barbarian

You know what a barbarian is – someone who pillages villages (and other places that don’t rhyme). The word has an origin that you might not know though. It comes from ancient Greece where the term ‘barboros’ was used to refer to any non-Greek-speaking bunch of people, or anyone those high-falutin’ Greeks thought inferior. ‘Barboros’ is literally based on the sound ‘bar-bar’ which is the Greeks taking the piss out of other languages by imitating what sounded like gibberish to them. I imagine it was probably accompanied by a ‘blah-blah-blah’ hand gesture as well.

Over time, the term ‘barbarian’ evolved to cover not only linguistic differences, but also cultural, social and perceived intellectual disparities between the Greeks and everyone else. It wasn’t long before the Romans picked up on the term, using it to describe non-Romans, particularly those outside the Roman Empire.

My favourite historical barbarians are the Vandals, a Germanic tribe who played a big part in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Believed to have originated from the area around modern-day Poland and Ukraine, in the early 5th century AD they established a powerful kingdom in North Africa. They also formed alliances with other groups, including the Alans, an Iranian nomadic tribe with the best name ever.

In 455AD, under the rule of King Genseric, the Vandals invaded Rome. There’s a story that they ended up in the imperial wine cellars. Instead of looting them as they were supposed to do, they decided to have themselves a little tipple. As anyone who’s gone to the pub after work for ‘just one drink’ has experienced, this ended up in a raucous party that including parading around the city streets wearing posh Roman clothes, and even crowning one of their own as the ‘Vandal King of Rome’. We’ve all been there.

Although the Vandals sacking of Rome wasn’t as devastating as earlier barbarian invasions (like the one by the Visigoths in 410AD), it did show the rest of the world that the Empire was in trouble. Combined with their conquest of North Africa (an important source of grain and revenue for the Romans), the Vandals were the beginning of the end for the Romans.

Despite this, the Vandal kingdom in North Africa didn’t last an awful lot longer. It fell in 534AD when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I got the better of our tribe in the Vandalic War. Their most enduring legacy is probably (as I imagine you’ve guessed) the word ‘vandalism’, which is based on their reputation for looting and generally making a big old mess.

palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript or scroll that someone’s written something on, which someone else has later scraped off and then written on again. So it’s very environmentally friendly, but also means that lots of historic words were destroyed just so some arsehole had a fresh piece of paper.

Etymology wise, this one’s really straightforward. ‘Palimpsest’ comes from a Latin word ‘palimpsestus’. And that comes from an Ancient Greek word, ‘palímpsēstos’, which literally means ‘again scraped’. That doesn’t leave me very much to say here, sorry.

Lots of palimpsests came about due to the Greeks and Romans doing their writing on wax tablets. When they didn’t need the words anymore they’d scrape them off and start again. Kinda like ye olde Etch-a-Sketch, if you will. Later on people used parchment made of lamb, calf or goat kid’s skin which was expensive, hence reusing it wherever possible.

The most famous (relatively speaking) palimpsest is the Archimedes (yes, he of ‘eureka’ and naked bum fame) Palimpsest. It’s a 13th-century prayer book which contains several erased texts that were written hundreds of years before that. That includes two treatises by Archimedes that have never turned up anywhere else, ‘The Method’ and ‘Stomachion’ (good name for a band). You can find out more about how a team of scholars recovered these, and other texts, here. Oh, and it only took them 12 bloody years.

Name and shame time. The scribe who erased Archimedes’ writings only went and wrote his name on the first page of the palimpsest. He was called Johannes Myronas, and he overwrote Archimedes’ words in Jerusalem, finishing up on 14 April 1229. What an idiot.

ostracise

To be ostracised is to be exiled or excluded from a group, who all have a chat and decide you can’t hang around with them anymore, the utter bastards. Like a lot of our words it comes from a Greek word, ostraka, which refers to a shard of pottery. But what does that have to do with being exiled by a bunch of people, I hear you ask?

Well, imagine you’re a VIP in Athens in Ancient Greece. But you’re a bit of a renegade. A lone wolf, marching to the beat of your own drum. If all that rebelliousness meant you proved to be a bit too much of a thorn in the side of the powers that be, they’d get together and have a Big Brother-style vote to decide whether to get rid of you or not. But instead of going to ye olde diary room to cast their vote, they’d write your name down on, you’ve guessed it, a bit of pottery (also called a ‘potsherd’). And if you got enough pieces of pottery with your name on then you got exiled from Athens i.e. ostracised, for TEN WHOLE YEARS.

Why did they use broken pottery? Because there was a shit tonne of it hanging around, basically. Paper obviously wasn’t readily available and papyrus had to be imported from Egypt, making it much too expensive to be used for something like this.

These ostraka are from 482 BC, and were found in a well near the Acropolis. The name on them is ‘Themistocles’ who, after he was ostracised, defected to Persia where he was made governor of Magnesia (where ‘milk of’ comes from presumably?).

idiot

Alongside ‘moron’*, ‘idiot’ is one of my favourite non-sweary insults. But where does it come from? Turns out it’s derived from an Ancient Greek word, idiōtēs, which means ‘private person’. That doesn’t mean that idiōtēs didn’t want to go out (remember going out?), but that they didn’t have much to do with public affairs and the government. ‘Idiom’ (i.e. a word or phrase which is unique to a group of people or a place) also comes from the same root, as does ‘idiosyncrasy’ (a quirky thing that’s unique to one person), which makes sense when you think about the whole ‘private’ meaning.

Back to idiōtēs. As I said, an idiōtēs was basically just a normal – anyone who wasn’t a soldier, scribe, judge, politician, etc. But, people who weren’t idiōtēs saw them as the opposite of ‘citizens’. And because of this, ye olde Greeks soon started using the term to refer to people who they thought weren’t clever enough to talk about politics and public affairs. From this, it wasn’t long until ‘idiot’ began to take on the meaning we know today.

So, idiot. More than just a stupid person.

* While writing this post I discovered that ‘moron’ has some slightly shady origins. It, alongside ‘imbecile’, ‘cretin’ and ‘retard’, were once scientific terms used in psychology and psychiatry for people with mild intellectual disabilities. And they were also favourite terms of the American eugenics movement when pushing for enforced sterilisation. So that’s nice. With the exception of ‘retard’ (which most people now agree is pretty offensive), these have now slipped into the vernacular. But does that mean they’re okay to use? I DON’T KNOW.