upshot

You know what this one means – it’s the thing you want to know when you’re reading something really long and complicated (fundamental rule of good writing, people – say your main point first). But why is the thing we want to know a shot going up?

For the answer, we need to travel back to the 1500s, to the time of wife-beheading misogynist Henry VIII. Let’s go to an archery contest, yay! It’s the final, and it all comes down to one last shot. The best archer (picture Kevin Costner/Katniss Everdeen/Legolas, or whoever floats your boat) hits the bullseye and wins the contest. And that’s the upshot – the final shot that decided who was the winner. The term was later used figuratively to describe a final result or outcome, the way we do today.

Here’s ‘upshot’ in (literal) action in an extract from Henry’s accounts (ooh, exciting) for 1531 which included his sporting losses:

To the three Cotons for three sets which the King lost to them in Greenwich Park … and for one upshot won of the King … 6s. 8d.

In case you’re a bit confused by this, I’m reliably informed by the internet that it’s saying Henners had to pay three men (presumably related to each other) all called Coton, 6 shillings and 8 pence (a fairly big sum back then, roughly equivalent to a few days’ wages for a skilled labourer) for losing in an archery competition, which included an upshot.

(I did some archery once, which I really enjoyed. I was amused to learn that most archery injuries aren’t caused by people shooting arrows into each other, but by them walking into the arrows that they’ve shot into the target. Humans really are idiots, aren’t we?)

loophole

A loophole is one of those legally ambiguous things that celebrities (I’m looking at you Take That/Jimmy Carr) exploit to avoid paying tax. The word itself has an interesting backstory, and actually doesn’t have anything to do with loops. OOOH.

Allow me to take you back to the 16th century. There’s peasants and mud everywhere. It’s probably raining. You’re looking up at a medieval stone castle, which has slits in it for people to shoot arrows out of, with little risk of being hit by their attackers (unless they’re Kevin Costner). And these were known as… wait for it… loopholes. But they’re not called this because they (sort of) look like loops. The name comes from the Dutch word lûpen, which means ‘to watch’. So it’s literally a hole to watch out of (I probably didn’t need to explain that, did I?).

It’s not entirely clear how the meaning of loophole changed from window you shoot stuff out of to tax dodging. It’s more likely that the modern sense of loophole is related to actual loops, rather than windows (especially as you close a loophole). There’s also a second theory that it comes from another Dutch word loopgat (which isn’t used anymore), which describes a hole which someone or something could escape through.