treacle

I’m pretty sure you know what treacle is – uncrystallised syrup made during the refining of sugar. Okay, maybe you didn’t know that. But I’m sure you do know that it’s the sticky stuff that we use in many a pudding (my mum makes a killer treacle sponge pudding). Why ‘treacle’ though? Well, it turns out the word itself has distinctly medicinal origins.

As so many of these stories do, this one begins in ancient Greece. The word we’re interested in this time is thēriakos, meaning ‘of a wild animal’. Since lots of wild animals enjoy taking a chunk out of us human beings, thēriakē came to mean ‘antidote against a poisonous bite’. Latin borrowed this as theriaca, and the word eventually made its way through Old French into Middle English as triacle with this meaning. The earliest recorded use of it in English dates to 1340, in a text called ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’ where it refers to an antidote to poisons and snakebites.

(Just a quick aside: the ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt’ – literally the ‘again-biting of inner wit’ or the ‘Remorse of Conscience’ – is the title of a confessional prose work written in a Kentish dialect of Middle English. Wikipedia describes it as: ‘Rendered from the French original, one supposes by a “very incompetent translator,” it is generally considered more valuable as a record of Kentish pronunciation in the mid-14th century than exalted as a work of literature’. BURN.)

So how did we get from ‘remedy for painful bite’ to ‘sticky stuff on puds’? Well, theriac recipes often contained honey in large quantities – sometimes three times the weight of all the dry ingredients combined. Because of this, the meaning of ‘treacle’ later became associated with the sticky dark syrup left over from the process of sugar refining. This was probably because of a perceived resemblance to the old medicinal preparations. Or maybe just because it was really sweet.

‘Treacle’ is primarily a British term for what Americans call molasses, even though the two products aren’t actually identical – molasses is typically boiled for longer, creating a thicker, darker liquid with less sugar (and less fun, by the sounds of it). The figurative sense, meaning cloyingly sentimental, does appear in some American writing, but it’s less common than it is in British. Oh, and the pet name (‘Hello Treacle’), beloved of Pete Beale in Eastenders (showing my age there), comes from Cockney rhyming slang, where ‘treacle tart’ means ‘sweetheart’.

laconic

If you’ve ever had a text from someone consisting entirely of the letter ‘k’, you’ve been on the receiving end of laconic. As an adjective, it describes a way of speaking or writing that uses the absolute minimum number of words to get a point across. No padding, no pleasantries, no ‘I hope this email finds you well’. Just straight to the point, like a cricket ball to the crotch.

But, why ‘laconic’? Well, it comes from Lakonikos – a Greek adjective for anything relating to Laconia, a region on the south-eastern part of the Peloponnese peninsula. Laconia was home to Sparta and (obviously) the Spartans, whose six-packs you may remember from Zack Snyder’s naked chest-fest, 300. The Spartans were not big talkers. And while other Greeks like the Athenians were busy writing philosophy, performing tragedies and inventing democracy, the Spartans were honing an arguably more useful skill: saying a great deal by saying almost nothing.

The most famous example of Spartans being spartanly (yep) with their words comes from Philip II of Macedon. He was a man who loved to open a can of whup-ass (and dad to Alexander the Great), having taken Macedon from a fairly insignificant kingdom to a power that conquered most of Ancient Greece in less than 25 years. Turning his attention to Sparta, he sent a message asking whether he should come as a friend or a foe. The reply was ‘Neither’. He then sent the message:

If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.

The Spartans replied with a single word:

If.

There’s also a story from Plutarch of a Spartan mother sending her son off to battle. After handing him his shield, her farewell advice consisted of five words: ‘Either this or upon this’, meaning ‘Come back with your shield, or on it’ – returning without your shield meant you’d thrown it away to run faster (the ancient Greek equivalent of updating your LinkedIn profile before handing in your notice). Inspiring and absolutely terrifying.

So next time someone accuses you of being curt in an email or a text, tell them you weren’t being rude, you’re just channelling your inner Gerard Butler/Greek warrior. Sparta would be proud. Although they probably wouldn’t say so.

(PS The Philip vs Sparta story would have been great if it ended ‘Philip did not invade Laconia’, which is what ChatGPT told me when I was researching this. When I checked it elsewhere, which thankfully I always do since ChatGPT told me a bunch of lies previously, it turns out that Philip did indeed invade Laconia, devastating large parts of it and kicking the Spartans out. In hindsight, maybe a few more words might have helped.)

mundivagant

This is a lovely old word which has now sadly all but disappeared. It’s an adjective (AKA a describing word) which means ‘wandering through the world’. It has Latin roots and comes from ‘mundus’ meaning ‘world’, and ‘vagant’ meaning, you’ve guessed it, ‘wandering’ or ‘roaming’.

While you’re being mundivagant, you can also be a solivagant (this one’s a noun – and former word of the week – not an adjective, so it needs an indefinite article i.e. the ‘a’ before it). That means you like to wander on your own – ‘soli’ being Latin for ‘alone’ or ‘solitary’. And if you only want to do it at night, then you’re ‘noctivagant’ (this one’s an adjective again), ‘nox’ being ‘night’ in Latin. Although being a noctivagant solivagant might make you look a bit creepy…

Diogenes no-longer-of-Sinope-because-he-was-a-big-old-fraud (dunno who the dog was)

The ‘vagant’ bit of these words is also where we get the less-romantic word, ‘vagrant’. Nowadays ‘vagrant’ has quite negative connotations and we usually use it to describe people who’ve ended up on the streets. But it wasn’t always that way. Diogenes of Sinope was an ancient Greek philosopher who lived in the 4th century BCE, and was often referred to as a ‘vagrant philosopher’. He lived in a jar (yes, you did read that right – it was a very big jar, obviously) and survived by begging for food. He used this simple lifestyle and behaviour to criticise the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt, confused society.

This is all well and good until you find out that Diogenes’ dad, Hicesias, was a banker, and it was likely he followed in his father’s footsteps. At some point, Hicesias and Diogenes were involved in a scandal involving adulterating or debasing currency (that’s when you lower the value of coins by reducing the quantity of gold, silver or nickel in them, but continue to say they’re worth the same amount). Because of that Diogenes was exiled from Sinope, and lost his citizenship and all his possessions. Hmmm, that makes the mundivagant lifestyle a little bit less of a philosophical choice and more of a necessity, doesn’t it, Diogenes…?