congratulations

Last week we talked about the origins of ‘anniversary’. To carry on the celebratory theme, I thought this week we’d have a look at why we all shout ‘Congratulations!’ at events involving pulling party poppers and knocking back Prosecco. The good news is that, unlike ‘anniversary’, which has a rather morbid backstory involving martyed saints, ‘congratulations’ is pleasingly wholesome.

Similarly to ‘anniversary’, ‘congratulations’ also comes from Latin. This time it’s the verb congratulari, which breaks down into two rather lovely pieces:

• con-, meaning ‘together’ or ‘with’

• gratulari, meaning ‘to express joy’ (gratulari’s parent word gratus also gave us ‘grateful’, ‘gratitude’ and ‘grace’).

So ‘congratulations’ basically means ‘Hey, I’m expressing joy with you right now!’. Nice (if weirdly formal), right?

‘Congratulations’ appeared in English in the 1500s. Unlike a lot of Latin words which made their way to our shores via France, it was imported directly by Renaissance scholars. These scholars thought English was too simple or ‘barbarous’ (GASP) to handle certain formal ideas (which included partying, apparently), so they nicked Latin words to plug the gaps. When they were looking for an elegant word for sharing joy, they found the Latin verb congratulari. A little bit of Anglicisation later, and we ended up with ‘congratulate’ and ‘congratulation’.

(Sidebar: These scholar-imported Latin words were rightly mocked at the time as pretentious and unnecessarily fancy. Dissenters calling them ‘inkhorn terms’, a slightly weird insult based on the fact that the scholars inventing these words carried their ink around in small containers made from hollowed-out animal horns and attached to their belts.)

At first, ‘congratulations’ was strictly reserved for writing. You’d stick it in a formal letter with an introductory phrase (like ‘I beg leave to offer you my congratulations’ or ‘Allow me to extend my heartiest congratulations’) rather than shouting it across a room while slopping your drink. Over the next few centuries, we ditched the formal preamble altogether and turned it into the exclamation we use today whenever we hear a cork popping.

anniversary

Last weekend was my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Once the inevitable champagne-based hangover had cleared, it got me thinking – why is it called an ‘anniversary’? Well, turns out it actually has a much less celebratory backstory.

Let’s start with the etymology. ‘Anniversary’ comes from Latin and is made up of two roots:

• annus, meaning ‘year’ (which is also where we get words like ‘annual’ and ‘perennial’)

• versus, meaning ‘turned’ (that’s the past participle of the verb vertere – to turn – which gives us words like ‘reverse’, ‘divert’, ‘universe’ and ‘convert’).

Stick them both together and you get the adjective (describing word) ‘anniversarius’, which means ‘returning yearly’ or ‘revolving with the year’. Because it’s an adjective, the Romans slapped it on a bunch of different nouns to show that something happened once every year. For example:

• seasonal farm produce – like wheat, barley or grapes – was called ‘fructus anniversarii’

• politicians served in ‘magistratus anniversarii’ (‘one-year offices’)

• Roman doctors diagnosed seasonal allergies like hay fever as ‘morbus anniversarius’ (‘a yearly returning illness’).

With Latin being the OG language of the Christian church, when early church leaders and scholars needed a word for recurring holy days, they combined ‘anniversaria’ with ‘dies’, meaning ‘day’, to make ‘the annually returning day’. This wasn’t used for happy milestones though. ‘Anniversaria dies’ was for feast days honouring the many, MANY martyred Christian saints or the anniversary of someone’s death. Party time!

In the medieval equivalent of LOL, people couldn’t be bothered to keep writing ‘anniversaria dies’, so they dropped the ‘dies’ altogether and turned it into the noun, ‘anniversarium’ (meaning ‘the annual day’). That eventually made its way into French as ‘anniversaire’, crossing the Channel into English around the 1300s as ‘anniversary’.

Even though the ‘dies’ had gone, it was still wearing a lot of black eyeliner and obsessing about death. If, for example, your Auntie Ethel died on 12 March, your family would pay the local priest to say a special prayer for her soul every 12 March after that. That annual death-day service was called your auntie’s (you’ve guessed it) ‘anniversary’. I’m guessing there probably weren’t any party poppers though.

It would take another couple of hundred years (and the Protestant Reformation) for ‘anniversary’ to get a proper glow-up and become less about funeral prayers, and more about cake, champagne and throwing up in flowerbeds (just me?).

(I mentioned Christian martyrs above. While I was researching – and I use the word ‘researching’ very loosely – this post, I read about Saint Cassian of Imola who taught grammar to school children. When he refused to make a sacrifice to the Roman gods, the local magistrate turned him over to his own students. They stabbed him to death with iron styli, which are basically ye olde biros. Safe to say that was a tough day at the office.)

St Cassian of Imola, about to regret his policy on student participation.

rhetoric

Nowadays, when we say something is ‘rhetoric’, we usually mean it’s a load of bollocks designed to manipulate whoever’s unlucky enough to be listening to it. But this much-maligned word didn’t always have such a negative meaning. In fact, ‘rhetoric’ used to simply refer to the art of persuasion. Throughout Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ‘rhetoric’ was a prestigious and essential academic discipline, and one of three ancient arts of discourse (also called trivium) along with grammar (yay!) and logic (boo!).

Rhetoric, innit

The word ‘rhetoric’ has a Proto-Indo-European root, *werh₁, which means ‘to speak’ or ‘to say’. This appeared during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, i.e. bloody ages ago (about 6,500 to 4,500 years ago, if you want actual numbers. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the weird notation, the asterisk means the word was never written down, and the small 1 marks a soft throat sound, apparently). *werh₁ evolved into an Ancient Greek word, eírein, also meaning ‘to speak’, which then produced rhētōr meaning a public speaker or orator (although I’m not sure how – it’s something to do with the Greek letter for W vanishing, I think, but much too boring to go into here, which is saying something). To further complicate things, the Greeks then took the root of rhētōr and added the adjective ending -ikē (meaning ‘pertaining to’ or ‘the skill of’) which created a new adjective, rhētorikē, meaning ‘oratorical’. This clearly wasn’t complicated enough though, so they stuck tékhnē (‘art’, ‘craft’ or ‘technique’) on the end to make it mean ‘the oratorical craft’ or ‘the art of the public speaker’.

Understandably, as time passed people stopped bothering with the tékhnē bit, and just used rhētorikē on its own to mean ‘the art of speaking’. This made its way into Latin as rhētorica, then into 12th-century Old French as retorique, and finally into Middle English in the early 14th century as rethoryke or rhetorik.

Annnnnnd relax.

Now we all know too much about rhetoric, let’s have a look at the tools and techniques that people use when they’re trying to be good at it, AKA rhetorical devices. There are bloody loads of these, and they all have very long complicated names, so I’ll just give you a few. I can almost certainly guarantee you’ve used at least some of them in everyday speech.

Complicated name	Sounds like…	Actually is…	In action
Epizeuxis	Something that hangs at the back of your throat	Repeating a word or phrase back-to-back with no other words in between to make a point	‘Location, location, location.’
Anaphora	A shop that sells overpriced makeup	Repeating a phrase at the start of sentences or clauses for emphasis	‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields…’
Tricolon	A bowel complaint	Grouping things in threes to add rhythm and punch	‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
Hyperbole	An American sports event that no one outside America cares about	Deliberate, extreme exaggeration used to make a point or emphasise a feeling, and not meant to be taken literally (and pronounced ‘hy-PER-buh-lee’, confusingly)	‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.’

What about rhetorical questions, I hear you ask in a not-rhetorical way. Yes, rhetorical questions come directly from the study of rhetoric. They’re called that because they were traditionally used to make a point or persuade an audience, with the answer either immediately given by the speaker, or being so bleedin’ obvious that they didn’t need to. In speechmaking, posing a question forces the listener’s brain to process the thought actively rather than just listening (or drifting off…). Rhetorical questions also subtly steer an audience’s thinking without explicitly telling them what to think. Sneaky, huh?

gauche

‘Gauche’ describes someone or something that’s awkward, tactless or lacking social graces. If you did any French at school, you probably remember that ‘gauche’ is French for ‘left’, and that’s exactly where we get this word from. But why does ‘left’ translate to using the wrong fork at dinner or calling without texting first (shudder)?

(Before I get into this, apologies to any members of the left-handed community, which includes my mum, for what I’m about to say.)

A bit of Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgment showing Christ waving his arms in the air like he just don’t care, sorry, I mean separating the righteous from the damned with his right and left hands.

Historically in Europe, being left-handed was associated with being clumsy or downright evil. This was down to the fact that 90% of people are right-handed, and us humans have always had a tendency to view anything outside the ‘norm’ with suspicion. It’s down to language too (handy for me) – the word ‘sinister’ literally translates to ‘on the left side’ in Latin, while ‘dexter’, meaning ‘right’, implies skill and cleverness, and has given us words like ‘dexterous’.

Many major religious and spiritual traditions heavily favoured righthandedness too. It all kicked off with poor old Eve (of course), who, according to later medieval legend (it actually doesn’t specify in Genesis), was created from Adam’s left side – and we all know how that ended up. According to one online source I found, the Bible has over 100 favourable references to the right-hand alongside 25 unfavourable ones to the left-hand. For example, in Psalm 118, it says ‘The right hand of the Lord is exalted: the right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly’. And the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew describes how God will divide nations on Judgment Day ‘as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats; and he shall set the sheep [the good guys AKA the righteous] on his right hand, but the goats [the damned] on the left’. Poor old goats.

Lefties don’t fare much better in Islam either – in the Middle East, the left hand is seen as dirty, mainly due to the custom of using it to, well, wipe your bum. (There’s a theory that this is where we get ‘cack-handed’ from, though the origins are thankfully shrouded in mystery.)

So, after centuries of religious bias, linguistic snobbery and literal witch-hunts, ‘left’ had ended up with quite a bit of baggage. And when 18th-century English aristocrats started pinching French vocab to sound cultured (the earliest recorded use of ‘gauche’ in English is in a letter by one Lord Chesterfield in 1751), they adopted ‘gauche’ as a snappy insult for anyone lacking high-society polish – turning a simple direction into a go-to phrase for being a total social disaster.

villain

A villain is a bad guy (or gal – it is the 21st century after all). But, it didn’t always mean that. In one of the English language’s greatest plot twists, back in the day it simply referred to a farmworker.

So how did a villain evolve from a humble peasant to the ultimate baddie?

Our story starts, as it so often does, with a Latin word. In this case, that’s villanus. This came from villa, which meant a country estate, farm or, well, villa. From there we got the noun villanus, which was simply someone who worked on a country estate i.e. a farmhand or peasant.

As Latin evolved into Old French in the Middle Ages, the word became vilein or vilain and was used to describe a feudal serf, both male and female. These vileins were bound to the land and their lordly masters. The word still didn’t have any connotations of evilness or moustache-twirling though – it was just a legal and social status.

We actually have the Brits to thank for the semantic shift from farming to foul play, which says a lot about our medieval class attitudes. When the Normans conquered us in 1066, they brought Old French with them, including the word ‘vilein’. And because all the wealthy, aristocratic poshos looked down on everyone else, over time, they started using ‘vilein’, which had now become the more familiar ‘villain’, to describe someone with ‘the characteristics of a peasant’. To them that meant churlish, crude, untrustworthy and generally vulgar (think Baldrick in Blackadder).

By the 1300s and 1400s, the word had moved away from farming and describing a person’s social status to casting aspersions on their moral character. By the time Shakespeare was writing in the late 1500s and early 1600s, it was firmly established as a malicious antagonist. Take this, from Much Ado About Nothing:

‘In this, though I cannot be said to be
a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I
am a plain-dealing villain.’

There you have it. Villains didn’t start with a thirst for world domination, but with a pitchfork and low social standing. This word’s evolution is a stark reminder that for a long time, the English language was shaped by the classist attitudes of the rich and powerful elite.

pedigree

If, like me, you’re a dog person, you probably associate the word ‘pedigree’ with overly pampered pooches – or the word ‘chum’. Of course, we also use it to describe anything with a snooty background, like royals or break-the-bank wine. But if we peel back the layers of history, the origins of the word ‘pedigree’ are actually quite unglamorous. And French.

Lovely Bella, sadly no longer with us

Our story begins in Anglo-Norman French, somewhere around the early 15th century. Without Ancestry.com or online DNA tests, medieval genealogists drew up family trees to prove who’d fathered who and who owned which chateau. They would draw a three-pronged symbol – three lines radiating from a single point – that connected parents to their offspring. That three-lined diagram looked very similar to the footprint of a large bird, specifically, a crane. So the term ‘pié de gru’ was born, which literally translates as ‘foot of a crane’. (Now, if you remember your GCSE French, or you’re familiar with the scary French Duolingo chouette, you might be thinking ‘sacre bleu, the French word for “foot” is “pied” not “pié”, you plank’. And you would be right – but, back in the medieval period, spelling was a bit of a free-for-all, and it was routinely written that way. Later, poncy scholars who wanted to make the word look closer to its original Latin root stuck a ‘d’ on it.)

Anyway, I digress. As you can probably guess, over the centuries, English speakers did what we do best: we stole the French phrase, chewed it up and spat it out as ‘pedigree’. By the late 16th century, the new spelling had stuck, and the word shifted from describing the physical diagram on a parchment to meaning the ancestral line itself. By the 18th century, the term expanded beyond human aristocrats to include the selective breeding of horses and cattle, eventually landing us where we are today – with certificates for purebred poodles.

My previous dog, Bella, was a purebred dachshund who did indeed come with a certificate. (I’d like to emphasise that I didn’t buy her – I took her on after her previous owner, my great aunt, passed away.) I adored Bella but, as well as that certificate, she came with all sorts of health problems – including terrible back issues due to years of selective breeding to produce that distinctive sausage shape. It’s a sad fact that the pursuit of the ‘perfect’ pedigree has left a tragic legacy across the canine world – as well as dachsies with dicky backs, we also have pugs who can’t breathe properly, German Shepherds with broken hip joints, Shar-Peis with severe skin infections, Great Danes with failing hearts and deaf Dalmatians (I could go on…). Breeding for a specific look often comes at a massive cost to dogs’ quality of life – so if you’re looking to get a dog, remember that rescue is the best breed.

procrastination

I think all of us probably struggle with a bit of procrastination from time to time. It’s when you put off doing something, usually work, by doing something else. Like spending hours creating a colour-coded revision plan meaning there’s no time left for revision (I definitely did that). Or spending three hours scrolling through food blogs to find a super-healthy recipe leaving no time to go to Tesco so you have to order a pizza (yup, also me). Ironically, this word that describes the act of avoiding work actually has a very hard-working linguistic history.

This is an AI-generated image, which should be obvious from the fact that it looks like the man has eaten a third of his cup. I apologise for using AI, which I hate, but posts with images are usually more popular, and I couldn’t find anything on Unsplash for ‘procrastination’.

‘Procrastination’ entered the English language in the mid-16th century from the Latin procrastinationem. It’s made of three parts:

• the prefix pro-, meaning ‘forward’ or ‘forth’

• crastinus, meaning ‘belonging to tomorrow’ (from cras, the Latin word for, you’ve guessed it, ‘tomorrow’)

• -ation, a standard suffix that turns a verb into a noun describing an action or process.

Put it all together, and you get, literally: ‘The action of putting forward until tomorrow.’

Procrastination isn’t always the bane of creativity. For example, Leonardo Da Vinci was the patron saint of unfinished projects, taking 16 years to finish the Mona Lisa. The good news is that he didn’t just sit around colour coding his paintbrushes or scrolling through the renaissance equivalent of TikTok. He ‘productively procrastinated’ by studying (among others) optics, light and human anatomy. And that meant that when he finally returned to the painting, he’d mastered a technique called sfumato (smoky blurring) that he hadn’t been able to do previously. So if he’d actually finished the enigmatic painting on time, it likely wouldn’t be the masterpiece it is today.

Another notorious historical procrastinator was Queen Elizabeth I, who apparently drove her advisors nuts taking her time over signing death warrants and marriage treaties. The good news is that by procrastinating on executing Mary, Queen of Scots for nearly 20 years, Lizzie avoided a premature war with Catholic Europe. By the time she finally did sign the warrant in 1587, England was militarily stronger and better prepared for the eventual Spanish Armada. So that procrastination kept England out of a potentially bloody – and expensive – conflict that could have gone on for decades. Oh, and by not choosing a husband, Liz made sure every country in Europe was concentrating on getting in her pants rather than on invading her queendom.

So next time you find yourself doing anything but the thing you’re supposed to be doing, fret not – you’re not being lazy, you’re just applying Elizabethan diplomacy.

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?

testify

At first glance, ‘testify’ seems very serious and upright. It’s something you do in court with your hand on your heart as you swear to only tell the truth, and nothing but the truth. But like so many English words, ‘testify’ has a surprisingly cheeky backstory. And just in case you’ve got there before me, yes, it involves testicles.

Strap yourselves in.

The theory goes that in ancient Rome, men would swear oaths with their hands on their testicles to prove they were telling the truth. And from there, we get ‘testify’. (I also read one article that said two men taking an oath of allegiance would hold each other’s knackers. Don’t remember seeing that in Gladiator.)

It’s a great story. But is there any truth in it? Well, both ‘testify’ and ‘testicle’ do come from the same Latin root, ‘testis’. Although that probably doesn’t mean what you think it means – it actually translates as ‘witness’. Some etymologists think the anatomical sense came about because testicles were seen, metaphorically, as ‘witnesses’ to a man’s virility. Others say that the two words just sound similar. But frankly, the image of a Roman swearing on his love spuds was just too good for me to pass up.

So ‘testify’ and ‘testicle’ are genuinely related, although perhaps not in a holding-your-family-jewels-to-show-you’re-serious way. Same root, VERY different destinies. Either way, it’s probably not something to start doing if you ever find yourself in the witness box.

urchin

When you hear the word ‘urchin’, you probably picture a scruffy Victorian street kid saying ‘Please sir, can I have some more?’. But, did you know that the OG urchin had prickles rather than pickpocketing skills? Yep, in Middle English, ‘urchin’ meant ‘hedgehog’. It appears in writing as ‘yrchoun’ or ‘irchoun’, which we borrowed from an Old French word, ‘herichon’. That came from the Latin word for hedgehog, ‘ericius’. That Latin root is also linked to the Proto-Indo-European word ‘ghers-’, which means ‘to bristle’. That’s also where we get ‘horror’ from, which literally means ‘a bristling of the hair’.

From ‘hedgehog’, ‘urchin’ did what words (and Victorian pickpockets, probably) love to do – it wandered. In the 1500s, people started using it figuratively for anyone or anything small, mischievous or misshapen, including hunchbacks, women of bad reputation (rolls eyes), and even goblins and elves. Shakespeare mentions ‘urchin-shows’ in ‘The Tempest’, which refers to the ghostly or spirit-like apparitions that Prospero sends to haunt Caliban:

‘His spirits hear me,
And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch,
Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’ th’ mire,
Nor lead me like a firebrand in the dark
Out of my way, unless he bid ’em.’

It wasn’t long before those meanings of small, ragged, impish and half-wild started to blur together, and the word ‘urchin’ began being applied to children who fit the same image. By the 18th to 19th centuries ‘street urchin’ had become a familiar phrase, especially in urban contexts. Here it is in Dickens’ ‘The Pickwick Papers’:

‘Gabriel had been looking forward to reaching the dark lane, because it was, generally speaking, a nice, gloomy, mournful place … he was not a little indignant to hear a young urchin roaring out some jolly song about a merry Christmas, in this very sanctuary …’

Another urchin also appeared in the 1500s, this time in the sea. This is when the phrase ‘sea urchin’ cropped up, when English speakers spotted those spiky little sea creatures and thought, essentially, ‘there’s an underwater hedgehog’. The link’s completely visual: same shape and same spines, just wetter. Well, kinda.

I trod on a sea urchin on holiday when I was younger, and got a few of its spines lodged in my foot. The locals told me to pee on it, and I still don’t know if that was good advice or just them taking the piss out of the tourists. I’ll leave it up to your imagination as to whether I did or not, but let’s just say I flew home without any sea urchin spines in my foot.

scurrilous

It sounds posh, doesn’t it? But ‘scurrilous’ is actually the linguistic equivalent of getting slapped round the head with a rolled-up newspaper. It means ‘grossly or obscenely abusive’ or ‘slanderous’. So if you’re accused of making scurrilous claims, your pants are almost certainly in need of a visit from the fire brigade.

But how did such a fancy-sounding word end up doing such dirty work? Like lots of refined-but-rude words, ‘scurrilous’ comes to us from Latin. It traces back to ‘scurrilis’, which means ‘buffoon-like’ or ‘coarse’. And that comes from ‘scurra’, meaning ‘jester’ or ‘clown’ AKA someone who made a living making rude jokes (like previous star of the word of the week – and best job title evs – Roland the Farter).

Over time, ‘scurra’s association with low humour, insults and botty burps (sorry) stuck. So it wasn’t long before ‘scurrilous’ came to describe anything vulgar, mocking or abusive – especially in speech or writing.

Us English speakers got hold of ‘scurrilous’ in the 16th century. The earliest known printed use is in 1570 in the ‘Thesaurus Linguæ Romanæ & Britannicæ*’ by Thomas Cooper (theologian, Bishop of Winchester and master of Magdalen College at Oxford University): ‘Scurrilous iesting and vnshamefast rayling.’

Translation: rude jokes and shameless ranting – or in modern terms, social media.

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*The full title of this is, deep breath, ‘Thesaurus Linguæ Romanæ & Britannicæ: tam Accurate Congestus, vt Nihil Penè in Eo Desyderari Possit, Quod Vel Latinè Complectatur Amplissimus Stephani Thesaurus, Vel Anglicè, Toties Aucta EliotæBibliotheca’. Phew. You can also read it online, if you have a spare six months or so, and a magnifying glass.

pontificate

These days, to pontificate is to talk about something in a self-important way. To hold forth. To bang on. If someone’s pontificating, it usually means they think they’re making an important point, but everyone else is just waiting for them to stop (cough Donald Trump cough).

Originally, ‘pontificating’ didn’t have anything to do with pompous speakers. It comes from the Latin ‘pontificatus’, which means the office or duties of a pontifex – a high-ranking priest in ancient Rome. Later, the term was used for popes and bishops in the Catholic church. So to pontificate once simply meant to act as a pontiff i.e. to carry out religious ceremonies.

Over time, the link between pontiffs and authority became more important than the religious context. By the early 1800s, ‘pontificate’ had taken on a more figurative meaning – to speak like someone with unchallengeable authority. Over a bit more time, it came to mean someone talking at length with way more confidence than they should actually have.

The papacy has been around for nearly 2,000 years. That means there’s been plenty of time for drama, scandal and the occasional orgy. Here are some weird pope facts:

• In 897, Pope Stephen VI had the corpse of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, dug up, dressed in papal robes, propped up on a throne and put on trial for perjury and abuse of power. The verdict? Guilty. His body was thrown in the river.

• Pope John XII (955–964) was allegedly killed by a jealous husband who caught him in bed with his wife – though some accounts say he died of a stroke (heehee) during sex. Either way, it’s not exactly holy.

• Pope Benedict IX first became pope around the age of 20 (or possibly younger), in 1032. His reign was so corrupt and chaotic that he sold the papacy to his godfather. Yep – sold it. Benedict was pope three separate times and is considered one of the most scandalous popes in history. So much so that he was eventually excommunicated.

• Legend says there was once a female pope – Pope Joan – who disguised herself as a man and gave birth during a procession. Most historians agree it’s just a myth, but it was taken so seriously in the past that popes reportedly had to sit on a chair with a hole in it to prove they were male. Nice to see men’s bodies being subjected to humiliating checks for once…

gambol

This is inspired by the gorgeous lambs I saw running about this morning while I was walking my dog, Gus. (I also saw two dead ones which kind of ruined my day. Sorry. Anyhoo, moving on…) To gambol is to skip, frolic or jump about playfully, just like those lambs (the alive ones, obviously). It’s light, carefree and unbothered.

‘Gambol’ has been bouncing around the English language since the 1500s. It comes from the Middle French word ‘gambade’, which means ‘a leaping or springing action’. That, in turn, comes from ‘gamba’ which is Italian for ‘leg’. ‘Gamba’ also gave us ‘gambit’ and ‘gamble’ – I’m not going to tell you more about that now though, as I’m going to use both of these as future words of the week. Mean, I know.

One of ‘gambol’s first appearances in print in English was in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’: ‘Full oft he gamboled up and downe.’ So it’s describing a character literally leaping or frolicking around – very much in line with the way we still (occasionally) use the word today. Gambolling – not just for lambs.

Golding’s ‘Metamorphoses’ translation was a big deal in Elizabethan England because it made classical mythology widely accessible in English for the first time. He translated the entire work from Latin into English verse – and in a style that was rhythmic, vivid and packed with dramatic imagery. It was one of the most popular books of the time, and lots of writers drew on it (by which I think we mean plagiarised it) for stories, imagery and language. Shakespeare ‘borrowed’ some scenes and references from ‘Metamorphoses’ for plays including ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘The Tempest’. Luckily for Will, there weren’t any copyright laws then. (To be fair, he did transform those stories into something new, often with better pacing, deeper characters or sharper language. So that’s alright then.)

Golding translated the entire ‘Metamorphoses’ in just over a year – between 1564 and 1567. He mentions in his preface that he worked on it during his ‘leisure time’ while staying at the country estate of his nephew, Edward de Vere (the 17th Earl of Oxford – and one of the people some claim wrote Shakespeare’s plays, though that’s a whole other rabbit hole). Considering the translation runs to over 15 books of Latin poetry – around 12,000 lines – doing that in just over a year, by hand, in rhyming couplets is pretty bloody impressive. Thanks goodness he didn’t have Netflix.

descry

To descry something is to spot it – to catch sight of something faint, distant or difficult to see. You might descry land on the horizon, for example, or a face in the crowd. It’s easy to confuse ‘descry’ with ‘decry’ (although I doubt either of them are coming up that regularly in your daily life), which is understandable – they look and sound similar, but mean very different things. If you decry something then you condemn it, usually loudly and with lots of disapproval.

‘Descry’ and ‘describe’ come from the same Latin root – dēscrībere, meaning ‘to write down’ or ‘to represent’. That Latin word gave rise to an Old French verb, ‘descrier’, which meant ‘to proclaim’ or ‘cry out’ (often in the sense of calling something out that you’ve just seen). That’s where we borrowed it from.

‘Descry’ has been around for a long time, having first appeared in print in 1330, in the Middle English romance Reinbrun. Nope, me neither – it sounds pretty awesome though. Apparently Reinbrun is abducted by some merchants as a child and shipped off to Africa, where he’s presented to King Argus. During his captivity, he gets all buff and turns into a kickass knight. He goes on to rescue Amis, a friend of his father’s, from an enchanted castle controlled by a fairy knight. Sounds good, right? Oh, and just FYI, medieval ‘romances’ don’t actually involve much in the way of snogging – they’re more about heroic adventures, quests, battles and chivalric deeds, often with a bit of the supernatural thrown in. Sadly they’re also in Middle English which means they’re unpossible to comprehenden.

benignant

EF Benson, who looks like he was pretty benignant

If you’re thinking that ‘benignant’ sounds like it’s just stepped off the set of a Victorian drama wearing a waistcoat and holding a pocket watch, then you’d be right. I read it in a ghost story by one EF Benson, who was born in 1867. You might have already guessed that it’s the opposite of ‘malignant’ – it means kind, gentle or benevolent.

Benignant comes from the Latin word ‘benignus’, which is a mash-up (or compound) of ‘bene’ meaning ‘well’ or ‘good’, and ‘gignere’ meaning ‘to beget’ or ‘to produce’. So it’s basically about creating goodness, generating kindness or radiating a beneficent glow. Which makes a change in today’s shitty world, doesn’t it?

Interestingly (to me, at least), ‘benignus’ didn’t just mean ‘nice’ in Latin. It also carried a sense of generosity and nobility, so it was often applied to rulers, gods or generally all-round nice guys. It arrived in English via Old French in the early 17th century, alongside its more popular sibling, ‘benign’.

So why did ‘benign’ stick around while ‘benignant’ got assigned to obscure Victorian ghost stories? Well, ‘benignant’ generally leaned towards describing people, actions or attitudes, while ‘benign’ became the go-to for describing things that aren’t out to kill you (think moles and weather). Not to be cynical, but maybe there just aren’t enough nice people around to make ‘benignant’ more popular…?

Margaret – all that Egyptology sadly didn’t raise a smile

I referred to EF Benson as an obscure writer above, which is a little unfair. Well a lot unfair, actually – he was a prolific English author whose literary output included over 90 works, ranging from sharp social comedies to chilling ghost stories (the one I read was called ‘The Room in the Tower and Other Stories’). Benson was born into a pretty well-to-do family (his dad was the fricking Archbishop of Canterbury), and studied archaeology at Cambridge before turning to writing. He was a keen sportsman and also gay (a combination which sadly still isn’t accepted today), and his books are famed for their dry wit and camp humour. He was also the mayor of Rye in Sussex, which inspired the fictional town of Tilling in his most famous novels. His siblings were pretty cool too – Robert Hugh was another prolific author and Arthur Christopher wrote the words to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Let’s take a moment to appreciate his sister, Margaret (who apparently only got one name, unlike her brothers #patriarchy) though. She was one of the first women to be admitted to Oxford University and went on to become a keen amateur Egyptologist, excavating lots of super-cool stuff, and later writing about it. In fact, her writing and lectures are credited with making Egyptology much more accessible to the general public.

marcescence

Have you ever noticed a leaf clinging stubbornly to a tree, when all its other leaf friends have long fallen off? There’s a word for that. Marcescence is where something, usually plant matter like leaves or flowers, withers but doesn’t fall off. I can relate.

Oaks and beeches are classic examples of trees with marcescent leaves, which often stay in place for the whole of winter. It’s most common in juvenile plants too. Stroppy teenagers, eh?

Marcescence has its roots (HAHAHAHA) in Latin. Marcēscere means ‘to wither’ or ‘begin to decay’. This comes from marcēre, meaning ‘to be weak or withered’.

Marcescence first made its way into English in the mid-18th century when the study of botany was flourishing (I can’t help myself, sorry), and scientists were coming up with lots of neologisms to describe the natural world. That’s just a fancy way of saying that they were inventing lots of new words.

So how does marcescence happen? Let’s do some science for a sec. In most deciduous trees, a process called ‘abscission’ causes leaves to fall off in autumn. A specialised layer of cells forms at the base of the leaf stem to make this happen. But in marcescent trees, this process doesn’t fully complete, leaving them partially attached. Why? Well, it seems that no one’s entirely sure. There are a few theories though…

1. It’s for protection: the hanger-on leaves might protect new buds from weather or things trying to eat them. Marcescence is more common in younger trees and on lower branches, which adds credence to this defence theory.

2. They provide food for the soil: fallen leaves are great for promoting new growth as they rot. The theory here is that by falling off later, marcescent leaves will carry on providing this goodness to their tree long after their pals have gone to the big forest in the sky

3. To send water to the base of the tree: these leaves could act as a sort of snow fence, slowing down the white stuff and sending moisture to the bottom of the tree where it’s needed most.

There you go. Now you can casually say something like ‘there are so many marcescent leaves around this season’ on your next wintry walk and look well clevs. You’re welcome.

(Oh, and I saw this lovely word in the excellent Tone Knob newsletter, written by my equally excellent ex-colleague Nick Parker. If you’re even a bit interested in writing and tone of voice, it’s well worth signing up. You can do that here.)

filipendulous

If something is filipendulous, it means it’s hanging by a thread or a filament. It’s most often used to describe things that appear suspended by delicate or slender attachments, and look like they could drop at any moment. Like a spider suspended by a single thread. Or my sanity.

Like many of our words (especially the complicated ones), filipendulous comes from Latin. It’s a combination of the Latin word ‘filum’ meaning ‘thread’, and ‘pendere’ which means ‘to hang’.

You’re most likely to come across the word filipendulous in botany, where it’s used to describe plants with structures on fine stalks or threads. There’s actually a genus of plants called Filipendula containing 12 species of perennial herbaceous plants. That includes meadowsweet and dropwort, and the excellently named queen-of-the-forest (Filipendula occidentalis) and queen-of-the-prairie (Filipendula rubra), both of which are native to North America.

Filipendula species are food plants for the larvae of some Lepidoptera (AKA butterflies and moths) species, including the emperor moth, one of the biggest in the world. The largest emperor moth has a wingspan of between 15 and 20cm (6 to 8 inches). Yeesh. (I’ve literally just finished reading ‘The Travelling Bag’ by Susan Hill which makes this fact particularly freaky. If you know, you know.) These moths live in Europe, but haven’t made it across the Channel to us (YET). Having said that, our largest moth is the privet hawk moth, which can get up to a not-too-shabby 12cm (4.7in) wingspan.

You wouldn’t want either of those flapping round your bedroom light, would you?

prestigious

If something or someone’s prestigious, they’re generally highly respected and renowned. But ‘prestigious’ is one of those words which has completely reinvented itself over the years. When it first appeared in English in the 16th century, it referred to someone or something that was deceptive or fraudulent, or that involved trickery. It wasn’t until the 19th century that ‘prestigious’ tricked us all and morphed into the positive meaning it has today.

Before we get into the ‘why’ of that, let’s take a look at the etymology. Like lots of other words of the week, prestigious has its roots in Latin. It comes from the word ‘praestigiosus’, which meant ‘full of tricks’ or ‘deceitful’. That’s derived from ‘praestigiae’, meaning ‘delusions’ or ‘illusions’, and was often used to refer to conjuring tricks or sleight of hand. (You might also have heard the word ‘prestidigitation’, which also comes from ‘praestigiae’, and refers specifically to the skill of performing magic tricks or illusions, often using quick hand movements). The root word ‘prae-’ means ‘before’ or ‘in front of,’ while ‘stringere’ means ‘to bind’ or ‘to tighten’, suggesting something that deceives or confounds the senses.

So how did ‘prestigious’ fool us all into turning it into something positive? It’s probably down to the fact that we’re all impressed by someone who has the power to dazzle and deceive. And over time, we started using ‘prestigious’ to describe someone or something that does that as having earned our admiration and respect. By the mid-19th century, the association with trickery had pretty much completely disappeared, and we were only using it in the positive sense we do today.

Harrison Ford’s reaction to this is PRICELESS.

font

Ah, fonts. Most of us have our favourites. In fact, I once had a wonderful evening with a guy in a bar in New York after we got chatting because he had my then-favourite font (Trebuchet) tattooed on his leg. But that’s a story for another time. Back to business – do you know where the word ‘font’ comes from? Well, it actually goes all the way back to the Middle Ages and the early days of printing.

‘Font’ comes from the Middle French word, ‘fonte’, which means ‘something that’s been melted’. That in turn comes from the Latin verb ‘fundere’, meaning ‘to melt’ or ‘to cast’. So what’s with all the melting? Well, it refers to the traditional process of creating typefaces, where individual letters were cast in metal. A printer would use these metal letters to create a page of text, which they’d then cover in ink and press on paper. Each typeface needed a full set of these metal pieces, which were collectively referred to as, you’ve guessed it, a font.

Bonus word of the week – leading. I’m referring to the one pronounced ‘ledding’, which these days refers to the distance between lines of text. It’s called that because traditionally printers would insert strips of lead between lines of type to increase the spacing. Interesting, right?

(Oh, and if you’ve ever wondered how some of the fonts we use every day got their names, have a read of this blog post. It also explains the difference between ‘font’ and ‘typeface’, if you care about such things.)

spondulicks

‘Spondulicks’ (also spelled ‘spondoolicks’ or ‘spondulix’) is a slang term for money, which I’m almost certain Delboy Trotter used more than once. It first emerged in the United States in the mid-19th century, where it quickly gained popularity, even appearing in a New York Times article in 1857. Its exact origins are unknown, but there are a couple of theories about its etymology.

The first one, and the most widely accepted, is that it comes from the Greek word ‘spondylos’, meaning vertebra or a type of shell. What do shells have to do with money? Well, they were often used as currency in ancient times, and even as late as the early 20th century in some regions. (I read this in a fab book called ‘Spirals in Time: The Secret and Curious Afterlife of Seashells’ by marine biologist Helen Scales – nice bit of nominative determinism there.)

Cowrie shells were among the most widely used shells for currency across various cultures and regions, including West and Central Africa, India, Sri Lanka, China, Thailand and The Maldives. There’s even a cowrie shell called cypraea moneta or money cowrie. Why cowries? They’re hard and durable which makes them good for lots of handling, and they also come in relatively uniform sizes and shapes, so they’re easy to count and use as a standardised form of money. They’re also really pretty.

The second theory for ‘spondulicks’ is that it comes from the Latin word ‘spondere’, which means ‘to promise’ or ‘pledge’. This one’s less popular though.

When I asked ChatGPT for a list of slang words for money it gave me the usual suspects including ‘bucks’, ‘cash’, ‘dough’, ‘quid’ and ‘moolah’, but also some others I’ve never heard of. These included ‘cheddar’, ‘cabbage’, ‘simoleons’ and ‘bones’. Who knew?

Makes me laugh every single time.