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.

loophole

A loophole is one of those legally ambiguous things that celebrities (I’m looking at you Take That/Jimmy Carr) exploit to avoid paying tax. The word itself has an interesting backstory, and actually doesn’t have anything to do with loops. OOOH.

Allow me to take you back to the 16th century. There’s peasants and mud everywhere. It’s probably raining. You’re looking up at a medieval stone castle, which has slits in it for people to shoot arrows out of, with little risk of being hit by their attackers (unless they’re Kevin Costner). And these were known as… wait for it… loopholes. But they’re not called this because they (sort of) look like loops. The name comes from the Dutch word lûpen, which means ‘to watch’. So it’s literally a hole to watch out of (I probably didn’t need to explain that, did I?).

It’s not entirely clear how the meaning of loophole changed from window you shoot stuff out of to tax dodging. It’s more likely that the modern sense of loophole is related to actual loops, rather than windows (especially as you close a loophole). There’s also a second theory that it comes from another Dutch word loopgat (which isn’t used anymore), which describes a hole which someone or something could escape through.