freelancer

I can’t quite believe I’ve never written about the word ‘freelancer’ before, being as I am one, but apparently I’ve missed a trick there. So, why are people like me who work for themselves called freelancers? Well, it all comes down to Sir Walter Scott, Scottish novelist, poet and historian. He used the word ‘Free Lance’ in his most famous work, Ivanhoe (1820), to describe a medieval mercenary: literally a knight whose lance (hee hee) was free for hire, i.e. not pledged to any lord. Here’s a quote showing it in action:

‘ …“Trust me, Estoteville alone has strength enough to drive all thy Free Lances into the Humber.”—Waldemar Fitzurse and De Bracy looked in each other’s faces with blank dismay.—“There is but one road to safety,” continued the Prince, and his brow grew black as midnight; “this object of our terror journeys alone—He must be met withal.”’

Sir Walter (what’s that on the table next to him?)

‘Freelance’ changed to a figurative noun around the 1860s and was recognised as a verb in 1903 by the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s only recently that it’s morphed into an adjective (‘a freelance writer’), verb (‘a writer who freelances’) and an adverb (‘she works freelance’).

As well as coining the word ‘freelance’, we also have Walter Scott to thank for the fact that many of us were subjected to Bryan Adams singing ‘Everything I do’ for 16 weeks (the same length as a domestic pig’s gestation period) in 1991 as part of the soundtrack to Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. That’s because Scott wasn't just a writer; he was a cultural phenomenon who essentially ‘invented’ the way we view the Middle Ages today. Ivanhoe’s romanticised version of knights, chivalry and tournaments sparked a massive Gothic Revival, including a real-life attempt by British nobles to hold a medieval tournament in 1839 (apparently it rained so hard the knights had to hold umbrellas over their armour, proving that the Great British Weather has been ruining days out for centuries). But what does all this have to do with Kevin Costner, Alan Rickman (god rest him), et al? Well, Scott’s responsible for the modern image of Robin Hood, calling him Locksley in Ivanhoe. He was also the first to firmly place Hood in the reign of Sean Connery, sorry, Richard the Lionheart.

Oh, and Scott also ‘found’ the crown jewels of Scotland which had been lost for over 100 years (in a chest in Edinburgh Castle – I can’t help thinking no one else had looked particularly hard). For that he earned a baronetcy, giving him that ‘Sir’. Score.

braggadocio

If you ever watch the news, ‘braggadocio’ might sound familiar. During the 2016 US election, Donald Trump famously used the adjective ‘braggadocious’. At the time, most of us assumed he was talking rubbish as per usual – see ‘panican’ (used during his second term to describe those panicking over his economic tariffs), ‘bigly’ (often interpreted as ‘big league’) and ‘I’ve stopped eight wars’. But ‘braggadocious’ is actually rooted in a word that’s been around for over 400 years (although I doubt DT knows that). And ironically, both the word and its history describe him perfectly.

‘Braggadocio’ is an uncountable or mass noun (exactly what it says on the tin – examples include ‘bravery’, ‘nonsense’ or ‘happiness’) that describes empty, arrogant boasting or a swaggering manner that isn’t backed up by much substance. Despite its Italian looks, ‘braggadocio’ wasn’t born in the olive oil-drenched streets of Florence or Rome – its origins are actually a lot closer to home. It was cooked up in 1590 by the English poet Edmund Spenser for his epic poem, The Faerie Queene, one of the longest poems in the English language at a bum-numbing 36,000 lines and over 4,000 stanzas.

In the poem, Spenser created a character named Braggadocchio – a ‘knight’ who was all mouth and no trousers. He first appears in Book II, Canto iii when he steals the horse and spear of the hero, Sir Guyon. He then spends the rest of the book riding around on his fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry warhorse, pretending to be a legendary warrior while actually being terrified of his own shadow. Why Braggadocio? To give the character an air of pretension (and perhaps to make him sound like the vainglorious characters found in Italian comedy), Spenser took the very English word ‘brag’ and slapped a pseudo-Italian suffix on the end of it. It’s the linguistic equivalent of putting a spoiler on a 2005 Vauxhall Corsa.

Eventually, ‘braggadocio’ escaped the poem and became shorthand for anyone whose mouth is (to quote that literary giant, Limp Bizkit) writing cheques that their ass can’t cash. Whether it’s a stolen horse in an epic poem or a stolen election narrative on social media, ‘braggadocio’ remains the ultimate red flag for a man with a massive ego who’s all wrapping paper and no present.