burnsides

Now, if you’re one of my more, erm, mature readers, you might be thinking of DCI Frank Burnside from ‘The Bill’ (I just googled him and his entry on ‘The Bill’ wiki – yes, that’s a thing – says ‘built his reputation on good detective work combined with his unique approach of putting informants’ heads down the toilet’. They don’t make ’em like that anymore). Unfortunately this doesn’t have anything to do with long-running police procedural dramas, but it does have a military background, which I’ll get to in a minute. It’s also my second (spoiler alert!) beard-related word in two weeks – make of that what you will.

Excellent facial hair, questionable military tactics

So, burnsides are another name for sideburns – strips of facial hair growing down your cheeks and connecting to a moustache, but with a clean-shaven chin. They’re named after one General Ambrose Burnside whose face hair was so distinctive it spawned a whole new genre (?). Which was lucky, as he was a pretty crap general – his most notable achievement was a crushing defeat in the American Civil War.

The savvy among you will have realised that sideburns is just burnsides swapped round. Annoyingly, I can’t find out how or why this happened – maybe it just made more sense to people as (in a happy coincidence) they’re on the side of your face?

A sideburn fact for you: sideburns went out of fashion in the early 20th century. One of the reasons for this was war – to keep a gas mask on your face you needed to be clean-shaven (which meant ’taches were still okay).

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering what sideburns were called before the 1800s, the answer is, rather disappointingly, ‘side whiskers’.)

ambivert

Nope, not a plug-in air freshener. I’m an ambivert and you’re (probably) an ambivert. It’s a person whose personality is a mixture of extrovert and introvert, AKA basically everyone, ever. Specifically, ambiverts change according to the situation they’re in. So if they’re at a party where no one’s talking to anyone else, then they won’t talk to anyone else either. But if everyone’s having it large (sorry) at the party, they’ll do the same.

The word’s been around since 1927, and was coined by an American social scientist with the excellent name of Kimball Young. The ‘ambi’ bit is from the Latin meaning ‘both’, as in ‘ambivalent’ and ‘ambidextrous’ (‘ambi’ also means ’round about’, as in ‘ambient’). The ‘vert’ is also Latin and comes from ‘vertere’ which means ‘to turn’ (vertere also has a starring role in words like ‘reverse’ and ‘revert’).

Bonus fact – you can also be an omnivert, which means you do the opposite of whatever situation you’re in. So omniverts would sit quietly in the corner at the fun party, but try to get everyone up and dancing at the quiet party. Omniverts sound like arseholes.

Bonus bonus fact: Kimball Young was the grandson of one Brigham Young, who was the second president of the Church of the Latter-day Saints i.e. the Mormons. He had 55 wives (boooooo!) but a most excellent beard (yay!).

Excellent beard. Bad marital practices.

lukewarm

When I was little and I heard someone describe a bath as ‘lukewarm’, I totally thought it had something to do with Luke Skywalker. You’ll be sad to hear that, unfortunately, it doesn’t.

You know what ‘lukewarm’ means – something (usually liquid or food) that’s not very hot. The ‘warm’ bit means ‘warm’, obviously (and doesn’t have very interesting etymology – it comes from the old German word… wait for it… ‘warm’). But what about the ‘luke’ part?

Photo by Karla Alexander on Unsplash.

Well, we can trace that all the way back to the proto-Germanic (obviously you’re far too clever for me to need to explain what that means) word ‘hlēwaz’, which also means ‘warm’. Old English then nicked it in and used it for (again) ‘warm’. ‘hlēwaz’ then morphed into ‘lew’, ‘lewk’ or ‘leuk’ in Middle English, which meant ‘tepid’ (or ‘slightly warm’), which then, through the magic of language, became the ‘luke’ we know today.

You’ll be noticing a theme here. All the words I’ve mentioned, including ‘luke’, mean ‘warm’. So ‘lukewarm’ means ‘warm warm’. This makes it on a par with saying LCD display (liquid crystal display display) or PIN number (personal identification number number).

metathesis

Photo by Jay Ruzesky on Unsplash.

‘Metathesis’ is a linguistic term (wait, come back – it’s interesting, honest!) which basically means to swap bits of a word round to create a new one. The word ‘walrus’ came about because of metathesis. It’s from an old Norse word ‘hrossvalr’ which means ‘horse whale’. At some point when the word made its way over to us, somebody switched it round (it was possibly more complicated than this) and we got ‘walrus’. ‘Foliage’ is another example. The word comes from a Latin root (BOOM BOOM), ‘follium’ which means leaf. Metathesis happened to it at some point and it went from ‘foillage’ to the better known ‘foliage’ we use today.

The most famous modern (or is it…?) example of metathesis is ‘aks’ for ‘ask’. ‘Aks’ actually came first from the Old English word ‘acsian’. Because of metathesis in ye olde times (scientific, I know), there was also another version floating about – ‘ascian’ – which won the linguistic fight and is how we ended up with ‘ask’ being the norm. (I used to absolutely loath it when I heard people saying ‘aks’ instead of ‘ask’, but now I know it’s from Old English and that Chaucer used it, I don’t feel so cross about it. Because I’m a pretentious wanker apparently.)

The word metathesis itself comes from the Greek word ‘metatithenai’, which just means ‘to put in a different order’. So that’s not very interesting, sorry. There’s also a super-poncy joke in here about metathesis being a thesis about a thesis, but I’ll spare you. Because I don’t think it’d be very funny, even to me.