pedigree

If, like me, you’re a dog person, you probably associate the word ‘pedigree’ with overly pampered pooches – or the word ‘chum’. Of course, we also use it to describe anything with a snooty background, like royals or break-the-bank wine. But if we peel back the layers of history, the origins of the word ‘pedigree’ are actually quite unglamorous. And French.

Lovely Bella, sadly no longer with us

Our story begins in Anglo-Norman French, somewhere around the early 15th century. Without Ancestry.com or online DNA tests, medieval genealogists drew up family trees to prove who’d fathered who and who owned which chateau. They would draw a three-pronged symbol – three lines radiating from a single point – that connected parents to their offspring. That three-lined diagram looked very similar to the footprint of a large bird, specifically, a crane. So the term ‘pié de gru’ was born, which literally translates as ‘foot of a crane’. (Now, if you remember your GCSE French, or you’re familiar with the scary French Duolingo chouette, you might be thinking ‘sacre bleu, the French word for “foot” is “pied” not “pié”, you plank’. And you would be right – but, back in the medieval period, spelling was a bit of a free-for-all, and it was routinely written that way. Later, poncy scholars who wanted to make the word look closer to its original Latin root stuck a ‘d’ on it.)

Anyway, I digress. As you can probably guess, over the centuries, English speakers did what we do best: we stole the French phrase, chewed it up and spat it out as ‘pedigree’. By the late 16th century, the new spelling had stuck, and the word shifted from describing the physical diagram on a parchment to meaning the ancestral line itself. By the 18th century, the term expanded beyond human aristocrats to include the selective breeding of horses and cattle, eventually landing us where we are today – with certificates for purebred poodles.

My previous dog, Bella, was a purebred dachshund who did indeed come with a certificate. (I’d like to emphasise that I didn’t buy her – I took her on after her previous owner, my great aunt, passed away.) I adored Bella but, as well as that certificate, she came with all sorts of health problems – including terrible back issues due to years of selective breeding to produce that distinctive sausage shape. It’s a sad fact that the pursuit of the ‘perfect’ pedigree has left a tragic legacy across the canine world – as well as dachsies with dicky backs, we also have pugs who can’t breathe properly, German Shepherds with broken hip joints, Shar-Peis with severe skin infections, Great Danes with failing hearts and deaf Dalmatians (I could go on…). Breeding for a specific look often comes at a massive cost to dogs’ quality of life – so if you’re looking to get a dog, remember that rescue is the best breed.

nightmare

You know what a nightmare is (my dog has diarrhoea at the moment, so I’m literally living in one, as is my carpet) – a scary dream or, more broadly, a crappy real-life situation (not necessarily poop related). But what does a horse have to do with waking up in a cold sweat after dreaming you’re naked while about to play piano at the Albert Hall (just me?)?

Well, absolutely nothing, because the ‘mare’ of ‘nightmare’ isn’t anything to do with lady ponies. A mare is actually a malicious entity in Germanic and Slavic folklore. It sits on your chest when you’re sleeping, bringing on bad dreams. Most scholars trace the word ‘mare’ back to the Proto-Indo-European root mer-, which is associated with crushing, pressing and oppressing. That’s also where we get ‘mortar’ from (as in ‘pestle and’) as well as morsel, because you crush food with your teeth. This isn’t the only theory as where it came from though – there are a few others including that it stems from the Greek term ‘moros’, meaning ‘doom’.

The shape-shifting mare is often depicted as female (isn’t it always?) and has magical abilities to haunt her victim, as well as being able to shapeshift. She didn’t just target humans either – according to Nordic and German folklore, she often took horses out for midnight joyrides, leaving the poor beasts exhausted, terrified and covered in sweat by sunrise. She even targeted trees, particularly twisted, stunted pines growing on coastal rocks in Sweden, which are still known as ‘martallar’ or ‘mare-pines’.

Johann Heinrich Füssli’s 1781 painting The Nightmare

So, how can you keep this scary hag from putting her bum on you in the middle of the night? Well, medieval Europeans had some truly chaotic solutions. Depending on where you lived, you could ward her off by:

• leaving your slippers upside down next to your bed (seems far too easy)

• reciting a holy prayer/poem to trick her into counting all the stars in the sky before she could get close to you (more complicated)

• hanging a mirror over your horse’s manger to scare her with her own reflection (this happens to me a lot, with both mirrors and my phone’s front-facing camera).

If you managed to spot a mare wandering around the morning after an attack, German lore suggests the ultimate passive-aggressive move: politely invite her over for a nice breakfast. Not because she’ll want to avoid the awkward morning-after kitchen chat, but because almost every ancient culture has rules about hospitality. Once you share a meal with someone – even a demon – they can no longer harm you without bringing a massive curse down on themselves.

Well, at least the mare got a free brekkie out of it.

shoo-in

A shoo-in (not a ‘shoe-in’ as I thought) is someone or something that’s certain to succeed – the winner before the race has even started. Today, we use it for everything from obvious Oscar contenders to politicians with an easy lead. But did you know that its roots actually lie in early 20th-century American horse racing? And dodgy horse-racing at that?

‘Shoe-in’ first appeared in print around the 1920s – Merriam-Webster’s earliest citation dates it to 1928. The ‘shoo’ bit comes from the verb ‘to shoo’, as in to urge or guide someone or something away, like an annoying fly or other people’s children. But the things being shooed in this case are those horses I mentioned earlier, in races that had been rigged for betting purposes. Jockeys would deliberately hold their horses back and shoo the chosen horse to the front, guaranteeing it would win. So that horse was – you’ve guessed it – the shoo-in. And as long as enough of the jockeys were in on it, it was easy for trainers, owners, bookies, syndicates or whoever to quietly control the result and cash in.

By the 1940s, the term ‘shoe-in’ had broadened its meaning beyond the racetrack and was being used metaphorically in politics, entertainment and business – wherever someone seemed like a guaranteed winner. So while it’s now a harmless way to say ‘that’s a sure thing’, like lots of our words (and politicians), ‘shoe-in’ actually has quite the shady past.

hench(wo)man

These days a hench(wo)man is a villain’s loyal-to-a-fault sidekick, and the one who does the dirty work. But where does the ‘hench’ bit come from? Well, it actually has a quite noble backstory.

(Just FYI, henchperson sounds weird, which is why I’ve gone for that less sexist bracketed version.)

Hench comes from an Old English word ‘hengest’, which meant a horse – more specifically, a stallion or gelding ridden into battle. In the Middle Ages, a henchman (or henxman – an early spelling) was someone who walked or rode beside a noble or royal, often leading their horse. They were trusted servants, sometimes young noblemen, who acted as attendants in a lord’s household or during travel. The role was both practical and symbolic – yes, they were there to help with the horses, but having a henchman also showed off the lord’s status.

‘Henchman’ first appeared in Middle English in the 14th century. Records from 1360 mention ‘henxmen’ in the service of King Edward III. Over time, as the roles of squires and personal grooms disappeared, ‘henchman’ came to mean any loyal supporter or follower. By the 17th and 18th centuries, it was used more generally for someone who backed up a powerful figure. The more sinister meaning – a thug or blindly loyal enforcer – only became common in the 20th century, helped along by fiction books and films.

Talking of which, the most famous henchmen and women have probably gone up against James Bond. Here are just a few of my favourites along with JB’s perfectly delivered one liner.

• Oddjob in Goldfinger (1964), who’s electrocuted when Bond jams his steel-brimmed hat into electrified metal bars: ‘He blew a fuse.’

• Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye (1995) is crushed against a tree when Bond shoots down her helicopter harness: ‘She always did enjoy a good squeeze.’

• Necros, The Living Daylights (1987) (my favourite Bond film), who falls to his death after Bond cuts his bootlace during a fight hanging out the back of a plane: ‘He got the boot.’

• Vargas, Thunderball (1965), is shot by Bond with a speargun, and impaled against a palm tree: ‘I think he got the point.’

(Oh, and the slang term ‘hench’ for someone who’s big, strong and muscular probably does come from hench(wo)man, although no one’s completely sure.)

dashboard

These days we use the word dashboard for a couple of things – cars, and techy things with lots of displays and buttons, which I’m reliably informed by the internet are called graphical user interfaces (GUIs). So you might think it’s quite a modern word. In fact dashboards pre-date cars by a good 40 years*, first appearing in print in 1842. Hold on to your hats – let’s find out what put the ‘dash’ into ‘dashboard’.

The word ‘dashboard’ originally referred to a protective board or barrier at the front of a horse-drawn carriage. It was there to stop passengers being covered in crap thrown up by horses' hooves as they, you guessed it, dashed.

When cars turned up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the design used lots of elements from horse-drawn carriages (except for the horses, obviously), which included the dashboard. Initially it had the same function i.e. as a crap barrier, but as cars got more and more complicated (and got windows), the dashboard evolved to include various instruments and controls like the speedo, fuel gauge and so on (you know what a dashboard looks like). And we then started using the term to refer to that whole instrument panel.

In the mid-20th century, as computers and digital displays became the norm, the term expanded to include those GUIs I mentioned earlier, that display information and controls in one place. Cool, right?

*The first ‘proper’ automobile is widely attributed to Karl Benz (he of Mercedes-Benz fame), a German engineer and inventor. He developed and built the Benz Patent-Motorwagen in 1885, getting a patent for it a year later. It’s considered the world's first true automobile because it was designed to be powered by an internal combustion engine. Obviously there were lots of other experiments and prototypes that came before it though.

recalcitrant

Despite sounding like a medical complaint, recalcitrant is an adjective (AKA a describing word) for someone or something that stubbornly refuses to follow rules or instructions, while also being a dick about it. Think stroppy teenagers, Donald Trump or my dog*.

Recalcitrant’s angry roots are Latin, from ‘recalcitrare’, which is a combo of ‘re-’ (meaning ‘back’ or ‘again’, as in ‘return’, ‘recall’ and ‘recover’) and ‘calcitrare’, which means ‘to kick’. Why kicking? Well, in its original sense, ‘recalcitrare’ was used to describe the behaviour of a stubborn or unruly horse that literally kicked back at someone trying to control or train it. Over time, we’ve extended the term’s meaning to describe people who resist authority, are uncooperative, or are unwilling to be controlled or directed.

I asked my friend ChatGPT if he (it’s definitely a he) had any stories about stroppy horses. And he told me about Clever Hans. Now Clever Hans wasn’t actually stroppy (so I don’t think ChatGPT is going to be taking over the world just yet, seeing as he can’t even get that right), but it is quite an interesting story, so I thought I’d include it here anyway.

Clever Hans was a horse born in 1895ish who became famous for doing sums and other clever things. He would answer questions by tapping his hoof, and became a sensation in Germany in shows run by his owner, Willhelm von Osten. Hans could add, subtract, multiply, divide, work with fractions, tell time, keep track of the calendar, differentiate between musical tones, and read, spell, and understand German, which makes him much cleverer than yours truly.

Sadly, it turns out although Hans was a very clever horse, he was perhaps not quite as clever as everyone thought. A psychologist called Oskar Pfungst carried out a series of experiments to understand how Hans was answering questions correctly. And he discovered that the horse was actually responding to subtle (and unconscious) cues from his trainer and human audience. For example, when he was asked a question, he would start tapping his hoof. When he reached the right number of taps, the audience would involuntarily exhibit subtle body language changes like tensing up or relaxing. Hans would stop tapping when he detected these cues, giving the appearance of getting the question right.

One of the ways Pfungst realised he was doing this was that he only got the answer right when the person asking the question knew the answer themselves. This is now called the ‘Clever Hans effect’, and has changed the way scientists all over the world investigate animal intelligence.

Even after he was debunked, von Osten, who refused to believe Pfungst's findings, continued to show Hans around Germany, where he still attracted large and enthusiastic crowds. It’s worth pointing out that Willhelm never charged for any of these shows, either before or after Clever Hans was outed. Nice, right?

Also, I still think Hans was pretty clever.

*I love you really, Gus.

Clever Hans with Willhelm