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.)

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.

valentine

It’s that time of year again, when couples can be smug and single people can be depressed. To take my mind off my own spinsterhood, I thought I’d investigate exactly who the Valentine of St Valentine’s Day (note the apostrophe, card companies) is. And it turns out… no one’s entirely sure. Apparently there were a few Christian martyrs named Valentine who could have given their name to it, none of whom were particularly interesting (soz guys).

So, Christian martyrs were a bit of a dead end (both literally and figuratively). But while I was researching them I did stumble across Lupercalia, which is much more interesting. It was a Roman fertility festival which Valentine’s Day may or may not have its origins in (Wikipedia says it’s probably rubbish, but the Encyclopaedia Britannica is a bit more open to it). Lupercalia was held from 13th to 15th February, and was overseen by a group of priests called the Luperci, the name of which likely comes from ‘lupus’ – Latin for wolf. This is because Lupercalia was probably (the internet is a bit vague on this) connected to Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome who were suckled by a she-wolf (ewwww) after being abandoned on the banks of the river Tiber. They named the wolf Lupercal, and historians think that Lupercalia took place to honour her, and also to suck up to the Roman fertility god, Lupercus.

Lupercalia involved a bit more than flowers, chocolates and cards. It started with the priests sacrificing some goats and a dog, wiping the blood on themselves then laughing (yep). This was followed by the obligatory feast, after which the Luperci cut ‘thongs’ (which I assume are strips of leather rather than uncomfortable knickers) from the skins of the goats. They then took all their clothes off, and ran about whipping any women who got too close with the thongs. If you got hit with one, then lucky you, you’d immediately be super fertile.

Some scholars say there was also a jar of women’s names, which men would pick from. They’d then spend the festival with the woman whose name they’d pulled from the jar. Apparently lots of them went on to get married as well. Sounds better than Match.com to be honest.

In the late 5th century, the-then Pope, Gelasius I (who sounds like a super villain), decided that Lupercalia had to go (too much nakedness and BDSM I guess), and declared 14th February a day to celebrate some non-specific marytrs called Valentine. The new feast day didn’t have any of the lovey-dovey shenanigans that we have to put up with today though. These didn’t come about until the 14th century, when bloody Chaucer wrote a poem about it.

So how about it? Next year, forgo the sappy cards and garage forecourt flowers, and try hitting your other half with a piece of leather instead while running round the streets naked. They’ll LOVE it.

stellify

I came across this lovely word in Greg Jenner’s book ‘Dead Famous’ (well worth a read). To stellify something is to turn it into a star or to place it into the heavens. It comes from Greek mythology where this literally (well, literally in classical mythology) happened to people – in fact it was the best thing that could happen to a puny mortal at the end of their life (a couple you might have heard of who were full-on put into the heavens are Orion and Cassiopeia). But it’s also used to describe someone or something becoming famous. This is down to Geoffrey Chaucer – he of nightmare English lessons trying to read ‘The Canterbury Tales’ while waiting for the dirty bits – who wrote a poem called ‘House of Fame’ (or ‘Hous of Fame’ as it is in Middle English. See, it’s not that hard, is it?).

Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash.

Probably written between 1374 and 1385, the whole poem is over 2,005 lines long across three books (GC didn’t do things by halves). It’s basically about a poet who falls asleep and dreams he’s in a glass temple adorned with images of famous people and their deeds (so kinda like ye olde teenager’s bedroom then). With an eagle as a guide (OBVIOUSLY), he then meditates on the nature of fame for all of those 2,005 lines. I won’t quote it here because it’s in Middle English and therefore really bloody hard to read, but if you want to see it in action, go here.

Etymology wise, ‘stellify’ comes from the Latin work stella which means star. So that’s not very interesting. But it’s still a nice word, right?