orchid

Ah, human beings. We’re fundamentally filthy. And naming stuff is no exception. The word ‘orchid’ – those beautiful blooms so beloved that they’re the national flowers of at least eight countries (Venezuela, Colombia, Singapore, Costa Rica, Honduras, Belize, Panama and Guatemala, to name just a few) – means ‘testicle’. (See also avocado.) Yup. When you look at the picture below you can probably figure out why…

The Ancient Greek word for testicle is ὄρχις or ‘órkhis’, which is obviously where ‘orchid’ comes from. But we didn’t use that until the mid 19th century. In Middle English orchids were called ‘ballockworts’ which literally means ‘testicle plant’ (from ‘beallucas’, the Old English word for balls). Gotta love those dirty-minded Middle Englanders.

Let’s get our minds out of the gutter for the last paragraph of this post with some orchid facts.

• There are more than 25,000 documented species of orchid, and they grow on every continent of the world except Antarctica (#fail).

• Orchids have bilateral symmetry, which is a posh way of saying that if you draw a line down the middle of the flower, the two halves are mirror images of each other. Human faces also have this, which might be one of the reasons we like them so much.

• Not content with having tubers that look like human bollocks, orchids’ own reproductive bits look like insects. This is so they can trick them into pollinating them, the sneaky little bastards.

phoney

To be phoney (or phony if you’re in Murica), as you know, is to be fake or insincere. Like lots of our words, it’s reached us in a bit of a weird way though. And it doesn’t have anything to do with phones, as it appeared in print some 10 years before AGB (as no one calls Alexander Graham Bell) patented anything even vaguely telephone like.

Photo by Mariah Ashby on Unsplash.

Most authorities (I don’t know who these authorities are, but that’s by the by) agree that ‘phoney’ comes from an old English slang word, ‘fawney’, meaning ‘ring’ (from the Irish word ‘fainne’). Nope, still nothing to do with phones – instead this is referring to the type of ring that Beyoncé said you should have put on it, if you liked it. All this harks back to the 19th century, where English con artists ran a scam called the ‘fawney rig’ (‘rig’ is also slang, this time for ‘trick’). Here’s how it worked. The con artist would walk down a street then make a big song and dance about finding a gold ring on the ground. They’d then find a gullible passerby and reluctantly agree to sell it to them at a fraction of its actual worth. You can probably guess the rest – the conman/woman had actually dropped the ring themselves, and it was, of course, worthless. The people who carried out this scam were known as ‘fawney men’. ‘Fawney’ eventually mutated into ‘phoney’, possibly when the scam crossed to the US, and then into a synonym for anything that’s ‘false’ or ‘deceiving’.