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?).

tenterhooks

This is what a tenterhook looks like: from an 1822 trade catalogue published by H. Barns & Sons, of Birmingham, England

You know what it means – to be on tenterhooks (not ‘tenderhooks’ as I’ve heard lots of people say) is to be nervously excited about something that’s going to happen in the future, like your Amazon delivery or the new series of Ozark. But do you know what a tenterhook actually is? If the answer’s yes, then you’re obviously far too clever to be reading this, and should go away. Thanks.

For those of us who are still here, a tenterhook is a sharp hook that fastens cloth to, you’ve guessed it, a tenter. And a tenter is a frame that people making cloth, usually woollen, stretch it on (like a tent, geddit?), to stop it shrinking while it dries. Obviously this means the cloth is very tense, which is where the phrase comes from. Back in the day (I’m not sure which day, but let’s gloss over that), it would have been common to see fields full of tenters, which is probably why the phrase made its way into the vernacular. It’s interesting (to me, at least) that while tenterhooks themselves have pretty much disappeared, we’ve kept the phrase, despite not knowing what it’s referring to. Oh, and the word ‘tenter’ comes from from a Latin word, tendere, which means ‘to stretch’.

Thanks to my pal Rob Frankson for recommending I investigate this one.

kakistocracy

I heard this one on ‘The Chase’ this week, and even though Bradders didn’t think it was a real word, it definitely is. A kakistocracy is a state or society run by the worst, least qualified or most stupid people.

Government, innit

Unsurprisingly, ‘kakistocracy’ saw a rise in popularity when Trump took office in 2017. It actually isn’t related to ‘kak’ as in poo as you might think (that comes from a South African word for ‘faeces’). It’s from the Greek root kakistos, which means ‘worst’. The ‘-cracy’ ending is also from Greek – it’s from kratos which means ‘power’ or ‘rule’. ‘Kakistocracy’ was first recorded in the 17th century, where it made an appearance in a rant, sorry sermon, by someone called Paul Gosnold in ‘A sermon preached at the publique fast the ninth day of August 1644 at St Marie’s, 1644’. Here it is in action:

‘…transforming our old Hierarchy into a new Presbytery, and this againe into a newer Independency; and our well-temperd Monarchy into a mad kinde of Kakistocracy. Good Lord!’

It was later made famous by Thomas Love Peacock (whose name is so close to being a sentence – I love people whose names are sentences. Like Jeremy Irons) in his 1829 novel ‘The Misfortunes of Elphin’ (nope, me neither). Peacock worked for the East India Company and wrote a poem about working in an office. Even though it has nothing to do with ‘kakistocracy’, I’ve included it here because it still seems pretty relevant today:

‘From ten to eleven, have breakfast for seven;
From eleven to noon, think you've come too soon;
From twelve to one, think what's to be done;
From one to two, find nothing to do;
From two to three, think it will be
A very great bore to stay till four.’

nocebo

Sounds like ‘placebo’, right? Exactly – the nocebo effect is basically placebo’s evil twin. It’s when a patient’s bad expectations about a treatment mean that the treatment has a more negative effect than it otherwise would have. Which is a very long sentence. To give you an example, if someone is given a list of nasty side effects which they then get after taking a placebo, then they’re suffering from the nocebo effect.

The word ‘placebo’ means ‘I shall please’, from the Latin ‘placeō’ (‘I please’). So ‘nocebo’ means ‘I shall harm’ from, you’ve guessed it, noceō: ‘I harm’. It was coined in 1961 by a doctor called Walter Kennedy who I can’t find anything else to say about at all, sorry.

The word ‘placebo’ has been around for much longer than its dark counterpart – there’s a theory that it comes from a medieval practice where mourners were paid to chant for the dead during evening prayers. Because this was seen as a bit of sucky-uppy to him upstairs, these hired mourners were called ‘placebos’.