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.

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?

macaroni

Now, you might think you know what I’m talking about here – pasta, right? Wrong. Penguins? No, not them either. Allow me to take you back to the 18th century. If you were a macaroni, then you were likely the most flamboyant and extravagantly dressed man in the room (which was no small feat in an era of powdered wigs and embroidered everything).

A macaroni was the 18th-century equivalent of a fashion influencer – but with more lace, bigger wigs and a worrying obsession with teeny-tiny hats. The term referred to young men who’d been on the Grand Tour, a kind of aristocratic gap year where wealthy Brits swanned around Europe pretending to appreciate Renaissance art. Italy was a popular destination for these men and many developed a taste for maccaroni (okay, so it is pasta-related) which was little known in Britain at the time. When they returned to London draped in silk, covered in frills and with wigs so tall they made walking through doorways a logistical nightmare, they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club – not an actual club, but a subculture of worldliness, superior style, sophistication and enlightenment. They would even refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as ‘very maccaroni’.

It wasn’t all fun and games and tiddly hats though. Macaronis came to be seen in stereotyped negative terms in Britain, and as symbols of inappropriate effeminacy and bourgeois excess – satirical prints of the time show them mincing around in ludicrous outfits, clutching canes and sporting expressions of supreme self-satisfaction. And with the aristos over the Channel in France losing their heads, this type of extravagant dressing began to fall out of favour at the end of the 18th century when a more restrained aesthetic took over. Don’t worry though – although the French Revolution definitely put a dampener on the most OTT aristocratic styles, dandyism (led by figures like Beau Brummell) emerged soon after. And while it was a little more understated, it still embraced a meticulous approach to fashion. No small hats though, sadly.

The most famous reference to macaronis is probably in the nursery rhyme Yankee Doodle, where the American hero ‘stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni’. Written by a Brit, the joke was that the Yankees were so naïve that they believed a feather in the hat was enough to turn them into a sophisticated European macaroni.

But what about the penguin, I hear you ask? Well, the macaroni penguin sports a very fetching yellow crest. They were named by English sailors who came across them in the Falkland Islands in the early 19th century, and thought they bore a spooky resemblance to our macaroni fashionistas.

nostalgia

I’ve always thought this sounds a bit like a medical condition (oh dear, I’ve got a nasty case of nostalgia) and it turns out, I’m right – although it isn’t anything contagious. As you of course know, nostalgia is a noun (person, place or thing) that describes a sentimental longing or affection for the past.

The word itself hasn’t actually been around for all that long. It was coined by a Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer in the late 17th century (1688, to be specific). He used it to describe a medical condition observed in Swiss mercenaries. These mercenaries were a powerful infantry force made up of professional soldiers who served in foreign armies from the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Their proven battlefield capabilities made them sought-after troops-for-hire, especially among the military forces of the kings of France. The Swiss Constitution of 1874 banned the recruitment of Swiss citizens by foreign states, and these days there’s only one Swiss mercenary unit left – the nattily-dressed Swiss Guard at the Vatican.

Despite all this military success, when they were fighting away from home, Swiss mercenaries all got terribly homesick (bless them), pining for their beautiful Swiss landscapes. This was the medical condition that Hofer observed – symptoms were thought to include fainting, high fever and even death. Cases were so serious, and led to so many desertions, illnesses and deaths, that the mercenaries were banned from singing the ‘Kuhreihen’, a melody traditionally played by Swiss alpine herdsman as they drove their cattle to or from pasture, in case it pushed the mercenaries over the figurative edge.

After seeing all this extreme homesickness, Hofer combined two Greek words to describe it: ‘nostos’, meaning ‘homecoming’ (the word ‘nostos’ also refers to a theme used in Ancient Greek literature when an epic hero returns home, usually by sea) and ‘álgos’ meaning ‘pain’.

For many centuries, nostalgia was considered a debilitating and potentially fatal medical condition. But by the 1850s, it began to lose its status as a disease, and this meaning had almost completely vanished by the 1870s (although it was still recognised as such in both the First and Second World Wars, mainly by the American armed forces). Nowadays nostalgia is seen as an emotion rather than a condition – a yearning for the ‘good old days’, even if they actually often weren’t that great.

pia

My mum put this down in Words With Friends the other day, which prompted me to look it up as I’d only ever seen it as a woman’s name before and obviously proper nouns are NOT ALLOWED. Well, it turns out we all have a pia – it’s an anatomical term, the full version of which is ‘pia mater’. And it has quite an interesting backstory. (Disclaimer: I’m no biologist, so apologies if you are and I’ve got any of this wrong.)

The pia mater plays a vital role in keeping our central nervous systems healthy and functioning properly. It’s one of three meninges (sets of membranes that provide a protective covering) that surround and protect our brains and spinal cords. The other two are the dura mater and the arachnoid mater. The pia mater is the innermost layer that directly covers the surface of the brain and spinal cord. It’s a thin, transparent membrane that sticks closely to our brains’ contours, following the folds and grooves. It also surrounds the spinal cord.

The pia mater’s primary function is to support, protect and nourish the underlying neural tissues by carrying blood vessels that supply nutrients and oxygen to the brain and spinal cord. If you fall down a lot like I do, then you should be grateful to your pia mater, as it protects that brain and spinal cord from impacts.

We are of course here for the words, so why is it called a pia mater? If you did any Latin in school then you might be ahead of me here – it translates to ‘tender’ or ‘gentle’ ‘mother’ (the word ‘pia’ is the feminine form of the Latin adjective ‘pius’). The name ‘pia mater’ was introduced during the Renaissance period (14th to 17th centuries) when anatomical knowledge was expanding, and Latin was the universal language of science and academia, and has stuck around ever since. It was probably called that because of the way it encloses the surface of the brain and spinal cord, cradling them like a mother. Nice, right?

Oh, and you’ve probably guessed that ‘arachnoid mater’ translates as ‘spider-like mother’, because of its web-like appearance. And ‘dura mater’ means ‘tough mother’ due to this outermost meninge’s durable and robust nature. It’s one tough mother f*cker.