tawdry

The Hay Festival, a literary festival in Wales that I’ve been to a few times (because I is well intellectual) has been doing a virtual version this year, because of you-know-what. I watched one sesh with Greg Jenner, writer and historian extraordinaire, where he briefly mentioned the origins of the word ‘tawdry’. And turns out it has an interesting backstory, which I’m now going to share with you, you lucky people.

St Audrey in her glad rags

If you describe something as ‘tawdry’, you’re saying it’s showy, and cheap or crappy quality. You can also use it to describe something that’s immoral, like a ‘tawdry extramarital affair’. So, where did it come from?

Allow me to transport you back to 7th century England. The daughter of the king of East Anglia is a young princess called Etheldrida, who’s known as Audrey (and who can blame her with a name like Etheldrida? Although spare a thought for her sisters, who were called Wendreda and Seaxburh). After a life which basically consisted of not having sex (she took a vow of virginity, despite having two husbands), Audrey died in the year 679 of a throat tumour. The Venerable Bede recorded this as a just punishment because poor old Audrey liked a lace necklace, and this vanity apparently meant she deserved to die from cancer. Wow. Nice one, Bede.

Despite this, Audrey still managed to get beatified (AKA saintified) as she founded an abbey in Ely (just up the road from where I’m writing this, and today the site of the gothic gorgeousness that is Ely Cathedral). Fast forward to the 16th century and admirers of St Audrey are buying saintly merch in the form of lace necklaces, called St Audrey’s laces. Over time, this gets shortened to ‘taudrey laces’.

100 years later, the Puritans are everywhere, and Audrey’s statement necklaces are now seen as old-fashioned and cheap. So it’s not long before the word ‘tawdry’ comes to mean the same. This meaning was cemented by Shakespeare in ‘A Winter’s Tale’ – the character Mopsa, who’s a bit of a country bumpkin, has the line: ‘Come, you promised me a tawdry-lace and a pair of sweet gloves’, which shows how unsophisticated she is.

I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Aud. The woman hung on to her virginity through two marriages, then founded an abbey, and this is what she’s remembered for? Shame.

hooligan

A couple of days ago I walked into my bedroom to find Gus, my one-year-old cavapoo, standing on my bed (which he’s not supposed to get on), having emptied the washing basket all over the bedroom. After failing to tell him off (because he’s literally the cutest dog in the world ever, even when he’s got my one nice bra in his mouth), I half-heartedly called him a ‘hooligan’. Which got me thinking… where does the word ‘hooligan’ come from?

I’ve found three origin stories for ‘hooligan’ all of which might be apocryphal (i.e. bollocks). The first is that it comes from the Irish surname Houlihan, which was used as a byword for hell-raising Irishmen in musichall songs on the late 1900s. The second is that it’s named for Patrick Houlihan, one of the aforementioned hell-raising Irishmen (sorry Ireland). He was a small-time crook who died in prison in London (Southwark to be precise) after killing a policeman in a brawl.

The third theory, which is my favourite so probably not true (and doesn’t involve any Irish people), is that during the Jacobite rising of 1745 in Scotland (when Charles Edward Stuart attempted to regain the British throne for his father James Francis Edward Stuart – but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that), a British officer was being eaten alive by midges (i.e. those bitey insects which ruin picnics and other outdoor activities, including several bike rides I did as a child where I accidentally rode through a cloud of them with my mouth open #neverforget). He misheard the Scots-Gaelic word for midge which is ‘meanbh-chuileagi’ as ‘midge hooligan’ and accidentally invented a new word which still survives today.

idiot

Alongside ‘moron’*, ‘idiot’ is one of my favourite non-sweary insults. But where does it come from? Turns out it’s derived from an Ancient Greek word, idiōtēs, which means ‘private person’. That doesn’t mean that idiōtēs didn’t want to go out (remember going out?), but that they didn’t have much to do with public affairs and the government. ‘Idiom’ (i.e. a word or phrase which is unique to a group of people or a place) also comes from the same root, as does ‘idiosyncrasy’ (a quirky thing that’s unique to one person), which makes sense when you think about the whole ‘private’ meaning.

Back to idiōtēs. As I said, an idiōtēs was basically just a normal – anyone who wasn’t a soldier, scribe, judge, politician, etc. But, people who weren’t idiōtēs saw them as the opposite of ‘citizens’. And because of this, ye olde Greeks soon started using the term to refer to people who they thought weren’t clever enough to talk about politics and public affairs. From this, it wasn’t long until ‘idiot’ began to take on the meaning we know today.

So, idiot. More than just a stupid person.

* While writing this post I discovered that ‘moron’ has some slightly shady origins. It, alongside ‘imbecile’, ‘cretin’ and ‘retard’, were once scientific terms used in psychology and psychiatry for people with mild intellectual disabilities. And they were also favourite terms of the American eugenics movement when pushing for enforced sterilisation. So that’s nice. With the exception of ‘retard’ (which most people now agree is pretty offensive), these have now slipped into the vernacular. But does that mean they’re okay to use? I DON’T KNOW.

curfew

This is another one I’ve shamelessly stolen from the Wittertainment podcast (which is technically about films, but lucky for me also features a lot of etymology, generally courtsey of Sir Simon of Mayo). You know what a curfew is – that thing your parents gave you which meant you had to be home by a certain time (you know, back when we were allowed to go outside and do stuff). ‘Curfew’ comes from an Anglo-French word, coverfeu, which itself comes from an Old French word cuevrefeu. This literally means ‘cover fire’ (as in to cover a fire in a fireplace to put it out, not the stuff that soldiers do when they’re advancing on a battlefield).

The story is that back in the Middle Ages, houses were mainly made of wood and straw, and other super-flammable things. And, due to the fact that electricity wouldn’t appear for another few hundred years, obviously everyone had candles for light and fires to keep warm. Which was a bit of a recipe for disaster (see The Great Fire of London*). To make sure that no one fell asleep without putting their fire out, Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror (no one’s quite sure who came up with it) put a law in place which meant someone rang a curfew bell at 8pm to remind everyone to do just that, and also blow out any candles, put out their pipes/ciggies, etc. Willie the Conq also used the curfew bell to make sure that everyone was back in their house by 8, to stamp out any pesky English people getting together after dark to talk rebellion.

The curfew law was rePEALed (bad bell joke, sorry) in 1103 by Henry I. But you can still find a few curfew bells round the UK, like this one in Leadhills, Scotland.

*Interesting fact alert: despite the fact that the GFOL, as no one calls it, destroyed around 70,000 of the 80,000 homes in London at the time, only six people are known to have died.