rival

Ah yes, my favourite novel by Jilly Cooper (I’m not ashamed to admit I love her). A rival is, of course, someone you compete with for the same thing – like the last roast potato at a family dinner or the armrest on an aeroplane. ‘Rival’ comes from a Latin word, rivalis, which literally means ‘one who uses the same stream as another’ (rivus = brook or stream – but not ‘river’, weirdly, which is flumen). But where does the conflict and side-eye come in? Well, just as it is now (and rapidly becoming more so thanks to AI and its thirsty data centres), water was a precious commodity in ancient times. If you and your neighbour were using the same stream, you were naturally competing for that resource. That’s why, in Roman law, rivales were neighbours who had ‘river rights’ to the same water source. Which of course led to lots of argy-bargy about one person taking too much. So it wasn’t long before the word rivalis came to mean ‘competitor’ or ‘adversary’.

As Latin evolved into the Romance languages, rivalis entered Old French as ‘rival’. But the literal watery meaning fell away while the ‘competitor’ meaning took over, specifically in the context of love or honour.

While ‘rival’ existed in Latin and French for yonks, the word didn’t make its debut in English until the late 16th century, first appearing in print in 1577. This was in ‘Holinshed’s Chronicles’ (specifically ‘The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande’), an enormous history of Britain which was a major source of inspo for lots of Shakespeare’s plays (as well as works by Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser). Here it was used in the context of political and military competition. (There’s also a separate, slightly earlier variation of the word – ‘rivality’, meaning the state of being rivals – which turned up in print as early as 1528, but that obviously didn’t make the cut.)

‘Rival’ initially arrived as a noun (i.e. a person, place or thing) in English, and we have Willy S (as per bloody usual) to thank for verbifying it (i.e. turning it into an action – to rival someone). He first did that in ‘King Lear’ (1605–1606) in a now rather suspect reference to Cordelia as a prize for two men to fight over:

My lord of Burgundy,
We first address toward you, who with this king
Hath rivaled for our daughter. 

Not bad for a word that started as a plumbing dispute, right?

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.

sarcasm

You know what sarcasm is – snarky comments which are either the lowest form of wit or the highest form of intelligence, depending on which side of them you’re on. But do you know where the word itself comes from? Yes? Well, aren’t you clever? (That’s sarcastic, by the way.) If you don’t, then read on…

The word ‘sarcasm’ has its roots in the Greek sarkazein, which means ‘to tear flesh like a dog’ or ‘to bite the lips in rage’. So basically, it’s a verbal savaging. This same root, sark-, meaning ‘flesh’, also turns up in sarcophagus – AKA a stone coffin beloved of mummies (and former word of the week). Why? Because the original sarcophagi were made from limestone that was believed to consume flesh. Yum.

An intelligent response to a sarcastic comment

Sarcasm (the word, not the concept) first appeared in English in 1579, in an annotation to ‘The Shepheardes Calender’, Edmund Spenser’s first major poetic work (his most famous one was ‘The Faerie Queene’, an epic allegorical poem about the Tudor Dynasty and Elizabeth I that you might have struggled through at school). The annotation reads ‘Tom piper, an ironicall Sarcasmus, spoken in derision of these rude wits’. (‘Ironicall Sarcasmus’ would be a great name for a band.) ‘Sarcastic’ took a bit longer to appear in print, not turning up until 1695 in a work by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Nope, me neither.

(Edmund Spenser’s first wife was called Machabyas Childe. This isn’t relevant – I just think it’s a fantastic name.)

Sarcasm can be hard to show in writing, so loads of people have tried to come up with a punctuation mark to denote it. This includes the percontation point (which I’ve previously written about here), and the excellently named SarcMark™.