘happiness’) that describes empty, arrogant boasting or a swaggering manner that isn’t backed up by much substance. Despite its Italian looks, ‘braggadocio’ wasn’t born in the olive oil-drenched streets of Florence or Rome – its origins are actually a lot closer to home. It was cooked up in 1590 by the English poet Edmund Spenser for his epic poem, The Faerie Queene, one of the longest poems in the English language at a bum-numbing 36,000 lines and over 4,000 stanzas.

In the poem, Spenser created a character named Braggadocchio – a ‘knight’ who was all mouth and no trousers. He first appears in Book II, Canto iii when he steals the horse and spear of the hero, Sir Guyon. He then spends the rest of the book riding around on his fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry warhorse, pretending to be a legendary warrior while actually being terrified of his own shadow. Why Braggadocio? To give the character an air of pretension (and perhaps to make him sound like the vainglorious characters found in Italian comedy), Spenser took the very English word ‘brag’ and slapped a pseudo-Italian suffix on the end of it. It’s the linguistic equivalent of putting a spoiler on a 2005 Vauxhall Corsa.

Eventually, ‘braggadocio’ escaped the poem and became shorthand for anyone whose mouth is (to quote that literary giant, Limp Bizkit) writing cheques that their ass can’t cash. Whether it’s a stolen horse in an epic poem or a stolen election narrative on social media, ‘braggadocio’ remains the ultimate red flag for a man with a massive ego who’s all wrapping paper and no present.

genuflect

To genuflect is to bend one knee to the ground, usually as a sign of reverence or respect. It’s mostly associated with churches and religion, particularly Catholicism – people genuflect before entering a pew. It also has a metaphorical meaning: to show excessive deference or subservience to someone. As in, ‘I'm not going to genuflect to my dog just because he’s the most gorgeous boy in the world’ (even though I spend a lot of time cramped into weird positions because he’s asleep on me and I don’t want to upset him by getting blood back into my limbs).

‘Genuflect’ comes from a Late Latin word, genuflectere, and it’s pretty straightforward when you break it down: genu means ‘knee’ and flectere means ‘to bend’. So literally, knee-bending. The Romans were nothing if not literal. (Oh, and ‘Late Latin’ refers to the form of Latin used roughly from the 3rd to the 7th centuries AD i.e. when the Roman Empire was beginning that falling business. At this point, Latin was becoming less standardised, picking up influences from regional dialects and the languages of the various peoples who were interacting with (or invading) the Roman world. Grammar got simpler, new words were created and it moved away from the highly polished Classical Latin of Cicero and Caesar.)

Flectere has been quite busy in the English language, popping up in all sorts of places. For example, it’s where we get ‘reflect’ from (bending light), ‘deflect’ (as in turning aside) and ‘inflect’ (bending as in modulating something, usually your voice). Meanwhile, poor old genu has been rather left on the sidelines. Its only real claim to fame beyond genuflect is ‘geniculate’, a scientific term that means ‘bent abruptly at an angle like a bent knee’. Sounds painful.

You might look at ‘genuflect’ and think ‘well, surely that’s also related to “genius” and “genuine”’, unless, unlike me, you have a life. Well, I’m afraid that, despite the resemblance, those words come from an entirely different Latin verb, gignere, which means ‘to beget’. So no knees involved whatsoever. But, if you’re hungry for more knee-based etymology, the Latin genu is related to the Greek gonu (also meaning ‘knee’), which gave us gōnia meaning both ‘knee’ and ‘angle’. And that means that polygons, pentagons and hexagons are all essentially named after knees. You’re welcome.

woebegone

If someone’s woebegone, they’re really sad. Not just a bit fed up, but proper miserable (think someone who’s just accidentally pressed ‘reply all’ or called their teacher ‘Mum’).

At first glance, ‘woebegone’ looks pretty straightforward – ‘woe, begone’, right? Well, no. ‘Begone’ does mean ‘go away’, but the second part isn’t actually anything to do with ‘begone’ at all. Instead it comes from ‘begān’, an Old English verb meaning ‘to go about’ or ‘to befall’. So woebegone isn’t sending woe away; it’s actively surrounding you. A figurative shitstorm, if you will.

‘Woebegone’ has been doing this slightly misleading double act since at least the 14th century. According to the OED, its earliest recorded use is from 1325 in Middle English, where it appears in forms like ‘wo-bigon’.

One of the reasons I chose this word was because I thought there was a species of shark called a woebegone, and I was going to regale you with interesting facts about it. But it turns out that it’s actually called a wobbegong. Still, that’s similar, so let’s talk about them anyway. Wobbegong is the common name for carpet sharks, so-called because they literally look like carpets and like to lie on the floor (well, seabed) – they can pump water over their gills which means they can sit quietly, then ambush their prey (most sharks need to keep moving to breathe). They’re believed to have got their name from the Australian Aboriginal word for ‘shaggy beard’, which is another reference to the way they look – they have fringed skin flaps, or dermal lobes, around their heads and mouths. These flaps help them camouflage when they’re pretending to be carpets on the sea floor, as they break up the outline of the shark so they blend into their surroundings even more.

All completely irrelevant, but interesting, I’m sure you’ll agree.

callithump

A ‘callithump’ is a noun that describes a noisy, boisterous band or parade. Think drunken revelry, tins banging, horns blaring, maybe a smattering of cowbells and a general ruckus. So just your average Friday night on most British high streets then. You can also use it as an adjective (describing word) – so something can be 'callithumpian'.

The origin of the word is a bit murky, but most authorities agree it comes from an older British dialect term, ‘Gallithumpian’. The capital ‘G’ here isn’t a mistake – Gallithumpian is a proper noun (a unique person, place or thing) and, just in case you’re as geeky as me, nothing to do with Doctor Who’s home planet. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Gallithumpians were groups who deliberately turned up at elections, hustings and public gatherings to make as much noise as possible – banging pots, ringing bells and generally drowning things out. While this might sound like a protest, contemporary accounts describe Gallithumpians less as protesters and more as organised nuisances – they arrived, f*cked things up, then went home again.

Etymologists usually break ‘Gallithump’ down into elements meaning noise or bluster simply combined with ‘thump’. So it’s slightly mocking label for people whose main contribution was a load of noise and disruption rather than an actual counterpoint. Hmmm, I know a few people that could refer to.

Over time, ‘Gallithump’ lost its political edge and shifted from a label for the people involved to a description of the behaviour itself. ‘Gallithumpian’ softened into ‘callithumpian’, and eventually into ‘callithump’.

The first recorded use of ‘callithump’ as a noun in the sense of a riotous parade dates to 1843. In 19th‑century America the term was often used to describe makeshift celebrations or mock serenades – sometimes cheerful (pots and pans for a wedding, say), sometimes protest‑style chaos (anything to do with Donald Trump then).

So next time you see a chaotic, clang-and-carnival-style parade coming down your street, you might think: ‘Ah yes… a proper callithump.’ And, if you’re me, stand very still until it passes.

chout

I discovered this word through one of my mum’s random Wordle guesses (as we all do, sometimes she just tries random letters until Wordle says ‘yes’). And being as it’s nearly Christmas, it’s actually quite fitting. Well, half of it is, anyway. That’s because ‘chout’ has two completely different meanings.

Let’s start with the (sort-of) Christmassy one. ‘Chout’ in this sense means to joke, play the fool or mess about in a silly, good‑natured way. This meaning appears in some older English dialect dictionaries, like the Century Dictionary, a massive, multi-volume English dictionary originally published in the late 19th century.

The second, and better documented, meaning of ‘chout’ comes from a tax that Maratha rulers in western India demanded from neighbouring territories during the 17th and 18th centuries. (The Maratha were a powerful group of rulers and warriors who controlled much of western and central India during this time.) They called this ‘chauth’, which meant ‘a quarter’ in Marathi, because they demanded a quarter of the revenue from the territories they targeted. I say ‘tax’, but it was essentially protection money which rulers paid to avoid being raided by the Marathas. British administrators in India picked up the word and began describing it in English as ‘chout’.

There you go. I hope we all have a good chout this festive season – just the first kind, though. If you find yourself demanding payment from your neighbours in exchange for not setting fire to their recycling bins, you’ve got the wrong one.

(PS While I was researching this post I found Chout, a Chicago-based 90s-style grunge rock band known for their Alice in Chains-like sound and music. And I think I love them.)

tare

I have a dog with a dodgy stomach, which means I spend a lot of time weighing various potions and powders for his food. My weighing scales flash up with the word ‘tare’ every time I turn them on or press the ‘zero’ button. Now I don’t usually spend a lot of time thinking about weighing scales, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about words – and I realised I have no idea what ‘tare’ actually means.

Strap yourself in...

It turns out that ‘tare’ is the name for the weight of any container or packaging that isn’t part of the thing you actually want to measure. So when my scales show ‘tare’, they’re telling me they’ve set that deducted weight to zero. Put a bowl on, press the zero button and the scales adjust the tare so you only see the weight of the food itself.

‘Tare’ has travelled a long way to get to my dog’s daily allowance of probiotics. It comes from Middle French (also ‘tare’), which in turn comes from the Medieval Latin word, ‘tara’. Go one step further back and you reach the Arabic word ‘ṭarḥ’ – this means ‘that which is deducted’ or ‘something thrown away’. It’s a very old word in Arabic that’s been around for more than 1,400 years (and its earliest form goes back even further than that). But it’s always referred to the bit you don’t count.

So that’s the story behind ‘tare’. A word that has crossed continents and centuries to help me measure out pumpkin powder for a dog who still hasn’t learned not to eat disgusting things he finds in the street.

dragoon

I’m not sure what I thought ‘dragoon’ meant, but I think I’ve been conflating it with ‘platoon’ all my life. And maybe also ‘doubloon’.

It turns out that ‘dragoon’ isn’t even a noun (a person, place or thing) – it’s a verb (doing word). If you dragoon someone, it means you pressure or force them into doing something they don’t really want to do. It’s not always aggressive – it could just be heavy-handed persuasion – but it definitely suggests a lack of choice. Think of being ‘dragooned into organising the office Christmas party’ when all you want to do is go home and watch ‘Kirstie’s Handmade Christmas’ with an eggnog. (Every Christmas I thank god I no longer have to run the gauntlet of senior colleagues and free alcohol. And that’s all I’m going to say about that.)

Like many good words, ‘dragoon’ started out in uniform. In the 1600s and 1700s, a dragoon was a mounted European infantryman – someone who rode to battle but fought on foot. They were named after their weapon, a short musket so-called due to its resemblance to a fire-breathing dragon when fired.

Here’s where things get a bit darker. Under Louis XIV in 17th-century France, dragoons were sent to persecute French Protestants (Huguenots) – often moving in with them forcibly and staying until they converted to Catholicism. This coercion was so notorious that ‘dragoon’ eventually became a verb, meaning to force someone to do something, echoing that original, presumably very literal, form of arm-twisting.

So next time someone’s trying to make you do something you don’t want to, try telling them you refuse to be dragooned – it might not get you out of it, but at least your resistance will sound stylish.