zetabetical

Okay, cards on the table. I’m not entirely sure this is a real word. It turned up in the book I’m reading with my book group, ‘Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine’ by Gail Honeyman. The full quote is:

‘I’d cleaned the bathroom and washed the kitchen floor, taken out the recycling and arranged all the tins in the cupboard so that the labels were facing forwards in zetabetical order.’

I can’t find anything on this in Wikipedia (gasp!) and Word has given it a red underline (although I don’t trust that anyway). But, I’m forging ahead with it as the word of the week anyway, because I want it to be true. So, let’s pretend it is.

Presumably to arrange something in zetabetical order means alphabetising backwards, i.e. from ‘z’. This would make sense for the heroine of the book – she’s not one for doing things the ‘normal’ way.

It also makes sense when you consider that zeta is the ancestor of zed, the name of the Latin letter ‘Z’ in English. But, anyone with a little bit of knowledge of the Greek alphabet (this is the most poncey thing I’ve ever written) will know that zeta is the sixth letter, not the last. So what does this mean for the order of Eleanor’s tins? But that way etymological madness lies, so I'm going to leave it there.

galanthophile

A galanthophile is someone who collects, or just really, really likes, snowdrops. It comes from the Greek name for the flower which is ‘galanthus’, and translates to ‘milk flower’. Which isn’t as nice as ‘snowdrop’, but I guess there’s probably more milk than snow in Greece.

Snowdrops aren’t native to the UK, but no one knows when or where they came here. It was probably around 1770-something, although it could have been a few hundred years earlier. So that’s not a very useful snowdrop-fact, sorry. Here’s a better one – there are more than 2,500 varieties of snowdrop and some of them can grow up to 30cm high. The Victorians thought they signified death and it was seen as bad luck to have them in the house (that got dark fast, didn’t it?). This might have something to do with the fact that the bulbs are really poisonous if you eat them (though why the hell they were eating snowdrop bulbs is anyone’s guess).

In nicer news, snowdrops contain a substance called ‘galantamine’ which is used to treat the symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

Snowdrop collectors are proper mental. No, really – bulbs are regularly stolen, and a single one can go for several hundred pounds on eBay (other online stores are available). Have a look at this article to find out more.

To finish off with some better words than those above, here’s a bit of Willie Wordsworth (as no one calls him) on snowdrops:

‘Lone flower, hemmed in with snows, and white as they
But hardier far, once more I see thee bend
Thy forehead as if fearful to offend,
Like an unbidden guest. Though day by day
Storms sallying from the mountain-tops, waylay
The rising sun, and on the plains descend;
Yet art though welcome, welcome as a friend
Whose zeal outruns his promise! Blue-eyed May
Shall soon behold this border thickly set
With bright jonquils, their odours lavishing
On the soft west-wind and his frolic peers;
Nor will I then thy modest grace forget,
Chaste snowdrop, venturous harbinger of spring,
And pensive monitor of fleeting years.’

wassail

This actually has a couple of meanings as an adjective:

1. to drink lots and generally have a fun noisy time, or

2. to go from house to house at Christmas singing carols.

I’m going to focus on the second one here. Wassailing was different to carol singing because the singers had a wassail bowl with them – basically a bowl of hot booze, often mulled wine or cider – the contents of which they dolled out to the people they were singing to (why has this died out!?).

There’s also the distinctly pagan-sounding practice of orchard-wassailing, which is when people serenade their apple trees to encourage a good harvest the next year (a custom I’m pleased to say is still alive and well today in rural England).

The word ‘wassail’ itself comes from an Anglo-Saxon greeting: ‘Wæs þu hæl’. This means ‘be thou hale’ and probably morphed into the toast we do to good health today when we’re cheersing (not a word but should be).

Wassailing wasn’t always a wholesome Christmas tradition. Both here and in Europe it was sometimes associated with rowdy yoofs barging into their well-off neighbours’ homes and demanding free food and drink. If the neighbour wouldn’t give it to them, they’d kick up a right old stink, possibly even vandalising their house (think trick or treating without the slutty outfits). This explains the slightly weird bit of ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’. You know, all the stuff about ‘figgy pudding’ and ‘good cheer’ (for which read, booze). The people in the song are refusing to go until they’ve had these (‘We won't go until we get some, so bring some out here’). The bastards.

You can find more Christmas words the English language has forgotten on my blog at http://bit.ly/2URhz6T.

Oh, and happy Christmas y’all.

arseling

This is because I’ve been binge watching ‘The Last Kingdom’ on Netflix (when I’m not working really hard of course). If you haven’t seen it, it’s a fictionalised retelling of when the Danes came over here and pillaged all our villages in the 9th century (Wessex being the titular last kingdom as it was the last major stronghold against them). There’s lots of mud, blood and bare bums. The main character is called Uhtred of Bebbanburg, although his bezzie Anglo-Saxon mate calls him (you’ve guessed it), arseling.

Sadly, an arseling isn’t a baby arse. Nor is it quite as insulting as it sounds – it means, simply, ‘backwards’. The original spelling was ‘earsling’ and first turned up in written form in 1050 in a manuscript called the ‘Paris Psalter’. The exact phrase was ‘Syn hi gecyrde on earsling’, which means ‘Let them be turned backwards’. And that’s it. It’s not found in any other writing until a poem from 1768 called ‘The Fortunate Shepherdess’ by Alexander Ross (nope, me neither). This means that the OED has pronounced it officially obsolete, although this might well change now, thanks to its resurgence in ‘The Last Kingdom’. Who says TV rots your brain?

Interesting (sorta) fact: According to one website I looked at, ‘arseling’ might have been coined by royalty. That’s because the psalm in question was translated by one Alfred the Great. Find out more here.

gallimaufry

No, not Doctor Who’s home planet*. A gallimaufry is a mixed-up jumble of things. It’s similar to ‘hotchpotch’, in that you can use it for any mixture of stuff. So, I could say there is a gallimaufry of socks in my drawer.

Interestingly (maybe), ‘gallimaufry’ has culinary origins. A ‘galimafree’ was a 16th century French stew. Apparently it wasn’t a very nice stew, as the name actually means ‘unappetising dish’ in Old French. ‘Galimafrée’ itself comes from ‘galer’ for ‘have fun’ and the Picard** word ‘mafrer’, which means to ‘eat copious amounts’. I’m not sure how they got from fun overeating to horrible stew, but somehow they did. And that’s one of the reasons words are great.

In a nice coincidence, the word ‘hotchpotch’ also has a foody background – as well as meaning a mixture of stuff, it’s a type of thick stew with mixed vegetables.

And now I’m hungry.

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* I literally only chose this word so I could make this joke.
** Nope, not Jean-Luc – this means from Picardy, a region of France. Wow, the geeky references are coming thick and fast today, aren’t they?

denizen

You probably already know what it means – a ‘denizen’ is an inhabitant of somewhere, or someone who goes to a place frequently (which means I’m a denizen of the Mason’s Arms in Bury St Edmunds).

I’ve chosen this one because I’ve been watching a lot of horror films and TV series recently (healthy), and it comes up loads in those. One case in point is ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ on Netflix. (It’s excellent, although I kept getting distracted by the beautiful cast and missing the background ghosts. The book it’s based on by Shirley Jackson is also well worth checking out, although it’s completely different to the TV show.) In an interview the creator Mike Flanagan said of the ghosts: ‘They are the denizens of Hill House from years past that the house decided to keep for itself.’ So, I thought I’d look into the etymology of the word and try to work out why, these days, it’s so often applied to things to do with hell, darkness and other supernatural scary-ass things.

Let’s start at the beginning. ‘Denizen’ comes from the Middle English word ‘denisein’ which in turn comes from the Old French word ‘denzein’, from ‘deinz’ for ‘within’, and‎ ‘-ein’ from the Latin deintus or ‘from within’. (I think that makes it ‘within from within’. Useful.)

‘Denizen’ was also a British legal category between the 13th and 19th century, for a foreigner who has certain rights in their adopted country. ‘Denization’ has since been overtaken by ‘naturalisation’, maybe because of its infernal connotations…?

As to why it comes up so often in horror films and literature, well, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe because ‘denizen of hell’ sounds more sinister than ‘occupant of hell’?

bowdlerise

If you bowdlerise text, you censor it by removing or changing anything you think is offensive or vulgar. The word’s named for an English doctor called Thomas Bowdler who was born in 1754. In 1818 he published a book called ‘The Family Shakspeare’ (not a typo – apparently no one knows how to spell Will’s name so it’s changed over time). This was basically the complete works of Shakespeare with all the fun stuff taken out, to make it suitable to be read to women and children. This makes him sound like a bit of a dick, but his expurgated version made Shakespeare accessible to young people. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne said of Bowdler that: ‘…[n]o man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children.’ (No mention of the women, but c’est la vie.)

The inspiration for the book came from the fact that Thomas’ father used to read Shakespeare’s plays to him and his five siblings. But it wasn’t until he was grown up that he realised his dad had been taking all the rude bits out. I imagine that this realisation was like when I saw the unedited version of ‘Crocodile Dundee’ for the first time a few years ago, and realised there’s a whole scene of a guy snorting coke at a party that I’d never seen before. I’m still shocked about that.

Having said all that, Bowdler’s nephew wrote that the actual bowdlerising for ‘The Family Shakspeare’ was done by Thomas’ sister Harriet. In an ironic (I think – I’m never entirely sure I understand irony) twist, they probably had to publish under his name because a woman couldn’t publicly admit that (a) she was capable of this type of work, and (b) that she understood the racy stuff she was censoring.

bolus

This one’s kind of gross, but it’s been a while since I did anything disgusting so I think it’s time. A bolus is the big old ball of food and spit that forms in your mouth while you’re chewing, just before you swallow it. I bet you’re picturing that now, right? Ewww.

The word itself comes from the Latin for ‘ball’ and you can also use it for other round stuff, if you really want to. ‘Bolus’ has a couple of other meanings as well – in medicine, it’s a dose of a drug, and in veterinary medicine it’s a large pill.

Don’t confuse it with ‘bolas’, which is a type of throwing weapon made from weights on the end of two ropes. You wouldn’t want to try to swallow one of those.

pumpkin

This is of course in honour of Halloween. So, etymology. The word pumpkin comes from ‘pepon’, which is Greek for ‘large melon’. The French changed this to ‘pompon’, which we then changed to ‘pumpion’. Then at some point American colonists changed it to ‘pumpkin’.

The term ‘pumpkin’ doesn’t have an agreed botanical or scientific meaning. So it can refer to basically any kind of winter squash-type vegetable.

Some pumpkin facts for you (feel free to use these to bore any trick or treaters tonight).

• The oldest pumpkin seeds were found in Mexico and are believed to date from between 7000 and 5500 BC.

• According to www.giantpumpkin.com, the record for the largest pumpkin is 2,624 pounds. It was grown in 2016 by a surprisingly attractive Belgian man called Mathias Willemijns, and weighed a whopping 300 pounds more than the previous winner.

• Although you might think it’s an American tradition, carving pumpkins for Halloween originated from an Irish myth about a man named ‘Stingy Jack’. To cut a long legend short, Stingy Jack is a drunkard who attracts Satan’s attention because of all his drinking and general bad-deed-doing. Through various shenanigans and trickery Jack manages to get away from the devil, so much so that when he dies, he ends up wandering the world, doomed never to be able to enter heaven or hell. And the only thing that lights his way is an ember inside a hollowed-out turnip. At some point turnips were superseded by pumpkins, apparently for the only reason that they’re easier to carve.

• Pumpkin chucking (also called punkin chunkin and pumpkin chunking), is the ‘sport’ of throwing pumpkins as far as possible using mechanical things including slingshots, catapults, trebuchets and pneumatic cannons (I don’t know what a ‘pneumatic canon’ is but I want one). The record is 5,545.43 feet (1,690.25 meters). Unfortunately the last event in 2017 ended in a lawsuit (someone got hit in the head), so the future of punkin chunkin is uncertain. Shame.

scurryfunge

To scurryfunge is to rush around cleaning when you find out someone’s on their way over. Another definition I found has it as ‘a hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbour and the time she knocks on the door’.

I’ve struggled a bit to find the etymology of this and it’s not entirely clear where it comes from. It’s described as Old English (which means it appeared any time from 450AD to the Norman Conquest) on a lot of sites, and it definitely sounds like that. But the earliest proper reference I can find to it is in the late 18th century, where its meaning is shown as ‘to beat or lash’, and later ‘to rub or scrub clean’. It then disappeared for a while before reappearing in the mid-19th century with the meaning mentioned above. It looks like this might have happened with some confusion around the word ‘scurry’ i.e. ‘to move in or as if in a brisk pace’ or ‘to move around in an agitated, confused or fluttering manner’.

Thanks to my friend Lorna for telling me about this word when she came round for tea at the weekend. I don’t know why she thought of it when she came to my house though.

collywobbles

So, I thought having the collywobbles was the same as having the heebie-jeebies i.e. being a bit scared of something (like spiders or lack of wi-fi coverage). And while that is one of its more common uses nowadays, it used to mean an upset stomach or, as I prefer to call it, the squiddly dits.

No one’s entirely sure where ‘collywobbles’ came from, but it might have some fairly dark origins. One is that the ‘colly’ bit comes from the Middle English word for ‘coal’. This refers to the dodgy stomach you get from breathing in coal dust down in the pits or up a chimney if you’re an urchin. Or it might be a corruption of the medical term for cholera, ‘cholera morbus’.

‘Collywobbles’ first turned up in a book called ‘A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue’ by Francis Grose which was published in 1785. It’s a compendium of slang that Samuel Johnson (he of dictionary-writing fame) decided was too rude or just not good enough for his book. Grose apparently compiled it by boozing with the hoi-polloi in less salubrious areas of London. Now that’s my kind of academic research.

You can find the whole of ‘A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue’ here. There’s also an excellent list of now-obsolete slang including ‘captain queernabs’ (a ‘shabby ill-dressed fellow’) and ‘chimping merry’ (to be ‘exhilarated with liquor’ – which I imagine Mr Grose was after all that ‘research’).

demiurge

Nope, not a small urge.

*clears throat and puts on posh voice*

In the Platonic, Middle Platonic, Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean schools of philosophy, the demiurge is responsible for building and arranging the physical universe. He/she/it isn’t necessarily the same as ‘god’ though – depending on the belief system, they might be, but they might also have been created by some other all-powerful being to do all the hard work so they don’t have to.

The word itself comes from the Greek word dēmiourgos (via the Latin ‘demiurgus’). It was originally an everyday noun which meant ‘craftsman’ or ‘artisan’. Gradually it came to mean ‘producer’, and then ‘creator’.

Having said all that, I also found a source where ‘dēmiourgos’ is translated as ‘public worker’. This is my favourite definition as (in my head at least) it has connotations of admin and paperwork. I like the idea of all-powerful beings still having to fill in spreadsheets and raise purchase orders.

termagant

A termagant is a shrewish woman. Because, patriarchy. Grrr.

Okay, sorry. Actually, termagant only started being applied to women around the 16th century. Before that it was a name given to a god which Christians believed Muslims worshipped (for various reasons which mainly involve Christians being confused about every other religion). By Shakespeare’s time a ‘termagant’ had become a theatrical archetype for a ranting, bullying type (see ‘Henry IV, Part I’ for an example: ‘that hot termagant Scot’). And probably because the termagant often wore long robes, and because all the parts were played by men anyway (grrr again) audiences starting thinking of them as female. By the late 17th century this was firmly entrenched – Thomas Shadwell's play ‘The Squire of Alsatia’ had a character called Mrs Termagant who’s described as a ‘furious, malicious, and revengeful woman’.

Termagant still gets used these days, and actually turned up fairly recently in an equal opportunity insult (yay!). In 2008, the Australian politician Kim Beazley called his opponent Tony Abbott a termagant.

plangent

So this is another one which came from a book I’m reading (‘Lud-In-The-Mist’ by Hope Mirrlees – ‘the single most beautiful and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century’ according to Neil Gaiman). It means ‘having an expressive and especially plaintive quality’. So basically it’s a sad, melancholic sound. Like the pounding of waves on a lonely beach. Or a bell echoing through an empty church… *stares off dreamily into middle distance*

Sorry, I got a bit carried away there. Back to the reason we’re here. ‘Plangent’ comes from ‘plangere’, a Latin word which has two meanings. The first is ‘to beat’ as in beating your chest in grief (like I did today when I realised my favourite cheese was out of stock at Ocado) and the other is ‘lamenting’. So, all in all, a plangent sound probably isn’t a particularly cheery one.

growlery

Now, if you ever watched ‘Bo’ Selecta!’ on Channel 4, then you might be thinking of a certain sketch involving pretend-Lorraine Kelly doing a Sharon-Stone-in-Basic-Instinct (that’s as much as I’m going to say for fear of breaching Facebook’s decency standards). Or at least that’s what immediately sprung to my mind when I saw this in a book I’m reading at the moment. As it’s set in the 1930s, I assumed this wasn’t the right meaning and immediately headed to Google.

According to Collins’ English Dictionary, a growlery is ‘a place of refuge or retreat when one is out of sorts or in ill-humour’ (unless you look on the Urban Dictionary where it’s something else entirely – I’ll leave it to you to look that up if you want to). So, literally somewhere to go and growl.

A ‘growlery’ is generally used to describe a man’s study. Dickens used it a lot in ‘Bleak House’:

‘…“Sit down, my dear,’ said Mr. Jarndyce. ‘This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.’”

Sadly, the word itself looks set to disappear, having been removed from the OED in 2011 (heart = broken). I suppose the closest equivalent today would be the horrendous ‘man-cave’. But why on earth would you use that when you can have a gender-neutral growlery?

debunk

I watched the British horror film ‘Ghost Stories’ this weekend (not great – it all felt a bit like it was patting itself on the back at how clever it is – the stage show was better and more scary). It’s about a man who debunks (i.e. exposes as false) ghost stories. Which got me wondering – where does the word ‘debunk’ originate from? And it turns out it has a very interesting backstory (which is lucky – otherwise this really wouldn’t be worth reading).

So, the ‘de’ prefix refers to reversing or undoing something. But it’s the ‘bunk’ bit that’s interesting. You might have already guessed that it comes from ‘bunkum’ meaning ‘nonsense’ (which is really nice to say – go on, give it a go. Bunkum. The louder the better. Assuming you’re not sitting on a train or in a library or anything like that). Bunkum is a phonetic spelling of Buncombe, a county in North Carolina in the US of A. In 1841, one Felix Walker, who was something important which I don’t really understand in the US Congress, started a very long and boring speech. Despite everyone yelling at him to stop talking, he refused because he wanted to show the people of North Carolina that he was doing his job properly: ‘I shall not be speaking to the House,’ he said, ‘but to Buncombe.’ And from that moment on, ‘bunkum’ became slang for ‘a load of rubbish’.

Not the best thing to be remembered for, but still, better than nothing, right? Right?

thrawn

I saw this in the book I’m reading at the moment (‘Life After Life’ by Kate Atkinson – well worth a read). The author used it to describe the look on a violent husband’s face just before he got wife-beaty (that’s not cheery, sorry). It’s a mainly Scottish adjective which means misshapen or crooked, as well as obstinate or recalcitrant. It’s generally used in a negative way (as in the wife beater), but can also be used for someone who’s admirably determined to do something.

Etymology-wise, it comes from the Old English word ‘thrawen’ which means to twist or turn. This meaning survived in Scottish as the verb ‘thraw’. In 1881 Robert Louis Stephenson published a short story in Scots called ‘Thrawn Janet’ about a preacher who hires a local crone (funny how there’s no male equivalent of a crone) as a housekeeper. Suspected of being in league with the devil (probably just because she’s old and female), the preacher has her renounce Satan. The next day she appears with a ‘thrawn’ (for which read twisted) neck, as if she’s been hanged. Here’s our word in action:

‘For there was Janet … wi’ her neck thrawn, and her heid on ae side, like a body that has been hangit, and a girn on her face like an unstreakit corp.’

(If you want to find out what happens next, the whole story’s online here.)

‘Thrawn’ doesn’t turn up much these days, although (if you’ll just allow me to geek out for a moment), there is a Grand Admiral Thrawn in a series of novels in the Star Wars extended universe, before the latest films made them no longer canon. He’s got blue skin and is a bit of a bastard. This probably doesn’t have anything to do with the Scots word as it’s short for Mitth’raw’nuruodo (obvs), but it’s a nice coincidence nonetheless.

star-crossed

So, I was catching up on my newest guilty pleasure this week, ‘Bondi Rescue’, and one of the lifeguards was putting together an elaborate proposal for his girlfriend (there was a helicopter). Just as they were flying towards the words ‘Marry Me’ written in the sand of Bondi, the voiceover guy described them as ‘star-crossed lovers’. This immediately had me reaching for Google, as I’m sure that the last time I checked, being a star-crossed lover wasn’t a good thing. And I was right – ‘star-crossed’ means to be ‘thwarted by bad luck’.

Etymology wise, there don’t seem to be any references to the word before Mr Shakespeare used it in the prologue of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (spoiler alert!):

‘From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.’

The word comes from the idea that our fates are ruled by the positions of the stars, and that some people are thwarted by evil or malign stars. Hence being ‘star-crossed’, like the unfortunate teen suicides, R+J.

You’ll be pleased to hear that lifeguard Harries and his wife Em are still married, and now have themselves a bub, so it doesn’t seem like they’re at all star-crossed. Not that I’m obsessed with ‘Bondi Rescue’ or anything.

Right, I wonder if I can fit another episode in before I have to earn a living…

paraphernalia

So, you're probably used to using ‘paraphernalia’ to mean lots of bits and pieces. It’s generally seen as negative as we tend to use it to mean too much stuff (or drug stuff, weirdly). Unfortunately, the origins of the word are actually a bit sexist.

Etymology-wise, it comes from the Greek ‘para’ for ‘distinct from’ and ‘pherna’, from ‘phernē’ or ‘dower’. So it actually means ‘distinct from dowry’, and referred to the personal bits and bobs a bride brought with her to a marriage. So all the stuff that wasn’t part of the all-important dowry. These fluffy female extras were generally regarded as superfluous to requirements, which is why the word now tend to refer to extra things we don’t need. Oh, and in English law up until 1870 (when the first Married Women’s Property Act was passed), all of a woman’s paraphernalia would have become the property of her husband anyway once he got that ring on her finger. Bah.

skive

So we all know what skiving is, right? It’s bunking off work or school. Well yes, but this is actually an almost exclusively British use of the word. Skive has another meaning which it seems is more well known away from our shores – to cut thin layers or pieces off a material like leather or rubber. This probably comes from Scandinavia, from ‘skīfa’ which is Old Norse for slice.

Back to bunking off now (figuratively, not literally of course, for any clients who are reading). ‘Skive’ in this context first appeared in print in 1919 and was originally a British military expression. One theory is that it came from another earlier slang meaning of the same word which was ‘to move lightly and quickly, to dart,’ as someone who’s trying to get out of their duties might do. It likely comes from the French word ‘esquiver’ which means to dodge, sidestep or evade. From there we go on an etymological round trip of Europe – ‘esquiver’ probably came from the Spanish word ‘esquivar’ which means unsociable or shy, which itself came from a German word which came from an Italian word (I’ve stopped telling you the words now in case you stop reading/your head explodes), which finally takes us back to France and the Old French word ‘eschiver’.

Opinions differ as to whether you add an ‘off’ or not (as in ‘Emma never skives work’, or ‘Emma is definitely not skiving off work as we speak’).