ultracrepidarian

We probably all know an ultracrepidarian. It’s someone who gives advice or opinions on things they don’t know anything about.

A different type of cobbler.

The story behind this word comes, as do many of my words of the week, from Ancient Greece. A famous painter by the name of Apelles (said to have been court artist to Alexander the Great – so a pretty big deal then) heard a cobbler being rude about the way he’d painted a foot in one of his works. Apelles then said something very cutting and witty to the cobbler about how he shouldn’t judge things that were beyond him (although, to be fair to the cobbler, he probably had seen a fair few feet working as he did in the shoemaking game… Anyway, I digress). Sadly, Apelles’ exact remark has been lost in the mists of time, which is annoying. But much cleverer people than me think it probably went something along the lines of ultra crepidam, which means ‘beyond the sole’ in Latin. And from that we get ultracrepidarian. Or, in modern parlance, mansplainer.

disaster

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

You know what a disaster is – a shitshow. So basically the whole world at the moment (just in case you’re from the future, it’s late 2020 and we’re in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic). But ‘disaster’ is another everyday word that has an interesting backstory.

It first turned up in 1567, and the ‘aster’ bit comes from the Latin word for ‘star’ (‘astro’). And the ‘dis’ bit is Latin for ‘baaaaaaaaaaad’. Or, to put it in a more professional way, the ‘dis-’ prefix expresses that a word is negative (think discontent, dishearten, dislike, and so on). This all comes from ye olde idea that the position of the stars influences what happens on terra firma. And that if those stars are out of whack, bad stuff goes down here. Like how Romeo and Juliet are described as ‘star-crossed’ AKA (spoiler alert) doomed to be thwarted by outside forces.

‘Disaster’ isn’t the only word that has a galactic flavour – ‘influenza’ comes from the Medieval Latin word for ‘influence’, based on the idea that epidemics were influenced by the position of the stars. Well, it’s as good a theory as any, I guess.

relict

I saw this word on a gravestone while walking my pooch. In case you can’t see it clearly in the picture, it says:

‘In memory of Robert Harvey
Who died January 21st 1855
Aged 80 years
Also of
Maria, relict of the above
Who died December 1886, aged 87’

I immediately felt sorry for poor Maria, forever immortalised in sexist stone as just the ‘relict’ of her husband Robert (although it’s a better epitaph than this poor lady got, also in the same churchyard). A quick Google search revealed that yes, a relict is an archaic term for a widow. It comes from the Latin verb ‘relinquere’ which means ‘leave behind’. Okay, so it still feels a bit sexist, but it’s also quite sad.

The word ‘relict’ actually has a few different meanings. It’s sometimes used interchangeably with ‘relic’, and in fact saints’ bits, the selling of which was big business back in the day, were originally called ‘relicts’. Somewhere along the way the ‘t’ fell off (much like those saints’ bits).

In biology a relict is a once prolific plant or animal that still exists in a single place, when the rest of its mates have gone extinct (not to be confused with previous word of the week ‘endling’ which you can find here – it actually mentions ‘relict’ in this context despite me having no memory of writing about it already). Relictualism (ooh, fancy) usually happens when a small area of a habitat gets cut off from the rest.

Back to widows for a sec. According to Wikipedia, the collective noun for a group of widows is an ‘ambush’. This seems a bit mean, especially as it’s also used for a group of tigers. I blame the patriarchy.