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.)

fathom

Fathom has a few meanings, the most well-known of which is probably as a unit of measurement for the depth of water, one fathom being equal to six feet (1.83 metres for my metric friends). ‘Fathom’ also has a figurative meaning which is when you use it to describe understanding or comprehending something – ‘despite her best efforts, she couldn’t fathom what the hell was going on’.

Fathom comes from an Old English word, fæthm, which means ‘outstretched arms’ or ‘embracing arms’. In fact, ‘fathom’ was once used as a verb to mean ‘embrace’ – so you could say you were going to fathom someone if you were going to hug them (although that does sound vaguely threatening). In the 1600s, ‘fathom’ ran away to sea, and the verb came to mean ‘to measure with a sounding line’ – a sounding line being a bit of rope with a weight on the end used to measure the depth of water. The measurements then became known as fathoms, because sailors used their outstretched arms to measure the length of these ropes or cables (which makes much more sense that what I was imagining – lots of sailors trying to measure the depth of water by getting in the sea and stretching their arms out). Eventually this measure was standardised as six feet.

At the same time as all this was happening on the ocean waves, landlubbers started using ‘fathom’ to mean ‘probe’ or ‘investigate’. That’s because it was all about getting to the bottom of something – just like those sounding lines.

barmecide

Despite sounding quite murderous (‘Oh my god, he’s a barmecidal maniac!’), ‘barmecide’ actually has a slightly more mundane meaning. It’s an adjective (AKA a describing word*) for something that has the illusion of abundance but is ultimately disappointing. Here’s an example: ‘The company’s extravagant promises turned out to be barmecidal, leaving the investors with nothing.’ Apparently a ‘barmecidal feast’ is a well-known phrase, although not one that I’ve ever come across.

So why have I chosen ‘barmecide’ and its sad investors? Well, because it has quite an interesting backstory. ‘Barmecide’ is an eponym (AKA a word named after a person) and comes from ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ (also known as ‘The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment’ or ‘Arabian Nights’, which is what everyone actually calls it). The tale that introduces the term is ‘The Barber’s Tale of his Sixth Brother’ in which a prince called, you’ve guessed it, Barmecide, invites a beggar to a big old feast. Because Barmecide is an arsehole, the feast is an illusion and the beggar is given empty plates and glasses that only appear to have food and drink in them. And that’s where we get our word from. Thankfully our beggar is a wily chap and pretends to get drunk on the imaginary wine before punching the prick of a prince. Hooray.

*If you don’t know your adjectives from your elbow, head to my Instagram page for a video on parts of speech. More fun than it sounds, honest.

torpedo

I’m sure you know what a torpedo is – an underwater weapon with an explosive warhead that propels itself towards a target, often accompanied by Harrison Ford and some dramatic music in the background. But do you know why a torpedo is called a torpedo? Well, it comes from a Latin word, ‘torpere’, which means ‘to be stiff’ (behave) or ‘to be numb’.

I’m now going to take you on a mini tour of Europe. Ready?

In the 16th century, the Italians called an electric ray (the fish kind) a ‘torpedine’. This was based on the numbness bit of ‘torpere’ – because if you got electrocuted by the fish, you went numb. This word then moved to Spain (that fish obviously got about a bit), where it was changed to ‘torpedero’.

Robert Fulton – I would

Next we’re going to France, where the word ‘torpille’ appeared in the mid-19th century for a kind of explosive device used in naval warfare. This was probably because of the electric ray’s ability to immobilize underwater prey with electric shocks. This word was later borrowed into English as ‘torpedo’. An American inventor called Robert Fulton (1765–1815) popularised it as a term to describe explosive charges when he added them to the Nautilus, his submarine.

As well as building the world’s first ‘proper’ submarine, which he designed between 1793 and 1797, Fulton had a series of homosexual and polyamorous relationships during his life, including living with a couple in Paris for six years. He died from pneumonia after diving into an icy Hudson River to rescue a friend who’d fallen in. None of this is relevant to torpedoes, but I’ve included it because he sounds like a TOTAL LEGEND.

lemma

A lemma is a term or phrase that’s being defined or explained. Huh? Here it is in action – when you look up a word in a dictionary or, more likely these days, type a word into a dictionary search bar, the word you’re typing is called a lemma.

Lemma has its origins in ancient Greek. It’s derived from the Greek word ‘λῆμμα’ which means ‘something taken’, ‘an assumption’ or ‘a proposition’. It’s the noun (person, place or thing) form of the verb (doing word) ‘λαμβάνω’, or ‘lambanō’, which means ‘to take’.

The plural of lemma is either ‘lemmas’ or, if you’re feeling a bit arcane, ‘lemmata’. And it’s also where we get the word ‘dilemma’ from – which is ‘lemma’ in the sense of a proposition, with ‘di’ meaning ‘two’ at the start – two propositions.

All of this emma-based etymology caused me to ask ChatGPT what my name means. He told me it comes from the Germanic word ‘ermen’ or ‘irmin’, which means ‘whole’ or ‘universal’. He went on to say that Emma is ‘a classic name that carries a sense of timelessness and elegance’. Fingers crossed he wasn’t just buttering me up before he steals my job and brings about Judgement Day.

If you’re not a fan of ‘lemma’, another word for a term being defined is a ‘definiendum’. It’s fun to say, and will deffo make you sound like a smarty pants. You’re welcome.

mascot

When you hear the word ‘mascot’, you probably think of someone dressed in an oversized costume running about at a sports event posing for pictures and hugging people. But in fact, the word ‘mascot’ has quite a sinister history, rooted in black magic and witches. OOOH.

Okay, I might have overegged the pudding ever so slightly. The word ‘mascot’ dates back to the 19th century, and comes from the French word ‘mascotte’, which was used to describe a lucky charm, talisman or magical object. This in turn came from ‘masco’, a Provençal (a dialect of southern France) term for a sorceress or witch. That probably comes from the Old Provençal word ‘masca’, meaning ‘mask’ or ‘spectre’. In the late 19th century, we started using the term to refer to a person, animal or object that brought luck or represents a group, like a sports team.

Sports team mascots are often chosen based on symbolism, characteristics or qualities that are supposed to bring positive energy or success. But sometimes they’re just downright scary. Take Kingsley, who represents Partick Thistle, a professional football club from Glasgow, and looks like a squashed sun with the cold dead eyes of a killer. He was designed by Turner Prize-nominated artist David Shrigley and was unveiled in 2015 to coincide with Thistle’s new sponsorship from investment firm Kingsford Capital Management. Reactions to Kingsley varied from ‘Lisa Simpson on meth’ to ‘the haggard face of the Teletubbies’ sun baby’. Kingsley also has the dubious honour of being the only mascot ever to earn a review from the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones, who compared him to the monsters painted and sculpted by the surrealist Joan Miró. It obviously hit home as well, with Kingsley’s web page on the Partick Thistle site reading as follows:

‘There were a lot of mean things said about me when I first appeared, but I’m not too concerned because I know it’s what’s on the inside that counts. I’m a nice guy really – just a bit misunderstood … I might look a bit angry but I’m really very approachable and I love Partick Thistle. So don’t be scared to come and say hello if you see me out and about.’

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

WT actual F

ambigram

An ambigram is a word, phrase or symbol that you can read from different orientations or perspectives, usually in at least two different ways. So the word or symbol is still legible when you rotate it or look at its reflection, and might reveal a different word or phrase.

If you’ve lost interest after this convoluted explanation, let’s look at a couple of examples:

SWIMS

This is a rotational ambigram, which means it reads the same when rotated 180 degrees (i.e. upside down).

NOON

This can be designed as a mirror-image ambigram – so if you look at it in a mirror, it reads MOON.

Image from https://www.johnlangdon.net/works/angels-demons, © John Langdon

To make them work, ambigrams are often done in fancy-dancy calligraphy, which means they’re popular as logos and tattoos. Dan Brown used this in his rubbish book ‘Angels and Demons’ where the Illuminati’s symbol is an ambigram (that was designed by John Langdon, who has loads of cool ambigrams on his website).

Ambigrams aren’t the same as palindromes, which are defined as words, verses or sentences that read the same backwards as they do forwards. So ‘deified’ is a palindrome. But ‘noon’ is both a palindrome and an ambigram (head explodes).

Ambigram is a portmanteau (a word made up of two other words), in this case a combination of ‘ambi-’ from the Latin word ‘ambidexter’ meaning ‘both’ or ‘on both sides’, and ‘-gram’ from the Greek word ‘gramma’, meaning ‘grandma’. Not really, it means ‘letter’ or ‘written character’.

The term ‘ambigram’ was coined by Douglas R. Hofstadter, an American scholar of cognitive science, physics and comparative literature, in the early 1970s. He’s known for his interest in puzzles and visual art, and exploring patterns in language. He introduced the concept of ambigrams in his book ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid’, which was published in 1979. Such was his influence that he even gets a mention in ‘2010: Odyssey Two’ by Arthur C. Clarke (the sequel to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’), when scary (especially now) AI HAL 9000 is described by the character Dr Chandra as being caught in a ‘Hofstadter–Möbius loop’ (I tried to find out what this actually means, but it was far too complicated for little ole me).

Hofstadter also created his own law (I want a law!), which is ‘It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’. This basically means that any task or project will probably take longer than you thought, even if you take into account Hofstadter’s law that it’s likely to take longer than you thought (second head explosion).

(Oh, and in case you were wondering, Leonard Hofstadter in The Big Bang Theory wasn’t named after our Doug, but after Robert Hofstadter, an American physicist who won the 1961 Nobel Prize in physics. He was Douglas’s dad though (that’s one talented family).)

retronym

A retronym is a word for something that’s been named or renamed to differentiate it from a newer or modified version. They’re usually created by adding an adjective or qualifier to the original term. If you’re currently saying ‘Huh?’ and losing the will to live, let’s have a look at some examples which should hopefully make it clear:

• ‘acoustic guitar’ is a retronym which appeared after electric guitars – before they were just called ‘guitars’

• ‘film camera’ turned up after digital cameras were invented – before they were just ‘cameras’

• ‘landline phone’ is a retronym that appeared after we all got mobiles – before they were just, well, I’m sure you get it now.

As you’ve probably realised from the above, retronyms usually appear when an advancement or change in technology or society means the original term becomes ambiguous.

‘Retronym’ is a relatively young term, and was coined by American linguist Frank Mankiewicz in a magazine article in the early 1980s. It’s made up of two parts:

• ‘retro’ – you know what retro means, and

• ‘nym’ which comes from the Greek word ‘onoma’, meaning ‘name’ or ‘word’.

So it basically means ‘a name or word that looks back’.

The word ‘retronym’ follows the same style as other linguistic terms which you may or may not remember from school – like ‘synonym’ (a word that means the same as another word, like ‘big’ and ‘large’ – ‘syn’ being a Greek word for ‘together’ or ‘with’), or antonym (the opposite of a synonym, with the ‘ant’ bit coming from ‘anti’, which is Greek for ‘opposite’ or ‘against’).

maven

A maven is someone who’s exceptionally experienced or knowledgeable about something – basically it’s a fancy-dancy way of calling someone an expert. So you could say ‘Emma is an etymology expert’ (oh, thanks).

’Maven’ comes from the Yiddish (a West Germanic language spoken by Jews) word ‘meyvn’ which means ‘one who understands’. It’s related to the Hebrew verb ‘bin’, which means ‘to understand’.

‘Maven’ was made popular by a guy called William Safire who, to be frank, sounds like my perfect man (if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s dead). He wrote a feature in The New York Times called ‘The Maven’s Word of the Day’ where he explored ‘new words, vogue phrases and the intriguing roots of everyday discourse – with occasionally crotchety observations on everything from proper usage to impropaganda’. The column aimed to entertain and educate readers about the English language and its quirks (it’s like looking in a mirror – even if he may have had one or two more readers than me). It ran for more than 30 years under Safire, and he wrote an impressive 1,300 instalments.

Safire receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006 (White House photo by Shealah Craighead)

Much like me, William didn’t have any real credentials for his wordy expertise, saying after being hired to write his column, ‘So what if I hadn’t finished college [he dropped out after two years ar Syracuse University], or even studied Latin? In the language dodge, I figured, a cat could look at a king.’ That’s one of the reasons he chose the word ‘maven’ as his title, as he said it contained ‘a note of self-mockery’. Also much like me, he was happy to play fast and loose with language if it suited, saying ‘I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness’. Despite that, he was a staunch defender of correct English, and was instrumental in getting Safeway stores to change their express-lane signs from ‘Ten items or less’ to ‘Ten items or fewer’. SWOON.

Safire didn’t just wax lyrical about words. He was also a speechwriter for Richard Nixon where he coined several memorable phrases, including describing critics of the administration as ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ in a speech for Vice-President Spiro Agnew. He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1978, and was described by President George W Bush as ‘a voice of independence and principle’, adding ‘American journalism is better for the contributions of William Safire’.

What a legend.

myrmecophilous

If you’re described as ‘myrmecophilous’, then you’re associated with, benefited by or fond of (hopefully not in a weird way) ants. It’s a scientific term that describes the positive relationships ants have with other species like butterflies, crickets, beetles and mites, all of which help them be good at staying alive (that’s the science). For example, butterflies belonging to the family Lycaenidae (which is almost 6,000 species worldwide), are myrmecophiles. In return for protection from predators, some caterpillars have developed dew patches, small button-like spots on their backs, that ooze a thick sugary fluid that the ants go nuts for, while others have a nectar gland that pumps out the same sweet goodness (sounds gross, I know). So the ants get their fix, and the caterpillars get bodyguards (even if they are all hopped up on sugar).

The word myrmecophilous has Greek roots. ‘Myrmec’ means ‘ant’, while the ‘phile’ ending comes from ‘philos’, which means to love. Like extremophile, galanthophile and lots of other nasty words we won’t mention here.

Okay, ant facts.

• There are over 12,000 ant species worldwide.

• The bullet ant is said to have the most painful sting in the world – it feels like being hit by a hammer. Just kidding, it feels like a bullet, obviously.

• A single ant can carry 50 times its own bodyweight. And they even work together to move stuff they can’t manage on their own.

• Ants can be found on every single continent except Antarctica, which is mental considering it’s the only continent that literally starts with ‘ant’.

• The biggest ants’ nest ever found is over 3,700 miles wide. Yep, you did read that right. Called the ‘Argentine Ant Supercolony’ (good name for a band), it goes from northern Italy through the south of France, and out to the western coast of Spain. Many ant experts think it’s actually much much bigger than this and stretches across the globe – that’s because Argentine ants from opposite sides of the world recognise each other (which I think basically means they don’t try to kill each other), leading them to think they all live in one utterly ginormous colony. Here’s hoping they don’t rise up and take over the world… actually maybe that would be better.

• I ate a stir-fry in a restaurant in Cambodia that had ants in it (as an ingredient – it wasn’t a really dirty restaurant) – although I didn’t realise until I was about halfway through. I thought they were saffron or something like that. It was very nice, but once I did realise, I couldn’t finish it.

tartle

‘This is…’

Picture the scene. You’re at a party (not that I ever go to parties anymore. But I do remember them. Vaguely). You’re making small talk with someone you’ve met a few times, but whose name currently escapes you. Then disaster strikes. Your partner/friend/someone else you know comes over to join the conversation. They both look expectantly at you, waiting for introductions. You hesitate just a bit too long. Panic… PANIC…!

Congratulations, you’ve just tartled.

This lovely Scottish verb is the act of hesitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name. It’s important to note that it’s the hesitation that ‘tartle’ is referring to here – not the act of bad memory itself. If you do this type of thing a lot, then you can be described as ‘tartlesome’.

Sadly ‘tartle’ hasn’t taken off as much as it should, so there’s not much info on its origins. It’s possible that it comes from an Old English word, ‘tealtrian’, which means to totter, shake, stagger or generally be uncertain.

So there you have it. Next time you find yourself trying to introduce someone whose name you’ve forgotten, just fill that awkward silence with ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve just tartled.’ And hope no one thinks that means you’ve broken wind.

quiddity

The most popular sport in the wizarding world, it’s played on broomsticks, and involves each team… I jest, of course. Quiddity is a philosophical concept that describes the thing that makes something what it is – its essence. So you could write: ‘Emma’s weekly posts capture the quiddity of complicated words in straightfoward prose.’ Oh really? How kind of you to say, thank you so much.

It’s nothing to do with HP. But there are no good pictures for ‘essence’.

Now, my two major word-of-the-week sources (which are Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster), disagree on the meaning of quiddity. The one above is Merriam-Webster’s definition, which is the one I’m going with because it’s easiest to understand. But according to Wikipedia, quiddity is a bit more complicated, and describes the properties that a particular thing shares with others of its kind. This makes it the opposite of something called ‘haecceity’ or ‘thisness’ (which apparently is an actual word) i.e. a positive characteristic of an individual that causes it to be this individual, and no other. See why I’m going with the first one?

Quiddity comes from a Latin word, ‘quidditas’. That’s a translation of a Greek phrase ‘to ti en einai’ , meaning ‘the what it was to be’, which sounds like something a drunk person would say.

Quiddity can also refer to a small and usually trivial criticism or complaint, or to a quirk or eccentricity in someone's behaviour or personality. Hamlet uses it in this way in, well, ‘Hamlet’ in his graveside speech, referring to a lawyer: ‘Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures.’

That’s not a very fun note to end on, so here’s a quidditch joke:

Why should you never have sex with a wizard?

Because you might catch Hogwarts, and they never stop quidditching.

(I didn’t say it was a good joke.)

vocable

A vocable is a form of non-lexical utterance. Got it? Nope? Okay, in normal-person speak, they’re word-like sounds that aren’t actually words. Their meaning can change depending on the context, and they often show the speaker’s emotional reaction to something. If you’re still thinking ‘WHAT?’, here are some English examples of vocables and their translations:

I think this is definitely ‘um….?’

• uh-huh: yes

• mm-hmm: also yes

• uh-uh: nope

• hmmm: I’m not sure, maybe

• uh-oh: crap, this isn’t good

• awww: thanks or that’s super-cute

• um…?: what the f*ck

• ewwww: yuck yuck and more yuck.

Filler words like ‘er’ and ‘um’ (i.e. words we use to buy more time when we’re thinking and talking at the same time) also count as vocables. And they turn up in music a lot, as in ‘lalala’ or ‘dumdedum’ (in fact, there are lots of Native American songs that consist entirely of vocables). Every language on earth has its own vocables.

There are lots of other types of words that aren’t actually words. These are called pseudowords, and they include the following…

Nonsense words

Beloved of Lewis Carroll, nonsense words sound like they could be words, but aren’t. Have a read of The Jabberwocky to see them in action.

Nonce (!) words

Nothing to do with Prince Andrew (allegedly), nonce words are words coined for a single occasion only. They’re often used to study the development of language in children, because they let researchers test how kids treat words they don’t already know.

The name comes from ‘for the nonce’ which is an old English idiom meaning ‘for the time being’ or ‘for now’ (thank god).

Ghost words

Words published in a dictionary or reference book by mistake, which are often taken as gospel by readers. A great example is ‘dord’, which was accidentally created by the staff of G. and C. Merriam Company (now part of Merriam-Webster) in the 1934 edition of the New International Dictionary. It was defined as follows:

dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chem. Abbreviation for density.

So how did this happen? Well, on 31 July 1931, Austin M Patterson, the dictionary’s chemistry editor, sent in a slip reading ‘D or d, cont./density’, which was supposed to add ‘density’ to the list of words that the letter ‘D’ can abbreviate. But whoever was doing the dictionary misread this as one word: Dord. It then appeared on page 771 of the dictionary between the entries for ‘Dorcopsis’ (a type of small kangaroo) and ‘doré’ (golden in colour). It wasn’t until 1939 that an eagle-eyed editor realised ‘dord’ didn’t have any etymology and investigated, then flagged the error. Books being what they are though, it took until 1947 before ‘dord’ was completely removed.

haywire

If something goes haywire, it means it works erratically, in a crazy way or doesn’t work at all. We often use it when we’re talking about technology. That might make you think the ‘wire’ of ‘haywire’ is something to do with power-type wires (that’s the official technical term), but you would in fact be wrong. ‘Haywire’ actually has a much older meaning to do with… wait for it… hay.

Well, I didn’t say it was exciting.

People who deal with hay (farmers, I guess?) use baling wire – a thin, flexible metal wire – to bind together (you’ve guessed it) bales of hay. It’s a bit like duct tape, in that it’s used for all different types of quick and dirty repairs (see ‘The Martian’ by Andy Weir – and the Matt Damon-starring film – for the wonders of duct tape: ‘Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.’ I wholeheartedly agree). Some of the repairs baling wire is used for include ‘wiring gates shut, mending a fence, holding rickety machinery together and stuff like that’. This led to the expression ‘haywire outfit’, which appeared around the turn of the century. It referred to New England logging camps which used cheap temporary fixes (often involving baling wire) for repairing equipment, rather than doing it properly. Eventually the word ‘haywire’ came to describe anything that was flimsy or patched together, and then for attempts to fix things that went wrong.

Unlike duct tape, hay wire also has a reputation for being tricky to manage. That’s because, much like Christmas lights, wired headphones and my jewellery, it can get itself in a complete tangle without any outside intervention. It was probably this that led to ‘haywire’ getting the meaning of ‘crazy’ or ‘out of control’.

carceral

Carceral is an adjective meaning of, or relating to, jails or prisons. The sharp-eyed among you have probably already realised that it shares its roots with ‘incarcerate’ (i.e. put in prison). Both of these come from the Latin word for prison, ‘carcer’. And that comes from ‘karkros’, a Proto-Italic word for ‘enclosure’ or ‘barrier’. In case you’re wondering ‘Proto-Italic’ languages are the ancestors of the Italic languages, spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. So well old, then.

There are lots of other slang words for prison and going to jail. Here are just a few I found.

Slammer

This one didn’t appear until the 1950s in the US of A. It’s pretty straightfoward – it refers to doors being closed noisily behind you.

Clink

Possibly from the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer closing the irons around the wrists or ankles of prisoners. There was also a prison called the Clink in Southwark which goes all the way back to 1129 (and is now the site of The Clink prison museum, where my sister and I once spent a memorable afternoon – there are A LOT of awesome photo opportunities in there). It might also have been influenced by the Flemish word ‘klink’ meaning ‘latch’.

Doing bird

Cockney rhyming slang for ‘birdlime’ which translates to ‘doing time’. This is probably because birdlime is horrible sticky stuff spread on twigs to trap small birds by utter bastards (thankfully banned in most places now).

Pokey

This first appeared in the early 20th century, although no one knows its exact origins. It might come from ‘pogey’, a 19th-century English slang word for poorhouse.

Pen

This is short for ‘penitentiary’, which has been around since the early fifteenth century. Then it meant a ‘place of punishment for offenses against the church’, from the Medieval Latin ‘peniteniaria’ meaning ‘of penance’. The slang term ‘pen’ first appeared in 1884.

In other prison news, England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe, locking up 149 people for every 100,000 of the population. Yay us. And apparently old people are getting naughtier – between 2002 and 2015, the number of prisoners aged 60 and over rose by 164%.

If all that’s left you feeling a bit depressed, here’s Johnny Depp in a parody of Jailhouse Rock in John Water’s stone-cold classic ‘Cry Baby’. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you watch it immediately – alongside JD, it also has Iggy Pop and Ricki Lake in it, for crying out loud.

juggernaut

A juggernaut is something huge and powerful, usually destructive, that can’t be stopped, either literally or metaphorically. Like a steam roller, or Donald Trump’s ego. In British English we also use it for a big old lorry. But it is a bit of a weird word. So what is a jugger, and why is it nauting?

A slightly unimpressive photo of the temple

Well, the good news is that ‘juggernaut’ has some epic etymology. The bad news is that it’s a bit grim. It comes from Jagannāth, the Hindi word for ‘Lord of the World’. Jagannath is an incarnation of the god Vishnu, and has an important temple in Puri, on the eastern coast of India. That’s not the grim bit, obviously. Each year the temple holds the Ratha Yatra, or chariot festival, when images of Jagannath and his brother (Balabhadra) and sister (Subhadra) are pulled on huge and elaborately decorated (you’ve guessed it) chariots. According to hopefully apocryphal (i.e. bullshit) reports going back to the 14th century, hardcore Vishnu fans would throw themselves in front of these to show their devotion by being crushed beneath the wheels of carriages. That. Is. Commitment. Colonial Brits supposedly saw this, then anglicised Jagannath as ‘juggernaut’ giving it the meaning of unstoppable force that we have today.

Jagannath and his siblings’ temple at Puri is freaking massive – it covers an area of over 400,000 square feet (37,000 square metres in new money). It was built in the 11th or 12th century (depending on which page of Wikipedia you look at) by king Anantavarman Chodaganga, a ruler of the Eastern Ganga dynasty who were in charge of the southern part of Kalinga in India. There’s a flag on the top of it which apparently defies science, and always flies in the opposite direction to the way the wind’s blowing. (Boringly, there is actually some science that explains this involving fluid dynamics and something called a Kármán vortex street, but that isn’t half as fun so let’s ignore it.) Every day since it was built, a priest has scrambled up the walls of the temple – the height of a 45-storey building – without any protective gear, to change this flag. Bagsie not me.

extremophile

It’s another ‘-phile’ word this week, but there’s nothing to worry about, honest. An extremophile is an organism that thrives in extreme environments previously thought to be uninhabitable, for example under massive pressure or really bastard cold. These organisms not only tolerate these conditions – for many, they need them to survive. Extremophiles have been found 6.7 km below the Earth’s surface, more than 10km deep in the ocean at pressures of up to 110 MPa (which is a lot, apparently), in acid, in frozen seawater at -20°C and in underwater hydrothermal vents at temperatures of 122°C. The name is made from the Latin extremus meaning, um, ‘extreme’, and the Greek philiā which means ‘love’.

A tardigrade*. Doesn’t he look like he’s about to start singing ‘Always look on the bright side of life’?

Extremophiles are also normally polyextremophiles (‘poly’ meaning ‘many’), which means they can live in more than one shit place – for example, the deep ocean is generally very cold and also under high pressure. So that’s a double whammy. And most extremophiles are microorganisms, but not all – the tardigrade (which I thought was a made-up thing in Star Trek) is one example. Also known as a water bear or moss piglet (awwww), a tardigrade is a microscopic eight-legged animal that thrives in environments that would kill most other forms of life – on mountaintops including the Himalayas, at the bottom of the sea, in mud volcanoes (which are literally what they sound like) and even in solid ice. They can go up to 30 years without food or water, and have been on earth for about 600 million years, which means they pre-date the dinosaurs by a mere 400 million years.

Not long ago, some nice scientists chucked a load of tardigrades out into outer space to see what would happen. Not only did lots of them survive, but some of them even went on to have babies. And in August 2019, scientists reported that some tardigrades might be living on the moon after an Israeli lunar lander carrying thousands of them crash landed (although it’s since been reported that they probably didn’t survive the impact, booooo). Both of these things sound like the start of really good sci-fi horror films.

The name ‘water bear’ comes from the way tardigrades walk, which apparently resembles the way bears get around. The largest ones can get to a (still pretty tiny) 1.5mm, which means you can see them using a bog-standard microscope if you have such a thing.

Extremophiles like the tardigrade are proof that life can exist in many different forms, and that oxygen and water aren’t pre-requisites. In the words of well-known mathematician and chaos theory specialist Dr Ian Malcolm (AKA Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park): ‘Life, uh, finds a way.’

*Wikipedia says I have to credit that tardigrade photo with this horrible bit of text: photo by Bob Goldstein and Vicky Madden, UNC Chapel Hill – http://tardigrades.bio.unc.edu/pictures/ >https://www.flickr.com/photos/waterbears/sets/72157607218607395/ >https://www.flickr.com/photos/waterbears/2851666759/in/album-72157607218607395 (note permission below), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4747599).

roorback

It’s a bit of an obscure – some might say obsolete – one this week (although I’ve never let that stop me before). A roorback is a false story published to damage someone politically, usually a candidate trying to get elected – AKA dirty dirty tricks. (It’s also the ninth studio album by Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura, but that’s not what we’re interested in here.) Roorbacks are a form of black propaganda, which is propaganda intended to create the impression it was written by those it’s discrediting (as opposed to grey propaganda which doesn’t identify its source, and white propaganda which doesn’t care who knows where it came from). But how did political lies get the name ‘roorback’? 

In 1844, James K Polk, the 11th president of the United States, was trying to get elected. By all accounts it was a pretty nasty campaign, with both major party candidates throwing a lot of metaphorical mud at each other. One of these is known as the Roorback forgery. In late August an article appeared in an abolitionist newspaper quoting part of a book about the fictional travels through the deep south of one Baron von Roorback, a made-up German nobleman. A newspaper in Ithaca, New York printed this without mentioning it was fiction, and also added a sentence saying that the Baron had seen 40 slaves who’d been branded by Polk with his initials before selling them. (Polk was actually a prolific slave owner – he even replaced White House staff with his own enslaved people because it was cheaper – but there’s no evidence that he branded them. So that’s alright then.) The item was withdrawn by the newspaper when the Democrats challenged it, but not before it’d been widely reprinted elsewhere. Ironically Polk actually benefited from the lie – despite his questionable attitude to people ownership – as it reflected badly on his opponents when it was found out.

Because of this, many later political falsehoods were branded (see what I did there) as ‘roorbacks’. In today’s era of fake news and clickbait, maybe there’s still a place in modern English for this one?

nidification

Spring be sprunging. And that means animals and birds be having babies. And it’s birds we’re looking at here – nidification is the act, process or technique of building a nest.

Nidification has its origins in Latin – nidificare means ‘to build a nest’. This comes from nidus, meaning (somewhat unsurprisingly) ‘nest’. A couple of related words are ‘nidifugous’, which means ‘to leave a nest soon after hatching’, and nidicolous, which means ‘reared for a time in a nest’, and also just ‘living in a nest’.

The Guinness world record for the largest birds’ nest is currently held by a pair of bald eagles and was found in Florida in 1963. It measured 2.9m (9ft 6in) wide and was 6m (20ft) deep. It was estimated to weigh more than two tonnes (4,409 lb). Another massive nest builder is the Australian mallee fowl whose creations can measure up to 4.57m (15ft) in height and 10.6m (35ft) across. We also have some big birds over here as well – in 1954 a golden eagle nest was found in Scotland that was an impressive 15 feet deep.

Phwoar, look at the nest on that – a sociable weaver nest in Namibia (photo by Harald Süpfle).

Little birds are also getting in on the big-nidification game as well. The sociable weaver (who sounds like it’d be a laugh in the pub) is only around 15cm long (so it’ll struggle to carry the drinks). But it builds massive nests which house hundreds of its mates. These are made up of several different ‘rooms’ – they use the inner ones for sleeping at night (as they’re warmer) and the outside ones for hanging out in during the day. They even place sharp sticks at the entrances to stop any predators from getting in.

Birds don’t have the monopoly on nidification. Lots of other animals build nests, including insects (termites and ants, for example), frogs and fish. Gorillas also build nests which they sleep in at night – they make a fresh one every day, which is the equivalent to changing the sheets, I guess.

wheelhouse

You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘that’s in my wheelhouse’ – it means that something is your area of expertise. But why wheel? And why is it in a house?

The word ‘wheelhouse’ has been around since the mid-19th century. Back then it meant exactly what it said on the tin – a building with a wheel in it, most usually on a boat or ship. In the nautical sense it referred to the place where the steering wheel was, i.e. where the captain was most likely to be found. It first appeared in writing in an 1835 travel memoir by an American writer called Joseph Holt Ingraham. He wrote: ‘The pilot (as the helms-man is here termed) stands in his lonely wheel-house.’ (Ingraham, who later became a clergyman, died by accidentally shooting himself at the age of 51 in the vestibule of his own church. That’s got to put a dent in your faith in the almighty.) Shortly after this, ‘wheelhouse’ appeared in an 1840 letter to Daniel Webster, then the American secretary of state, from a traveller who was on a ship that burned and then sunk (double whammy). He wrote that the ship’s captain ‘went into the wheel house, and that was the last I saw of him’. (You’ll be pleased to hear that the captain did manage to escape the on fire/sinking ship, along with three other people. The 136 passengers on the ship all drowned though. Wow, that’s really good captaining, mate.)

So how did ‘wheelhouse’ become a word for an area of expertise? Well, at some point in the 1950s (the internet wasn’t any clearer than that, sorry), baseball commentators and reporters picked up on the term and started using it to describe the area of the strike zone (I think this means where the batter swings the bat) that’s the prime spot for them to hit a home run. Which is a good thing, apparently. In the 1980s the term moved from sports writing into everyday language, when we started using it to figuratively describe an area in which someone excels.