word — Words of the week

I can’t imagine there are many of us who haven’t uttered the words ‘it’s a [expletive] shambles’ about something or other. So I’m sure you know that it means a state of disorder or confusion, AKA SNAFU. But, did you know that despite having been around since the end of the 16th century, it was only in the 1920s that ‘shambles’ came to mean this? Before that it had a much darker meaning… DUM DUM DUUUUUUM

Okay, so the first meaning of shamble (singular) was a stool or a ‘money-changer’s table’ (this isn’t the dum dum dum, don’t worry), from the Latin for footstool, ‘scamellum’. After a time it took on the extra meaning of a ‘table for the exhibition of meat for sale’, with ‘shambles’ (plural) becoming a term for a ‘meat market’ (the kind that sells meat, not the Colchester Hippodrome on a Friday night in the 90s). It wasn’t long before ‘shambles’ became an alternative word for a slaughterhouse and, finally, was used figuratively to describe a scene of blood, like a battlefield or place of execution. DUM DUM DUUUUUUM (there it is).

Here’s ‘shambles’ in action in this way in Shakespeare’s Othello:

‘Desdemona: I hope my noble lord esteems me honest.
Othello: O, ay; as summer flies are in the shambles, That quicken even with blowing.’

(I think this means he doth not esteem her honest.)

Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester (swoon) also uses it in this context:

‘If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter […] had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?"

YES, EDWARD, YES. Sorry. Where was I? Oh yes. The Shambles, the picturesque street of timber-framed buildings in York, is so called because there used to be lots of butchers’ shops there – 31 in 1885 apparently. Its full name was ‘The Great Flesh Shambles’. I can see why they rebranded.

I found a couple of different sources for ‘shambling’ as in wonky walking/zombies. Both stem from the stool/table-meaning I mentioned before all the dum dum dumming above. One source says that because people regularly hacked up chunks of meat on these tables, wobbly legs – or ‘shamble legs’ – were a hazard of the job. A second source says that it was to do with the bowlegged position you have to assume to sit on a stool, or shamble.

(I haven’t been able to find out why ‘shambles’ got sanitised in the early 20th century and came to have the hot-mess meaning it does today. Sorry.)

If you watched this week’s Inside No. 9 on the BBC (and if you didn’t, go and do that immediately), you will have heard this term, along with its definition. A mountweazel is a bit of fake information deliberately added to a reference work like a map or dictionary to root out anyone who’s illegally copying them. I used to work in directory publishing (which is as boring as it sounds), and we included made-up companies based at our home addresses to make sure people weren’t stealing data from our directories. So if I got a bit of marketing bumpf delivered at home from a company we knew hadn’t bought a list of addresses from us, then we knew they’d just copied it from the publication.

Here are some more fun examples.

The New Oxford American Dictionary added the made-up word ‘esquivalience’ in 2005 which they defined as ‘the wilful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities’ (geddit?).
The fictional town of Agloe in New York was added to maps as a ‘trap street’ to catch any would-be copyright infringers. Agloe ended up becoming a real landmark for a brief time after a shop opened on the spot named ‘Agloe General Store’, after the name on the maps. Unfortunately it later went bust and Agloe is no more. (Trap streets are quite common in cartography – so much so that they were a major plot point in an episode of Doctor Who called ‘Face the Raven’. It featured a hidden street where aliens could seek asylum, which people dismissed as a trap street when they saw it on maps.)

So, why are these called ‘mountweazels’? Well, it’s after one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fake entry added to the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. It read as follows:

‘Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942–1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.’

Mountweazels are also known as ‘nihilartikels’ which means ‘nothing article’ in Latin and German.

Sometimes words get added to reference works by accident (or crappy proofreading), in which case they’re called ‘ghost words’. The most famous example of a ghost word is ‘dord’ which appeared in the 1934 second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, and was defined as meaning ‘density’. This was in fact a proofreading error (the original entry said ‘D or d, cont/ density’ and was referring to the abbreviation ‘d’). It took five years for an eagle-eyed editor to spot it, and another eight years before it was removed from the dictionary.