geminate

I’ve been doing some geminating this morning, with my socks, which I hate (the geminating, not the socks. I’m fine with socks in general).

Not to be confused with germinating, ‘geminate’ as a verb means to put something into pairs. Although it’s usually used in this way by linguists to describe sounds that are doubled, you can also use it to be fancy-dancy when you’re doing laundry (and who doesn’t need to add a bit of fancy-dancy when they’re sorting out washing?).

Geminate is also an adjective (AKA a describing word). So when you’ve finished sorting those goddamn socks, you can says that they’re geminate (sadly I still can’t say this about mine as many of them are still lounging in the laundry basket).

It’s not just about socks of course – you can use ‘geminate’ for anything that comes in a pair, like headlights, eyes or the twins from The Shining (other twins are available).

So, where does the word come from? Well, if you were born between 21 May and 20 June then you’re probably well ahead of me – like the star sign gemini, it comes from the Latin word ‘geminatus’ which itself comes from ‘geminus’, meaning ‘twin’.

The constellation Gemini is named for the twins Castor and Pollux from Greek mythology. The story goes that their mother, Leda, was seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan (the logistics of this always bother me). She later laid four eggs (because, swan) out of which hatched the aforementioned twins, as well as two others – Helen (later to become ‘of Troy’ and launch a bunch of boats) and Clytemnestra (which I always think sounds like an STD). Because Leda had also had relations with her husband (not a bird) on the same night, it seems that Castor and Clytemnestra were his kids, while Pollux and Helen were Zeus’, which therefore gave them demigod status, and immortality. When Castor was later killed in battle, Pollux was so upset that he begged his dad to let him give up half his immortality to give to his bro. Zeus agreed, and Castor and Pollux were transformed into the Gemini constellation.

Woman impregnated by swan? Sounds like a load of old Pollux to me.

The geminate twins from ‘The Shining’. I used to work with the grown-up version of one of these actresses. Yes, really. Dunno which one though.

nickname

You know what a nickname is, of course – a substitute for someone or something’s proper name. But have you ever wondered who Nick is?

As it’s Christmas, it would be great if the ‘nick’ was St Nick. But, sadly, it turns out there’s no Nick in nickname. It’s a very old word, going all the way back to the early 1300s. And it looked a bit different then, as it was spelled ‘ekename’. This literally means ‘additional name’ from the Old English word ‘eac’, which comes from ‘eacian’ – to increase. So how did it become ‘nickname’? This is down to a process called rebracketing (also resegmentation or metanalysis if you want to get really technical), which is a fancy-dancy way of saying that the ‘n’ of the ‘an’ got moved to the beginning of the noun. So it went from [an][ekename] to [a][nekename], which eventually morphed into ‘nickname’.

This specific type of rebracketing is called ‘false splitting’. Other words that have lost an ‘n’ because of false splitting include:

• a napron ⇾ an apron (the thing you wear when you’re cooking)

• a naddere ⇾ an adder (snake)

• a noumpere ⇾ an umpire (the tennis people).

Another type of rebracketing is when words become split in a way that’s different from how they were built. If you just said ‘huh’, here are some examples which will hopefully help:

• hamburger – hamburgers are called hamburgers because they come from Hamburg i.e. [Hamburg][er]. But because ham is a food, at some point we decided they were made from ham (even though they’re not), and created a new word, ‘burger’. Then we attached that to lots of other foodstuffs (cheeseburger, veggieburger, etc). Ooh, I’m hungry now

• helicopter – this is made up of ‘helico’, from the Greek word ‘helix’ meaning ‘spiral’, and ‘pter’ from ‘pterón’ which means ‘wing’. So it’s actually [helico][pter]. Presumably because ‘pter’ is quite hard to pronouce, we’ve rebracketed it as [heli][copter] and use both of these as parts of other words (helipad and gyrocopter being the only two I can think of at the moment)

• alcoholic – this is actually made up of [alcohol] and [ic], with alcohol being, well, alcohol, and the suffix ‘ic’ meaning ‘relating to’. We’ve rebracketed this as [alco][holic] and added the [holic] bit to anything vaguely addictive (shopaholic, workaholic, etc.).

Well, that was a lot of technical gubbins, wasn’t it? Let’s finish up with some awesome historical nicknames.

Henry the Impotent doing a medieval finger gun

• Viscount Goderich, AKA The Blubberer: Goderich (1782–1859) holds the dubious honour of being the briefest-serving British prime minister ever (who didn’t die in office) at only 144 days. He got his nickname from crying in the House of Commons about people who died in riots against the Corn Laws (which I think makes him sound like quite a nice bloke).

• Ragnar Hairy Pants: This one’s slightly cheeky as Ragnar might not have been a real person, although he does turn up in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which is apparently pretty reliable. I think his nickname’s fairly self-explanatory (he had hairy trousers). His son also had an awesome nickname – Ivar the Boneless – although no-one knows for sure where that came from.

• Charles XIV of Sweden, AKA Sergeant Pretty Legs: He was king of Sweden and Norway from 1818 until he died in 1844, and he had good legs. Nuff said.

• Honourable mentions to: Constantine the Dung-Named (Byzantine emperor from 741 to 775); John The Babymaker (born in 1458 and ruled Cleves – where ‘Anne of’ came from presumably, apparently fathering 63, yep, 63 illegitimate children); and Henry the Impotent (King of Castile from 1454 to 1474, who failed to consummate his 13-year marriage to his cousin, although didn’t have trouble doing it with anyone else apparently).

gird

You’ll no doubt have heard the phrase ‘to gird one’s loins’ which means to prepare yourself for something, usually stressful. It’s always given me a slightly minging image of hairy thighs rubbing together (sorry). But it’s also made me wonder where the word ‘gird’ comes from. And do we gird anything other than loins? Let’s find out…

‘To gird’ something means to encircle or bind it with a flexible band (like a belt – that’s also where we get ‘girdle’ from). Girding of loins goes all the way back to the Bible. The actual quote (from the King James version) is:

Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ…

So, what does it actually mean? Well, ye olde Biblical fashionistas would have been decked out in long flowing tunics. Yes, these were great in the desert-y heat, but they weren’t all that practical for anything other than standing around. So when they had to do running or crucifying or killing first borns, they’d take all that long flowy fabric and tie it up with their belt like a pair of shorts, AKA ‘gird’ it round their nethers.

Because you can literally find anything on the internet, someone with too much time on his hands has put together a guide on how to gird your loins. So if you ever find yourself wearing a floor-length tunic then needing to run away from someone or something, you’re all sorted. I know, I spoil you.

Turns out you can gird something other than loins, because ‘gird’ also has a secondary meaning, which is to be sneering or mocking. So presumably if someone mucks up their tunic-tying – think the fashion show testicle in The Inbetweeners – you can be girding about the way they’ve girded their loins.

physiognotrace

A physiognotrace is a machine used to automate the production of silhouette portraits. Previously an artist would cut these out by hand. Although this was actually very quick to do, the demand for these types of portrait in the 1700s was so great that a Frenchman named Gilles-Louis Chrétien invented the physiognotrace (also spelled without the ‘g’) to speed things up even more.

Your subject would sit in profile and the physiognotrace used a pantograph (a metal arm made up of pivoted levers) to transmit the tracing to an engraving needle via an eyepiece. This made it easy to produce multiple copies, as well as aquatints, which are much more detailed portraits. The physiognotrace is considered a precursor to the camera, as it allowed artists to reproduce someone’s likeness in a fairly short space of time.

Physiognotrace is a portmanteau, i.e. two words smooshed together, of ‘physiognomy’ and ‘trace’ (you probably don’t need to be Susie Dent to figure that out).

Before photography, silhouette portraits were the cheapest way to record someone’s appearance. They’re named after Étienne de Silhouette, a French finance minister who was forced to impose austerity measures on France during the Seven Years’ War. Obviously no one liked that, and therefore him, so it wasn’t long before his name became synonymous with anything done on the cheap, including these little portraits, where it stuck.

Here’s a physiognotrace in action (accompanied by some very calming music).

A portrait made by a physiognotrace

I’d know that silhouette anywhere

inimical

If something is inimical, it means it’s hostile or unfriendly. Here it is in a sentence: today I pulled a burr out of my dog’s tail, and he fixed me with an inimical stare. It’s not to be confused with inimitable, which is much more positive – it means that something is not able to be imitated or is uniquely extraordinary.

‘Inimical’s etymology is a bit Wayne’s World (#datedreference) – the ‘imicus’ bit comes from ‘amicus’ which means ‘friend’ in Latin. That’s also where we get ‘amicable’ from. So that’s nice. But the ‘in’ suffix means ‘not’.

AKA friendly. NOT.

Even though I’ve used inimical above to describe my dog, we actually don’t generally use it to describe people (wait, what do you mean my dog isn’t a person? Get away with you). It’s used to talk about forces, concepts or situations that are harmful or hostile. Like climate change, the Taliban, Texas law courts… pretty much everything that’s happening in the world right now.

That got dark quickly, sorry. Here’s some Bohemian Rhapsody to cheer you up.

‘Don’t touch my tail.’

illeist

If you’re an illeist, it means you’re speaking about yourself in the third person, instead of the first. So if I said ‘Emma has a wet bum, because she just spilled a full cup of coffee in her lap’ (true story folks), then I’d be using illeism. And also sounding like a bit of an idiot.

Etymology-wise this one’s pretty straightforward, with ‘ille’ being Latin for ‘that man’ or ‘he’, plus the suffix ‘-ist’ which we add to things to show that someone’s doing them (if that makes sense) – like ‘pianist’ or ‘capitalist’. The term was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (he of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which I genuinely love, and also the opium-induced, unfinished Kubla Khan) in 1809.

One of the most famous historical illeists is Julius Caesar, who used it in Commentarii de Bello Gallico, his non-fictional account of the Gallic Wars. This was to make it sound like it was impartial, when obviously it wasn’t at all. And it might also be better filed in the ‘Fiction’ section at Waterstones, as several of Caesar's claims seem to have been outright lies. For example, he said that the Romans fought Gallic forces of up to 430,000, which was an impossible army size for the time, and also that not one Roman died during this battle. I call bullshit…

Other more modern illeists, both fictional and non-fictional, include:

• Gollum from Lord of the Rings – although he does it because he doesn’t have anyone else to talk to, which is sad

• Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson who used illeism in his wrestling catchphrases – ‘Do you smell what The Rock is cooking?’ (um, no thanks)

• Hercule Poirot, who almost always talked about himself and his little grey cells in the third person

• Dobby the house elf in the Harry Potter series (god rest his soul) – ‘Dobby has no master. Dobby is a free elf!’

While you might think talking about yourself in the third person makes you sound like a dick, in fact psychologists suggest that there are real benefits to doing just that – but only in your head, not out loud. The idea is that it can help you change your perspective to get past biases and improve decision-making. Emma will definitely be trying this from now on (once her bum dries off).

(With thanks to the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast, which is where I heard this word.)

deadline

To quote Douglas Adams:

‘I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.’

As a freelance writer, deadlines are a thing that I know a lot about and I also spend a lot of time worrying about. But what I didn’t know is that the word itself has a surprisingly bloody history…

‘Deadline’ as we know it today, i.e. a date or time by which you have to do something, has only been around since the 20th century. But the word itself is much older, and dates back to the 1860s. At this time it referred to a line drawn in or around a prison. If a prisoner went over the line, they’d be shot. Hence, ‘deadline’.

The word was made famous by a Confederate prison for prisoners of war called Andersonville in Georgia in America. Andersonville was known for having comfy cushions in each cell, fresh fruit for breakfast and massages for well-behaved inmates. Only kidding, obviously – it was notorious for its terrible conditions and, you’ve guessed it, use of deadlines. This is from a report on conditions in the prison from one Confederate Captain Walter Bowie (he knows Major Tom’s a junkie):

‘On the inside of the stockade and twenty feet from it there is a dead-line established, over which no prisoner is allowed to go, day or night, under penalty of being shot.’

Just to show you how awful Andersonville was, it was only open for just over a year, yet nearly 13,000 of the 45,000 prisoners of war died from lovely things like scurvy, diarrhoea and dysentery. This was probably due to the fact that it was overcrowded by four times its capacity. After the war ended in 1865, Captain Henry Wirtz, the camp’s commandant, was hanged for war crimes.

(By John L. Ransom – this image is available from the United States Library of Congress’ prints and photographs division under the digital ID pga.02585.)

So how did the meaning change to the less-shooty version we have today? Well, no one knows for sure, but it may well have been influenced by its use to describe a guideline on the bed of a printing press, after which the text wouldn’t print properly. Whatever the route, by the early 1900s people started using the word ‘deadline’ to describe any line that shouldn’t be crossed, and from there it wasn’t long before it became a synonym (i.e. another word for) a time limit.

(With thanks to my dad for telling me about the origins of this word.)

A mug my parents bought me. Just for any potential clients reading this – I’ve actually never missed a deadline. HONEST.

sanguine

This is one of those words that (to misquote The Princess Bride) doesn’t mean what I think it means. If you’re sanguine then you’re confidentally optimistic about something, or eagerly hopeful (I thought it meant you were resigned to something, which is entirely wrong). It also means ‘of or relating to blood’, and you can use it as an adjective to describe something that’s blood red. This second meaning makes sense when you know that the Latin word for blood is ‘sanguis’.

But how did a word that means ‘bloody’ also come to mean ‘optimistic’? Well, during the Middle Ages people believed that the human body contained four different liquids. These were called humours, and they were:

(Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.)

• phlegm

• black bile (also called ‘melancholy’)

• yellow bile

• blood.

The key to perfect health was to have all these humours balanced. But, everyone had one that dominated. So people who were solid, calm and unemotional were thought to have too much phlegm going on – which is where we get the word ‘phlegmatic’. Too much black or yellow bile meant you were bilious i.e. bad tempered. Blood was the best of the humours to be dominated by – these people were strong, confident and courageous. In short, sanguine.

As medical science advanced and germ theory came to the fore, the idea of humours slowly disappeared. But the words attached to them have stayed with us.

We get a few other bloody words from the same roots as ‘sanguine’ which you may or may not have heard of. These include:

• ‘sanguineous’ meaning ‘bloodthirsty’

• ‘consanguineous’ which means ‘descended from the same ancestor’

• exsanguination, which is what vampires do i.e. drain your blood

• sanguinary which means ‘murderous’ or ‘bloody’

• sanguinolent which is an adjective meaning something is ‘tinged with blood’.

(Thanks to my friend Rob Frankson for giving me the idea for this.)

The four humours in action – which one are you?

(Image from Wikipedia)

eavesdrop

As you’ll no doubt already know, to eavesdrop is to listen in to someone else’s convo without them knowing. But have you ever wondered what it has to do with ‘eaves’ and/or dropping stuff? Well, luckily I’m here to tell you, whether you want me to or not.

So, back in the day, ‘eavesdrop’ didn’t actually have anything to do with listening. It was actually much more literal, and referred to the water that fell from the eaves of a building (i.e. the edges of a roof which overhang the walls). The meaning then changed to refer to the ground where that water fell. In fact, there was an ancient law that meant when you were building your house you had to leave at least two feet between the edge of your eaves and your neighbour’s boundary. This was to make sure that any water dripping from your eaves stayed on your own land, thank you very much. There was even a legal term called ‘right of drip’ which entitled someone’s eaves to drip on their neighbour’s land (which sounds like a euphemism but isn’t). Eventually ‘eavesdrop’ morphed into a word describing people hanging around in that space under the eaves, listening in to conversations they shouldn’t be.

The original word ‘eavesdrop’ comes from an Old English word which goes all the way back to the ninth century. It has the fantastic spelling of ‘yfesdrype’ (and if you know how to pronounce that, will you marry me?).

Eavesdropping is a central plot point in a lot of well-known novels and stories. Here are some examples (SPOILER ALERTS):

A painting of some cardinals eavesdropping in the Vatican, by Henri Adolphe Laissement (that one in purple by the door is definitely telling the others to shut the fuck up).

• the entire plot of What Maisie Knew by Henry James (which I wrote an essay on at university but never actually read) revolves around a child, the eponymous Maisie, overhearing various salacious details of her divorced parents’ love lives (I think – like I said, I never actually finished it)

• Polonius gets stabbed in the arras while eavesdropping on Hamlet in, you’ve guessed it, Hamlet

• the unending misery that is Atonement by Ian McEwan is all kicked off by a child overhearing what she thinks is a rape

• all of Pride and Prejudice, and also Bridget Jones’ Diary, is centred on Lizzy Bennet/Bridget overhearing Colin Firth slagging her off.

cobweb

Obviously you know what a cobweb is (AKA things I constantly have on my car’s wing mirrors – how do the spiders stay in there?) But have you ever wondered where the ‘cob’ bit came from? Somewhat disappointingly, ‘cob’ is just an olde-worlde (Middle-English if you want actual facts) word for ‘spider’. It comes from the Old English word for spider which was atorcoppe – ‘ator’ meaning ‘poison’ and ‘coppe’ meaning ‘head’ – apparently those Old English types thought spiders were poisonous which, as far as I can work out, they never have been in the UK.

From ‘atorcoppe’ we got ‘coppeweb’ and then ‘cobweb’. While we’ve stopped calling spiders themselves ‘cobs’ (although J.R.R. Tolkien used it and ‘attorcoppe’ in The Hobbit in 1937), we’ve kept it when talking about their homes – although it might be something that dies out soon as the more pedestrian ‘spider’s web’ becomes more common.

Oh, and an old (from the 1670s) Norfolk term for a misty morning was a ‘cobweb-morning’. Nice, right?

Okay, spider facts. The biggest species of spider in the world is the Goliath birdeater. Despite its name, it very rarely preys on birds (thank god), preferring insects, worms and amphibians. It’s part of the tarantula family and can have a legspan up to 30 cm, a body length of up to 13 cm and weigh up to 175g. Yikes. The good news is that unless you’re in northern South America, you’re unlikely to come across a Goliath birdeater in your day-to-day doings. If you are there, you might also find one on a menu – they’re edible spiders and apparently taste like ‘shrimp’. Think I’ll pass, thanks.

(If you’re feeling brave, do a Google image search for ‘largest spider crab’. If the results don’t give you a little shiver then you’re a better person than me.)

cupidity

Photo by Christopher Beloch on Unsplash.

The ‘cupid’ bit of this has probably given you a clue as to the meaning. And while it does relate to the chubby Roman god of sexy times, it’s a bit darker than that. If you’re suffering from cupidity then you have a very strong desire for something, usually wealth or possessions. The word’s been around in English since the 15th century, and comes from the Latin ‘cupere’ which means ‘to desire’.

Cupid facts: The Roman god of love started out in classical myth as a slender youth, but for reasons best known to themselves (maybe because when you’re in a new relationship you always get a bit fat?) painters during the Hellenistic period (323 BC to 31 BC – but I’m sure you already know that, clever reader) made him increasingly chubbier until he became the lard-arse with a bow and arrow we see today. He’s the son of Venus (goddess of love – yay!) and Mars (god of war – boo!). According to the usual in-depth research I did (which just means I read the Wikipedia page on Cupid), Isidore of Seville (a Spanish scholar and cleric born in the year 560), Cupid is depicted with wings because lovers are ‘flighty and likely to change their minds’, he’s a young boy because love is ‘irrational’, and he has a bow, arrows and a torch (I assume not the battery-powered kind) because love ‘wounds and inflames the heart’. Sounds to me like Isidore hadn’t been having much luck with the ladies (or the gents – no heteronormativity here) when he wrote that.

borborygmus

Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash.

Now unless you’re a medical professional, or a big old know-it-all, then chances are you haven’t come across this word before. But I can almost certainly guarantee that it’s happened to you before. Because borborygmus is the technical term for when your stomach rumbles.

Etymologically speaking, the term ‘borborygmus’ has been around a long time – since 1724 to be very specific. It comes from the Greek word borboryzein which means, unsurprisingly, ‘to rumble’. The nice thing about it is that people think that it’s probably onomatopoeic. Go on, say it out loud. Sounds a bit like a stomach gurgle, right?

Borborygmus isn’t entirely confined to medical circles. It sometimes turns up as an adjective – borborygmic – generally used to describe noisy plumbing. Vladimir Nabokov (yes, he of pervy ‘Lolita’ fame) used it in his lesser-known (to me at least) novel ‘Ada’ (which, it turns out, is also pervy, this time in an incest-y way):

“All the toilets and waterpipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions.”

Borborygmus facts: The sound your stomach makes when it rumbles actually comes from your small intestine – the noise is produced by muscle contractions (or peristalsis), as food moves through it.

astrobleme

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash.

An astrobleme is the name given to a site that’s been hit by a meteorite. Or, to put it in more science-y terms, an ‘impact structure’. This isn’t to be confused with an ‘impact crater’ which is, well, just the hole-y bit – the impact structure includes all the deformed bedrock and sediment that’s underneath the hole (assuming I’ve understood Wikipedia correctly of course).

I like the word ‘astrobleme’ because it’s super literal. Its etymology translates as ‘star wound’ – ‘astron’ is Greek for star, and ‘bleme’ (also Greek) means ‘throw of a missile; wound caused by a missile’. It was coined by an American geologist called Robert S Dietz (1914–1995). His most notable feat was identifying the Sudbury Basin (Sudbury in Ontario, Canada, not the one in Suffolk which is just up the road from where I type this) as an ancient astrobleme – the second (or third, depending on which website you look at) biggest in the world.

But what’s the biggest, I hear you cry? Well, that honour belongs to the Vredefort crater in South Africa. It’s just over 300km (186.4 miles in old money) across. That means that the meteor that hit it was over 15km (9.3 miles) in diameter. Don’t panic though – it happened a VERY long time ago in the Paleoproterozoic Era which was between 2,500 and 1,600 million years ago.

The Vrefort crater has competition for the top spot from the Wilkes Land crater, which is underneath the ice caps in Antarctica and is as yet unverified. If it is an astrobleme then it’s a massive 480 km (300 miles) across. That means that the meteorite that caused it was at least 55km (34.5 miles) in diameter, which is four or five times wider than the Chicxulub impactor (good name for a band) AKA the one that killed all the dinosaurs, and also three-quarters of all the plant and animal species on Earth. Fuck.

ingurgitate

This is exactly what you’re thinking it is: the antonym (i.e. the opposite) of ‘regurgitate’. So it means to swallow something greedily (which my mum tells my dad off for doing with crisps). You can also use it figuratively – so you can ingurgitate a good book, for example.

You used to be able to just ‘gurgitate’ as well, although that means the same thing and seems to have fallen out of use completely (and isn’t to be confused with ‘gurgitation’, which means ‘a boiling or surging of a liquid’ (from Merriam-Webster)).

Ingurgitate was first seen way back in 1570. And whether you’re in or regurgitating (and I think we can all agree that the former is probably preferable, although might lead to the latter if you do it too fast), the etymology is the same. Both come from the Latin word gurges which means ‘whirlpool’. Although the link might not seem immediately obvious, it’s probably down to the action of whirlpools engulfing things which brought us to ‘gurgitate’.

(Bonus fact: The biggest whirlpool in the world – technically known as a ‘maelstrom’, which is an awesome word – is called the Saltstraumen, and is just off the coast of Norway, near the Arctic Circle. It forms four times a day as tides carry huge amounts of water through a small channel that’s only 490 feet (150 meters) wide. It’s so big that boats have to make sure they travel through this stretch of water when the maelstrom isn’t active.)

stellify

I came across this lovely word in Greg Jenner’s book ‘Dead Famous’ (well worth a read). To stellify something is to turn it into a star or to place it into the heavens. It comes from Greek mythology where this literally (well, literally in classical mythology) happened to people – in fact it was the best thing that could happen to a puny mortal at the end of their life (a couple you might have heard of who were full-on put into the heavens are Orion and Cassiopeia). But it’s also used to describe someone or something becoming famous. This is down to Geoffrey Chaucer – he of nightmare English lessons trying to read ‘The Canterbury Tales’ while waiting for the dirty bits – who wrote a poem called ‘House of Fame’ (or ‘Hous of Fame’ as it is in Middle English. See, it’s not that hard, is it?).

Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash.

Probably written between 1374 and 1385, the whole poem is over 2,005 lines long across three books (GC didn’t do things by halves). It’s basically about a poet who falls asleep and dreams he’s in a glass temple adorned with images of famous people and their deeds (so kinda like ye olde teenager’s bedroom then). With an eagle as a guide (OBVIOUSLY), he then meditates on the nature of fame for all of those 2,005 lines. I won’t quote it here because it’s in Middle English and therefore really bloody hard to read, but if you want to see it in action, go here.

Etymology wise, ‘stellify’ comes from the Latin work stella which means star. So that’s not very interesting. But it’s still a nice word, right?

charisma

The excellently named Charisma Carpenter – yes, that is her real name – of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame (photo credit: Gage Skidmore – also an excellent name)

Someone who’s charismatic is charming, attractive and often a little bit sexy. But you know that already. But did you know that ‘charisma’ actually has its roots in religion, specifically Christianity? It was only in the early 20th century that it came to have the little-bit-sexy meaning it has today.

‘Charisma’ originally comes from the Greek word ‘kharisma’ (so not much of a leap there) which means ‘favour freely given’ or ‘gift of grace’. Both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles talk about divinely conferred charisma, which is used to talk about someone who’s a favourite of him/her upstairs i.e. who’s received God’s favour. In English, from about 1640 onwards, people used ‘charisma’ to refer to a gift or power bestowed on someone by the Holy Spirit for the good of the church.

So where did the sexy come in? I’m afraid that’s a very unsexy story. German sociologist Max Weber came up with a new definition of charisma some time before 1920 (it was found in an unfinished manuscript after he died), which is generally regarded as having dragged the concept from theological obscurity into everyday use. He described it as:

“… a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person …”

janitor

This is a bit of an American word – we tend to have caretakers over here. ‘Janitor’ has a less obvious backstory than caretaker though (because that’s presumably just ‘one who takes care of somewhere’ innit). ‘Janitor’ comes from the Latin word ‘janus’ (yes, it has ‘bum’ in it – no sniggering at the back please) which means ‘arch’ or ‘gate’. So in days of yore ‘janitor’ was used to describe someone who guarded, you’ve guessed it, an arch or gate (and any other kind of entrance – agin, no sniggering please). Here it is in action in Vanity Fair:

“At the expiration of that time, wheels were heard whirling up to the gate – the young janitor went out with his gate-keys. It was a lady whom he let in at the bailiff’s door.”

— ‘Vanity Fair’ by William Makepeace Thackeray

Janus is also the name of a Roman god (who’s starred in a previous word of the week – contronym), who was the doorkeeper/bouncer for heaven. He had two faces, which presumably made him very good at his job (as he could see people coming and going – although I can’t imagine many people were leaving…). I like to think he said things like ‘your name’s not down, you’re not coming in’ and ‘no shirt, no entry’.

forensic

Photo by Nicole Reyes on Unsplash.

I listen to a lot of true-crime podcasts, and the word ‘forensic’ comes up all the time. I’ve recently been listening to an audiobook about a forensic scientist, which said that it doesn’t (as I thought) just relate to physical evidence like bits of skin and other gross stuff people leave at crime scenes. It’s actually a much broader term, and is a synonym (i.e. a word that means the same as) for ‘legal’ or ‘related to courts’.

Etymology-wise, ‘forensic’ comes from the Latin term forēnsis, which means ‘of or before the forum’. This is because, back in Roman times, people accused of crimes were presented to a group of important public individuals in the forum (AKA the marketplace). The naughty person and the person accusing them of being naughty would both give a speech telling their side of the story. The person who gave the best speech would then win. Yup, it was all about the argument and how they delivered it – the definition of not letting the truth get in the way of a good story. So I guess as long as you could do a good presentation then you could literally get away with murder.

Stay sexy, and don’t get murdered.

ultracrepidarian

We probably all know an ultracrepidarian. It’s someone who gives advice or opinions on things they don’t know anything about.

A different type of cobbler.

The story behind this word comes, as do many of my words of the week, from Ancient Greece. A famous painter by the name of Apelles (said to have been court artist to Alexander the Great – so a pretty big deal then) heard a cobbler being rude about the way he’d painted a foot in one of his works. Apelles then said something very cutting and witty to the cobbler about how he shouldn’t judge things that were beyond him (although, to be fair to the cobbler, he probably had seen a fair few feet working as he did in the shoemaking game… Anyway, I digress). Sadly, Apelles’ exact remark has been lost in the mists of time, which is annoying. But much cleverer people than me think it probably went something along the lines of ultra crepidam, which means ‘beyond the sole’ in Latin. And from that we get ultracrepidarian. Or, in modern parlance, mansplainer.

disaster

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

You know what a disaster is – a shitshow. So basically the whole world at the moment (just in case you’re from the future, it’s late 2020 and we’re in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic). But ‘disaster’ is another everyday word that has an interesting backstory.

It first turned up in 1567, and the ‘aster’ bit comes from the Latin word for ‘star’ (‘astro’). And the ‘dis’ bit is Latin for ‘baaaaaaaaaaad’. Or, to put it in a more professional way, the ‘dis-’ prefix expresses that a word is negative (think discontent, dishearten, dislike, and so on). This all comes from ye olde idea that the position of the stars influences what happens on terra firma. And that if those stars are out of whack, bad stuff goes down here. Like how Romeo and Juliet are described as ‘star-crossed’ AKA (spoiler alert) doomed to be thwarted by outside forces.

‘Disaster’ isn’t the only word that has a galactic flavour – ‘influenza’ comes from the Medieval Latin word for ‘influence’, based on the idea that epidemics were influenced by the position of the stars. Well, it’s as good a theory as any, I guess.