crotchety

If you’re crotchety, you’re a bit cross and fed-up. Not full on angry, but definitely somewhere in the middle of the pissed-off scale.

‘Crotchety’ comes from an Old French word, ‘crochet’, which dates back to around the 12th century, and meant ‘a little hook’. That in turn comes from the Latin word ‘cruciculus’, which is a diminutive (i.e. a word that conveys a smaller or lesser version of something) of ‘crux’, meaning ‘cross’. (I don’t know why the smaller version is much longer and more complicated than the short version, sorry.)

My whole life, I’ve had an irrational fear of getting a fish-hook caught in my cheek.

Around the 16th century, we stuck a ‘t’ in ‘crochet’ to create ‘crotchet’ in English, which still meant ‘small hook’. And that’s where we get ‘crotchety’ from – probably due to the idea that crotchety people’s minds get ‘hooked’ on small, trivial annoyances. This association didn’t become common until the early 19th century (maybe people were just super-chilled before then) which is when we get the first recorded use of ‘crotchety’ in print. According to the OED, the earliest known use was in 1847, in some writing by Benjamin Disraeli, UK PM and novelist.

The musical crotchet (i.e. a quarter note in British English) also shares the same linguistic root – this is due to the hook-like symbols used in early musical notation. And of course, the name of the craft of ‘crochet’ comes from the same place as it involves a little hook (one which I cannot master, despite trying really hard. The last time I tried, I ended up throwing it across the room, where it landed in the dog’s water bowl.).

I got extremely crotchety with ChatGPT while writing this article, as it contradicted itself four times while I was trying to get the facts straight on this etymology. So the moral of this crotchety story is, don’t rely on ChatGPT to write factually accurate articles – hire me to do that instead.

(It did then help me with a particularly complicated knitting pattern though, so we’re friends again now. Not a crochet pattern though, sadly, because I CAN’T DO THAT.)

gamut

You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘run the gamut’, which sounds like something torturous in The Hunger Games. Don’t worry though, a thing that runs the gamut is actually just something that covers every possible point in a range. So if you’re feeling all the feelings, you can be described as having ‘run the gamut of emotions’.

But WTF is a gamut?

Guido of Arezzo laying down some phat beats

Allow me to take you back to the 11th century to meet a monk called Guido of Arezzo. Guido’s favourite thing to do was to organise sounds (obviously – well, I guess he didn’t have Netflix). He also spent a lot of time teaching Gregorian chant to young monks, and as part of this he developed a way to teach his singers to remember the musical scale more easily. He named the very lowest note in his scale ‘gamma-ut’. This was from ‘gamma’, the Greek letter used for that low note, and ‘ut’, the first syllable of an ancient hymn Guido loved. Over time, ‘gamma-ut’ was shortened to, you’ve guessed it, ‘gamut’, and people began using it to refer to the entire musical range of notes.

As musical theory evolved, so did ‘gamut’. It grew beyond music to mean a full scope or range of anything, which is why we get to run gamuts today in any arena we like.

I confess that I’ve done Guido a bit of a disservice above, as he wasn’t just a singing teacher. In fact, he’s known as the father of modern musical notation. Guido’s most significant contribution was to develop a musical notation system that allowed notes to be written down and read consistently. He also created the basis of the four-line staff, which positioned notes at fixed heights to show their pitch more clearly than earlier systems. This eventually led to the five-line staff we use today.

He didn’t stop there either. Guido also invented the solfège syllables, AKA ‘do-re-mi’. He originally used ‘ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la’ from a Latin hymn for St John the Baptist, and maybe just because he seemed to like an ‘ut’. This helped singers remember pitch relationships more effectively, and revolutionised teaching music by ear.

Guido’s inventions allowed people to share music in written form across Europe. So it’s pretty safe to say that without him, we wouldn’t have most of the music we have today. Or that song from The Sound of Music.