furlong

A furlong is one of the many, MANY units of distance we use in English that I don’t understand (see also, yard, acre, fathom, nautical mile… I could go on). One thing I do know about furlongs is that they’re mainly used in horse racing. And the internet has just told me that a furlong is equal to 220 yards, which means NOTHING to me, but is apparently an eighth of a mile – about 201 meters – both of which I do, just about, understand.

Thankfully this post is about words, not how bad I am at understanding how far away one thing is from another thing. We can trace ‘furlong’ back to an Old English word, ‘furlang’, which combines two words:

• the noun (person, place or thing) ‘furh’ meaning ‘furrow’, as in a trench made by a plough to put seeds in (and also my brow when thinking about units of distance)

• the adjective (describing word) ‘lang’, which just means ‘long’.

These two words give us a big clue to what the word furlong was originally used for – and it wasn’t always defined as precisely as it is now. It previously referred to the length of a furrow in a cultivated field. This length was equal to the long side of an acre (that’s me lost again), an area originally defined as the distance a yoke of oxen (there are two oxen in a yoke, apparently) could plough in a straight line before needing a sit down and a cup of tea. Which surely changes depending on how beefy (pardon the pun) your oxen are, right? Presumably that’s why this was later standardised as an area measuring 220 yards by 22 yards, and is now defined as any area measuring 4,840 square yards.

Off to the races

So how did furlongs go from furrows to thoroughbreds? Well, that happened during the 16th and 17th centuries, around the time organised horse racing first emerged in England under the reigns (not reins) of King James I and King Charles II. Of course, people have been racing horses as long as they could sit on them, but largely informally in rural settings. The 1500s and 1600s saw the beginning of organised competitions on open tracks (like Newmarket), and racing authorities needed a reliable way to measure the length of courses. Because the furlong was already established for measuring open land and fields, it made sense to adopt it for tracks too.

Other units that refuse to die

The English language is full of archaic units that have survived within specific industries, sports or legal contexts. Here are just a few of those:

• chain (22 yards/66 feet/roughly 20.1 meters): used for measuring cricket pitches (the distance between the two wickets on a cricket pitch is exactly 1 chain) and railways (Network Rail still measures the entire British railway infrastructure in miles and chains)

• rods, perches and poles (5.5 yards/16.5 feet/5.03 meters): three names for the same measurement, which is used for allotments – a standard UK allotment plot is 10 rods/poles/perches, or about 250 square meters, apparently. It has three names because there were three different types of stick previously used to measure land

• cable (100 fathoms/a tenth of a nautical mile/around 185 meters): used by the Royal Navy and British mariners as a short-range distance measure (e.g., ‘there’s a ship passing 3 cables off the starboard bow, Jim’)

• thou (0.001 inches/0.0254 mm): British automotive mechanics, historic engine restorers and manufacturing machinists use thous for spark plug gaps, feeler gauges and metal foil thicknesses.

Parsecs and plot holes

It seems I’m in good company when it comes to not really understanding measures of distance. In Star Wars: A New Hope, Han Solo says that the Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run ‘… in less than twelve parsecs’. But a parsec is a measure of distance, not time (about 19 trillion miles or 3.26 light years).

No one’s quite sure whether this is a mistake by George Lucas or a deliberate choice to show that Solo was just a big old (hot) bullshitter trying to impress local yokels Obi-Wan and Luke in the Mos Eisley Cantina because he needs their credits. There’s also a theory (which started in the Expanded Universe and was officially made canon in the frankly rubbish 2018 movie Solo: A Star Wars Story) that the Kessel Run was normally an 18-parsec route which went around the Maw, a cluster of black holes. Han’s claim to have made it in less than 12 parsecs is actually a boast about both his ship’s speed and his skills and daring as a pilot because he shaved a third of the distance (and precious time) off the normal route by flying dangerously close to the black holes.

filibuster

In case you’re not an expert on political systems (which I definitely am not), a filibuster is a parliamentary tactic, often used in the United States’ Senate. It involves a member of the legislature speaking for a long time, or engaging in other tactics like raising lots of points of order, to try to delay a vote on a bill. This works because in the United States’ Senate there’s no time limit on individual speeches. So a senator can potentially speak for hours or even days to stop a vote.

There are a few ways to end a filibuster, including a three-fifths majority vote (usually 60 out of 100 senators in the US Senate) to invoke ‘cloture’ (another new-to-me word). This is a formal process that limits further debate and schedules a time for a vote on the bill.

So, why is this type of long speech called a ‘filibuster’? Well, it comes from a Spanish word ‘filibustero’, which originally referred to pirates or buccaneers doing naughty things in the West Indies and Central America during the 19th century. ‘Filibustero’ probably has its origins in the Dutch word ‘vrijbuiter’, which means ‘freebooter’ or ‘pirate’. It wasn’t long before this term that previously described pirates became a word for a parliamentary obstruction tactic.

Strom Thurmond – allegedly racist AND sexist (I cut the top of his head off on purpose)

The longest filibuster on record came from the awesomely named Senator Sturm Thurmond, who sounds like a Star Wars character. Despite his excellent moniker, Thurmond was a vehement opponent of the Civil Rights Act 1957, and supported racial segregation (apparently he also had a reputation for fondling women in elevators – he sounds like a massive dick). His filibuster to stop Black Americans getting the vote started at 8.54pm on 28 August and lasted until 9.12pm THE FOLLOWING DAY – that’s a massive 24 hours and 18 minutes. Thankfully it didn’t work, and the bill passed two hours after his filibuster ended. It was signed into law by President Eisenhower within two weeks. Up yours, Sturm.

trivia

You know what trivia is – information that’s usually quite interesting and perhaps not that widely known, but probably not that important. Also a thing that you have to have ready when you’re female and you tell a man you’re interested in something, and he immediately asks you to prove it (actual conversations with male friends: ‘I’m a big Star Wars fan.’ ‘Really? How many forms of communication is C-3PO fluent in*?’ And: ‘I love watching tennis.’ ‘Yes? How many French Opens has Nadal won**?’)

The word ‘trivia’ comes from Latin and is the plural form of ‘trivium’ (but don’t ever use the singular version because you’ll sound like a dick), which means ‘place where three roads meet’. In ancient Rome, ‘trivium’ was used to refer to the three subjects of the beginners’ liberal arts course at university, which were: grammar (my fave), rhetoric (the study and practice of persuasive public speaking) and logic (a branch of philosophy focusing on valid and sound reasoning). While these might not seem that trivial to us, the fact that ‘trivium’ was the name for the beginners’ class is probably why it’s since evolved to refer to less important information.

I asked my robot overlord, ChatGPT, to tell me some trivia, and here’s what it said:

• Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs that are over 3,000 years old and still perfectly edible.

• The shortest war in history occurred between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896. It lasted only 38 minutes.

• The world’s oldest known recipe is for beer. It dates back to ancient Sumeria around 1800 BCE.

• The Eiffel Tower in Paris was originally intended to be a temporary structure, built for the 1889 World’s Fair. It was almost dismantled afterward but was saved because of its value as a radio transmission tower.

• The average person spends around six months of their lifetime waiting at red traffic lights.

• The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn.

• The world’s largest flower is the Rafflesia arnoldii, which can grow up to three feet in diameter and weigh up to 24 pounds. It’s also known for its distinctive smell, often likened to that of rotting flesh.

• Astronauts’ height can change in space. Without the force of gravity compressing their spines, they can grow up to 2 inches taller while spending extended periods in space.

*It’s six million. Which I did know.

** It’s 14. Which I didn’t know. But I do now, and I’m ready for you, men.

agathokakological

That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? If something is agathokakological it means it’s made up of both good and evil. Think Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Darth Vader.

Photo by Jack Hamilton on Unsplash.

Agathokakological is a combo of the Greek roots agath- (which means good), kako- (which is a variant of cac-, and means, you’ve guessed it, bad) plus -logical (which is a suffix based on logos, meaning word). It was probably coined by Robert Southey, the least famous of the Lake Poets (Wordsworth and Coleridge being much more well known). Southey loved inventing words (the OED has him as the creator of almost 400) but, unlike other well-known word inventors, very few of his have survived to the modern day. This isn’t particularly surprising as several of them seem to be as hard to say/spell as agathokakological. Exhibit 1: batrachophagous which means ‘frog-eating’. What?

In 1813 Southey became poet laureate after being bigged up by his pal Sir Walter Scott (he of Ivanhoe and Rob Roy fame). Not because he was nice, but because Scott didn’t want to do it – he described it as a ‘poisoned chalice’ and said that previous holders had ‘churned out conventional and obsequious odes on royal occasions’. Ouch. In 1837, while being poet laureate and presumably churning out those crappy odes, Southey got a letter from a then-unknown young lady named Charlotte Brontë, asking for some advice on her poems. He praised Brontë’s writing but told her she shouldn’t give up the day job stating ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life…’. What a dick. And thank goodness she didn’t listen.

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).