genuflect

To genuflect is to bend one knee to the ground, usually as a sign of reverence or respect. It’s mostly associated with churches and religion, particularly Catholicism – people genuflect before entering a pew. It also has a metaphorical meaning: to show excessive deference or subservience to someone. As in, ‘I'm not going to genuflect to my dog just because he’s the most gorgeous boy in the world’ (even though I spend a lot of time cramped into weird positions because he’s asleep on me and I don’t want to upset him by getting blood back into my limbs).

‘Genuflect’ comes from a Late Latin word, genuflectere, and it’s pretty straightforward when you break it down: genu means ‘knee’ and flectere means ‘to bend’. So literally, knee-bending. The Romans were nothing if not literal. (Oh, and ‘Late Latin’ refers to the form of Latin used roughly from the 3rd to the 7th centuries AD i.e. when the Roman Empire was beginning that falling business. At this point, Latin was becoming less standardised, picking up influences from regional dialects and the languages of the various peoples who were interacting with (or invading) the Roman world. Grammar got simpler, new words were created and it moved away from the highly polished Classical Latin of Cicero and Caesar.)

Flectere has been quite busy in the English language, popping up in all sorts of places. For example, it’s where we get ‘reflect’ from (bending light), ‘deflect’ (as in turning aside) and ‘inflect’ (bending as in modulating something, usually your voice). Meanwhile, poor old genu has been rather left on the sidelines. Its only real claim to fame beyond genuflect is ‘geniculate’, a scientific term that means ‘bent abruptly at an angle like a bent knee’. Sounds painful.

You might look at ‘genuflect’ and think ‘well, surely that’s also related to “genius” and “genuine”’, unless, unlike me, you have a life. Well, I’m afraid that, despite the resemblance, those words come from an entirely different Latin verb, gignere, which means ‘to beget’. So no knees involved whatsoever. But, if you’re hungry for more knee-based etymology, the Latin genu is related to the Greek gonu (also meaning ‘knee’), which gave us gōnia meaning both ‘knee’ and ‘angle’. And that means that polygons, pentagons and hexagons are all essentially named after knees. You’re welcome.

barbarian

You know what a barbarian is – someone who pillages villages (and other places that don’t rhyme). The word has an origin that you might not know though. It comes from ancient Greece where the term ‘barboros’ was used to refer to any non-Greek-speaking bunch of people, or anyone those high-falutin’ Greeks thought inferior. ‘Barboros’ is literally based on the sound ‘bar-bar’ which is the Greeks taking the piss out of other languages by imitating what sounded like gibberish to them. I imagine it was probably accompanied by a ‘blah-blah-blah’ hand gesture as well.

Over time, the term ‘barbarian’ evolved to cover not only linguistic differences, but also cultural, social and perceived intellectual disparities between the Greeks and everyone else. It wasn’t long before the Romans picked up on the term, using it to describe non-Romans, particularly those outside the Roman Empire.

My favourite historical barbarians are the Vandals, a Germanic tribe who played a big part in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Believed to have originated from the area around modern-day Poland and Ukraine, in the early 5th century AD they established a powerful kingdom in North Africa. They also formed alliances with other groups, including the Alans, an Iranian nomadic tribe with the best name ever.

In 455AD, under the rule of King Genseric, the Vandals invaded Rome. There’s a story that they ended up in the imperial wine cellars. Instead of looting them as they were supposed to do, they decided to have themselves a little tipple. As anyone who’s gone to the pub after work for ‘just one drink’ has experienced, this ended up in a raucous party that including parading around the city streets wearing posh Roman clothes, and even crowning one of their own as the ‘Vandal King of Rome’. We’ve all been there.

Although the Vandals sacking of Rome wasn’t as devastating as earlier barbarian invasions (like the one by the Visigoths in 410AD), it did show the rest of the world that the Empire was in trouble. Combined with their conquest of North Africa (an important source of grain and revenue for the Romans), the Vandals were the beginning of the end for the Romans.

Despite this, the Vandal kingdom in North Africa didn’t last an awful lot longer. It fell in 534AD when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I got the better of our tribe in the Vandalic War. Their most enduring legacy is probably (as I imagine you’ve guessed) the word ‘vandalism’, which is based on their reputation for looting and generally making a big old mess.