gauche

‘Gauche’ describes someone or something that’s awkward, tactless or lacking social graces. If you did any French at school, you probably remember that ‘gauche’ is French for ‘left’, and that’s exactly where we get this word from. But why does ‘left’ translate to using the wrong fork at dinner or calling without texting first (shudder)?

(Before I get into this, apologies to any members of the left-handed community, which includes my mum, for what I’m about to say.)

A bit of Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgment showing Christ waving his arms in the air like he just don’t care, sorry, I mean separating the righteous from the damned with his right and left hands.

Historically in Europe, being left-handed was associated with being clumsy or downright evil. This was down to the fact that 90% of people are right-handed, and us humans have always had a tendency to view anything outside the ‘norm’ with suspicion. It’s down to language too (handy for me) – the word ‘sinister’ literally translates to ‘on the left side’ in Latin, while ‘dexter’, meaning ‘right’, implies skill and cleverness, and has given us words like ‘dexterous’.

Many major religious and spiritual traditions heavily favoured righthandedness too. It all kicked off with poor old Eve (of course), who, according to later medieval legend (it actually doesn’t specify in Genesis), was created from Adam’s left side – and we all know how that ended up. According to one online source I found, the Bible has over 100 favourable references to the right-hand alongside 25 unfavourable ones to the left-hand. For example, in Psalm 118, it says ‘The right hand of the Lord is exalted: the right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly’. And the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew describes how God will divide nations on Judgment Day ‘as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats; and he shall set the sheep [the good guys AKA the righteous] on his right hand, but the goats [the damned] on the left’. Poor old goats.

Lefties don’t fare much better in Islam either – in the Middle East, the left hand is seen as dirty, mainly due to the custom of using it to, well, wipe your bum. (There’s a theory that this is where we get ‘cack-handed’ from, though the origins are thankfully shrouded in mystery.)

So, after centuries of religious bias, linguistic snobbery and literal witch-hunts, ‘left’ had ended up with quite a bit of baggage. And when 18th-century English aristocrats started pinching French vocab to sound cultured (the earliest recorded use of ‘gauche’ in English is in a letter by one Lord Chesterfield in 1751), they adopted ‘gauche’ as a snappy insult for anyone lacking high-society polish – turning a simple direction into a go-to phrase for being a total social disaster.

heckle

Today, I think probably everyone thinks heckling is a thing that happens to people on stage, mostly comedians. But it has genuinely surprising origins. And they involve… sheep. Scottish sheep, to be precise.

In the early 14th century, ‘heckle’ (then spelled ‘hechel’) was a noun that referred to a comb for flax or hemp. It came into English from the Middle Dutch ‘hekelen’, which itself is from a root meaning ‘hook’ or ‘tooth’, a nod to the rows of sharp teeth on the combs. The verb followed soon after around 1350, meaning to comb out fibres before spinning them into linen.

Although flax was the main thing being heckled at this point, the same process of combing applied to wool, which is where my sheep come in. Farmers and spinners would literally heckle wool fibres into shape before weaving them into cloth.

So how did it go from combing to shouting at gigs? Come with me to 18th-century Dundee. This was the local centre of the wool trade and therefore full of hecklers, skilled workers employed to comb out wool. These hecklers had a reputation for radical politics, forming themselves into what we’d call a union today, and bargaining for better salaries and perks (mainly booze, apparently). At public meetings they’d bombard politicians with awkward questions, ‘combing through’ their arguments just like they did with those tangled fibres. And by the 1790s, ‘to heckle’ had also come to mean challenging or interrupting a speaker. Fast forward to the 19th century, and the textile sense of ‘heckle’ had pretty much faded away completely.

There you go. From pulling fibres apart to pulling people on stage apart in less than 500 years.

bellwether

A bellwether is ‘an indicator of trends’. Here’s a very egotistical (and patently untrue) example:

‘Emma’s family and friends often look to her as a bellwether of fashion.’

Bellwether can also mean ‘one that takes the lead or initiative’, which is also not true of my fashion sense.

Nowadays you’re most likely to see the word ‘bellwether’ in political or economic commentary. Here’s an actual example from the Washington Post:

‘Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain and considered a bellwether for the industry, is just the latest to shake up its print offerings.’

So what do trendsetters have to do with bells or, indeed, wethers? Well, to answer that, please come with me to… a sheep farm.

All flocks of sheep have a leader. And shepherds and farmers have traditionally hung a, you’ve guessed it, bell around the top sheep’s neck. A ‘wether’ is a word for a male sheep (nowadays the term specifically means a castrated male sheep) – so the leading sheep is called a ‘bellwether’.

This term for the sheep prime minister has been around since the 15th century. And over time we started to use it to refer to anyone who’s the leader of the pack (or flock), who takes initiative or who establishes trends that are then taken up by others.

If you’re wondering how the sheep choose their leader, they either do that themselves, by letting the most dominant one take the lead, or the farmer does it for them. Why does the farmer want to rig the sheep election? Well, they might do this because one sheep is particularly good at navigating obstacles or familiar with the terrain, and can therefore keep the rest of the sheep on the straight and narrow. Who knew? (Well, all the sheep farmers, obviously.)