pareidolia

We’ve probably all experienced pareidolia to some extent. Don’t worry, it isn’t another world-ending pandemic. Pareidolia is the word for when we humans find shapes in abstract patterns or inanimate objects. So when you next see a face in the trunk of a tree or a penis in the clouds (come on, we’ve all done it. No? Just me?) you’ll be able to show off to whoever you’re with that you’re experiencing pareidolia. It also applies to sounds – so if you think you’re hearing a hidden message in a piece of music, you probably aren’t – it’s just that pesky pareidolia.

Etymology-wise, the word itself is unsurprisingly Greek: para means ‘beside, alongside, instead [of]’ and eidōlon means ‘image, form, shape’.

So why do we do it? Evolutionary psychologists reckon that pareidolia helped our ancestors survive. There are two reasons for this. One is that babies who couldn’t recognise faces smiled less, which meant their parents cared about them less (mean). So they evolved to recognise faces to make sure their ma and pa would love them and, ultimately, protect them. The second one is to do with predators – in (very) simple terms, you’re more likely to run away from something that has a face than something that doesn’t. So it makes sense to see a face in anything that’s potentially threatening and just peg it.

Pareidolia used to be considered a sign of madness. And studies do show that people suffering from neuroses are more likely to experience it, as are people who in a negative mood. That might be because when we’re pissed off we’re on higher alert for danger, so more likely to see things that aren’t there. Women are also more likely to experience pareidolia, which is possibly due to the fact that we’re generally better than men. Sorry, better than men at using facial expressions to recognise emotions.

One of the most famous examples of pareidolia is the face on Mars. Located in the Cydonia region of the planet, it was first photographed by the Viking 1 spacecraft on 25 July 1976.

It’s a face on Mars!

Oh no it isn’t.

And in 2004, a ten-year-old cheese sandwich which supposedly has the image of the Virgin Mary burned on it sold for $28,000 on eBay. Where there’s pareidolia there’s brass, apparently…

hazard

We can trace the word hazard all the way back to the 14th century, although not with the meaning it has today i.e. something which you can fall into/over/under and so on. Allow me to take you back to medieval Arabia, where games of chance involving dice were all the rage. The Arabic word for dice was ‘al-zhar’ or ‘az-zhar’, and as these dice games spread across Europe, they became known as al-zhar games. As generally happens with words though, ‘al-zhar’ got a bit messed up on its travels, and by the time it got to Spain it had morphed into ‘azar’. And although it was still being used to describe the game, people also used it when they were talking about the random results of the dice throws.

When ‘azar’ made its way to France, it changed to ‘hasard’, and the Frenchies used it to describe unlucky dice throws. Over time people started using it to talk about anything that was a bit unlucky or risky. And when it made the leap over the Channel to British shores, ‘hasard’ became ‘hazard’. For a while it was just a noun, but at some point in the 16th century it got verbed, as people started hazarding things (maybe only guesses? I’m not sure what else you can ‘hazard’… Okay, I just looked it up and the definition of ‘hazard’ as a verb means to ‘offer or present as a risk’ so maybe you can hazard other things…? But people might think you’re a bit weird).

Let’s finish with a be-mulletted (although, SPOILER ALERT, not by the end) Richard Marx singing ‘Hazard’. This always used to make me sad as a child, and having googled it I realise it comes under the genre of ‘murder ballad’, which probably explains that.

gobbledygook

As regular readers will know (hello Mumsy!), last week I left you with something of a wordy cliffhanger. While researching the background of ‘maverick’, I found out that Samuel Maverick’s grandson, Maury Maverick, coined the word ‘gobbledygook’. So, this week we’re going to look at exactly how that came about. Better than EastEnders, right?

Maury Maverick was born in 1895 in Texas. After various jobs he became a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from 3 January 1935 to 3 January 1939. After losing out on a third term in office, he wound up working for a company called the Smaller War Plants Corporation (anyone know what a small war plant is?). And it was here that he wrote a note to his staff imploring them to stop using complicated bureaucratic language and jargon in memos, and just get to the point (can I get an amen, copywriter pals?). His exact words were:

Stay off the gobbledygook language. It only fouls people up.

Maverick’s inspiration for the word was the turkey, who, he said is ‘always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity’. (Personally I think he missed a trick by not saying that it ‘fowls people up’, but that might just be me.) 

This is a rare case of a word whose invention we can trace back to the actual day it came into being. So that’s nice. Here’s an article which was published in the Pittsburgh Press about it on 31st March 1944. I’m going to try the last line on some of my clients – I’ll let you know how it goes.

maverick

The original maverick

A maverick is an independent-minded or unorthodox person/sexually ambiguous American pilot who feels the need, the need for speed. But it has a second, less well-known meaning – it’s also the name given to unbranded calves in the world of ranching in the good ole US of A. It’s named after one Samuel Maverick, a Texas lawyer, politician and land baron (awesome job title) who was born in 1803. Maverick was a cattle owner and, unlike his contemporaries, refused to brand his cattle to show they belonged to him, because he thought it was cruel. At least that’s what he said – other, more cynical cattle-type people said he only did it so he could claim any stray non-branded baby cows as his own. Whatever the actual reason, Maverick’s name was soon used to describe any calf found without an owner’s brand, as well as people who refused to conform.

Samuel was married to Mary, meaning his wife’s name was Mary Maverick, which is pleasingly alliterative and sounds like a superhero alter ego. Their grandson was Maury Maverick (love it), a Texas politician who coined the word ‘gobbledygook’. More on that next week. Ooh, an etymological cliffhanger. Doesn’t get much better than that, right? Right…?

Oh, and thanks to my sister for telling me about maverick’s origins on this week’s family Zoom call (we might have run out of things to talk about…).

PS If all that etymological excitement hasn’t worn you out, here’s the Top Gun anthem for you. It features a grand piano alongside a man who looks like a woman with enormo hair playing guitar while wearing a sparkly tracksuit and standing on the wing of a plane (because, 80s). If it doesn’t make you punch the air at least once, then you’re dead inside.

tawdry

The Hay Festival, a literary festival in Wales that I’ve been to a few times (because I is well intellectual) has been doing a virtual version this year, because of you-know-what. I watched one sesh with Greg Jenner, writer and historian extraordinaire, where he briefly mentioned the origins of the word ‘tawdry’. And turns out it has an interesting backstory, which I’m now going to share with you, you lucky people.

St Audrey in her glad rags

If you describe something as ‘tawdry’, you’re saying it’s showy, and cheap or crappy quality. You can also use it to describe something that’s immoral, like a ‘tawdry extramarital affair’. So, where did it come from?

Allow me to transport you back to 7th century England. The daughter of the king of East Anglia is a young princess called Etheldrida, who’s known as Audrey (and who can blame her with a name like Etheldrida? Although spare a thought for her sisters, who were called Wendreda and Seaxburh). After a life which basically consisted of not having sex (she took a vow of virginity, despite having two husbands), Audrey died in the year 679 of a throat tumour. The Venerable Bede recorded this as a just punishment because poor old Audrey liked a lace necklace, and this vanity apparently meant she deserved to die from cancer. Wow. Nice one, Bede.

Despite this, Audrey still managed to get beatified (AKA saintified) as she founded an abbey in Ely (just up the road from where I’m writing this, and today the site of the gothic gorgeousness that is Ely Cathedral). Fast forward to the 16th century and admirers of St Audrey are buying saintly merch in the form of lace necklaces, called St Audrey’s laces. Over time, this gets shortened to ‘taudrey laces’.

100 years later, the Puritans are everywhere, and Audrey’s statement necklaces are now seen as old-fashioned and cheap. So it’s not long before the word ‘tawdry’ comes to mean the same. This meaning was cemented by Shakespeare in ‘A Winter’s Tale’ – the character Mopsa, who’s a bit of a country bumpkin, has the line: ‘Come, you promised me a tawdry-lace and a pair of sweet gloves’, which shows how unsophisticated she is.

I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Aud. The woman hung on to her virginity through two marriages, then founded an abbey, and this is what she’s remembered for? Shame.

hooligan

A couple of days ago I walked into my bedroom to find Gus, my one-year-old cavapoo, standing on my bed (which he’s not supposed to get on), having emptied the washing basket all over the bedroom. After failing to tell him off (because he’s literally the cutest dog in the world ever, even when he’s got my one nice bra in his mouth), I half-heartedly called him a ‘hooligan’. Which got me thinking… where does the word ‘hooligan’ come from?

I’ve found three origin stories for ‘hooligan’ all of which might be apocryphal (i.e. bollocks). The first is that it comes from the Irish surname Houlihan, which was used as a byword for hell-raising Irishmen in musichall songs on the late 1900s. The second is that it’s named for Patrick Houlihan, one of the aforementioned hell-raising Irishmen (sorry Ireland). He was a small-time crook who died in prison in London (Southwark to be precise) after killing a policeman in a brawl.

The third theory, which is my favourite so probably not true (and doesn’t involve any Irish people), is that during the Jacobite rising of 1745 in Scotland (when Charles Edward Stuart attempted to regain the British throne for his father James Francis Edward Stuart – but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that), a British officer was being eaten alive by midges (i.e. those bitey insects which ruin picnics and other outdoor activities, including several bike rides I did as a child where I accidentally rode through a cloud of them with my mouth open #neverforget). He misheard the Scots-Gaelic word for midge which is ‘meanbh-chuileagi’ as ‘midge hooligan’ and accidentally invented a new word which still survives today.

idiot

Alongside ‘moron’*, ‘idiot’ is one of my favourite non-sweary insults. But where does it come from? Turns out it’s derived from an Ancient Greek word, idiōtēs, which means ‘private person’. That doesn’t mean that idiōtēs didn’t want to go out (remember going out?), but that they didn’t have much to do with public affairs and the government. ‘Idiom’ (i.e. a word or phrase which is unique to a group of people or a place) also comes from the same root, as does ‘idiosyncrasy’ (a quirky thing that’s unique to one person), which makes sense when you think about the whole ‘private’ meaning.

Back to idiōtēs. As I said, an idiōtēs was basically just a normal – anyone who wasn’t a soldier, scribe, judge, politician, etc. But, people who weren’t idiōtēs saw them as the opposite of ‘citizens’. And because of this, ye olde Greeks soon started using the term to refer to people who they thought weren’t clever enough to talk about politics and public affairs. From this, it wasn’t long until ‘idiot’ began to take on the meaning we know today.

So, idiot. More than just a stupid person.

* While writing this post I discovered that ‘moron’ has some slightly shady origins. It, alongside ‘imbecile’, ‘cretin’ and ‘retard’, were once scientific terms used in psychology and psychiatry for people with mild intellectual disabilities. And they were also favourite terms of the American eugenics movement when pushing for enforced sterilisation. So that’s nice. With the exception of ‘retard’ (which most people now agree is pretty offensive), these have now slipped into the vernacular. But does that mean they’re okay to use? I DON’T KNOW.

curfew

This is another one I’ve shamelessly stolen from the Wittertainment podcast (which is technically about films, but lucky for me also features a lot of etymology, generally courtsey of Sir Simon of Mayo). You know what a curfew is – that thing your parents gave you which meant you had to be home by a certain time (you know, back when we were allowed to go outside and do stuff). ‘Curfew’ comes from an Anglo-French word, coverfeu, which itself comes from an Old French word cuevrefeu. This literally means ‘cover fire’ (as in to cover a fire in a fireplace to put it out, not the stuff that soldiers do when they’re advancing on a battlefield).

The story is that back in the Middle Ages, houses were mainly made of wood and straw, and other super-flammable things. And, due to the fact that electricity wouldn’t appear for another few hundred years, obviously everyone had candles for light and fires to keep warm. Which was a bit of a recipe for disaster (see The Great Fire of London*). To make sure that no one fell asleep without putting their fire out, Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror (no one’s quite sure who came up with it) put a law in place which meant someone rang a curfew bell at 8pm to remind everyone to do just that, and also blow out any candles, put out their pipes/ciggies, etc. Willie the Conq also used the curfew bell to make sure that everyone was back in their house by 8, to stamp out any pesky English people getting together after dark to talk rebellion.

The curfew law was rePEALed (bad bell joke, sorry) in 1103 by Henry I. But you can still find a few curfew bells round the UK, like this one in Leadhills, Scotland.

*Interesting fact alert: despite the fact that the GFOL, as no one calls it, destroyed around 70,000 of the 80,000 homes in London at the time, only six people are known to have died.

sabotage

You know what ‘sabotage’ is – an awesome song by the Beastie Boys. It also means to deliberately damage or destroy something. And it has an interesting backstory, which I heard on this week’s Wittertainment podcast (currently being broadcast from Mark Kermode’s under-stairs’ cupboard and Simon Mayo’s spare room). So, apparently French labourers in ye olde times used to wear wooden shoes (why?) called ‘sabots’. And when they got pissed off with les crappy working conditions, they’d chuck these wooden shoes into the machinery to break it. So this became known as sabotage. Interesting, right?

Photo by Silvia Trigo on Unsplash.

Well, it would be, except a little bit of internet research reveals that it’s sadly bollocks. Although the word ‘sabotage’ does relate to those painful sounding wooden shoes, no one was hurling them angrily into machinery as a protest. Apparently the French word it comes from, ‘saboter’, actually means ‘to walk noisily’, as you would if you were wearing wooden shoes (probably because you’re saying ‘ouch, why am I wearing shoes made of tree’ every two seconds). This fake news story was made popular by the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Random, I know.

So what’s the real story? Well, ‘sabotage’ first appeared in writing in an 1897 report by two French anarchists (best job title ever), called Émile Pouget and Paul Delassale. They recommended that French labour unions follow in the footsteps of British trade unionists who’d successfully protested bad working conditions using work slowdowns and inefficiencies (apparently we’ve always been good at going on strike). Us Brits called this Ca’ Canny, a Scottish colloquialism which basically means ‘don’t do too much work’ (my mantra). While looking for a French equivalent, Émile came up with ‘sabotage’, inspired by the phrase ‘Travailler a coups de sabots’, or ‘to work as one wearing wooden shoes’, which had long been used to refer to slow workers. It made its way into English in the early 1900s.

Turns out it’s still a quite interesting story, even if it doesn’t involve any angry French shoe throwing.

(With special thanks to the Grammarphobia blog for the info.)

petrichor

Ooh, this is a lovely word. It describes the scent you smell when rain hits dry soil. It’s one of the few words we have for a specific smell – most, like fresh-cut grass or frying bacon, are just descriptions of what they are.

Photo by Zachary Gilseth on Unsplash.

In the words of Jennifer Aniston, here comes the science… So, certain plants exude an oil during dry weather, which is then absorbed by clay-based soil and rocks. When it rains this is released into the air, alongside another compound called geosmin (a metabolic byproduct of bacteria) which is emitted by wet soil. And together they make the smell petrichor. Hmmm, I’m glad someone came up with a nice word for it, cos it sounds gross.

Origin-wise, even though ‘petrichor’ sounds all Latiney or Ancient Greeky, it’s actually quite a modern word. It was coined in 1964 by two researchers called Isabel Joy Bear and Richard G Thomas in the scientific journal Nature. The reason it looks like ye olde word is because our researchers took its parts from Greek. ‘petra’ means ‘stone’ (you can also find this in words like ‘petrified’ and ‘petrol) and ‘ichor’ is basically a fancy word for fluid (it’s also the stuff that flows in the veins of the gods of Greek mythology apparently).

If you’re a fan of Doctor Who then you’ve probably come across ‘petrichor’ already – it was used by the TARDIS as part of a password to open a back-up control room in ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, and was also the name of a perfume that Amy Pond modelled in ‘Closing Time’.

Interesting fact alert: our noses are super sensitive to geosmin – we can detect it at concentrations as low as five parts per trillion (which is good…?). Some scientists think this is because it might have been handy for survival for our ancestors to know when rainy weather was on the way.

ennui

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash.

We’re probably all feeling some ennui at the moment. It’s a French word for being a bit bored and listless. Because it’s French, in my head it involves lots of languid fanning of one’s own face while sighing and lolling about on a chaise longue. And turns out that’s not far wrong.

Ennui comes from an Old French word, enui, meaning ‘annoyance’. That comes from the Latin ‘in odio’ which means ‘hatred’. At some point ‘enui’ gained an extra ‘n’, and became popular in the 18th century to describe the boredom felt by French youth, who were disappointed that the French Revolution hadn’t been as revolutionary as they’d hoped. This left them full of existential angst, AKA ennui. The meaning morphed again a century or so later, becoming a word expressing a dissatisfaction with the modern age and industrialisation. Lots of arty-farty types suffered from ennui at this time, poor lambs, and because of this it was seen as a mark of how clever you were – because the bourgeoisie were far too stupid to worry about important things like the futility of human existence.

The German version of ennui is ‘Weltschmerz’, which literally translates as ‘world pain’. The difference between the German and French versions is the whole listlessness thing – the Germans are just sad, without all the lying around. I guess they’re just too efficient for that #nationalstereotypes

groggy

Old Grog himself

To feel groggy is to feel slow or weak, for example after a bad night’s sleep, a bump on the head or a hella awesome night out (remember those?). Groggy is derived from ‘grog’ which these days means any kind of booze. But it used to refer purely to the watered-down rum that was issued to sailors of our very own Royal Navy. It’s named after one Admiral Edward Vernon, a British naval officer and MP. He was known for wearing a cloak made from a material called ‘grogham’ (a mixture of silk and wool – also called grosgrain) which earned him the nickname ‘Old Grog’. Despite having a long and distinguished career in the Navy, he’s most remembered for his order in 1740 that his sailors’ neat rum ration should be watered down. The resulting weak drink became known as ‘grog’.

It’s not all bad news. The first president of Murica George Washington had an estate named Mount Vernon in honour of Ed – George’s older bro Lawrence served under him. He obviously made an impression, and the estate is still called Mount Vernon to this day.

I’d like to think that Old Grog was maybe the inspiration for Old Gregg from ‘The Mighty Boosh’, but this is complete speculation on my part (I can’t find any history of Old Grog having a blinding mangina for a start). Despite that, here’s a video of Old Gregg and Howard Moon singing ‘Love Games’ – because I think we could all do with a bit more Boosh in our lives right now.

dunce

You know what a dunce is – a stupid person (e.g. someone who stockpiles toilet rolls). But did you know that it’s actually named after someone? Well, if you do, then you’re deffo not a dunce, and you can go back to your self-isolating. But if you don’t, read on…*

The man himself

John Duns Scotus was born in 1266ish (no one’s entirely sure) in Scotland near the village of Duns, hence the name. He was a Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, as well as a university professor, philosopher and theologian (#overachiever). According to the internet he’s actually one of the three most important philosopher-theologians of Western Europe (the other two being Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham – but I’m sure you knew that already, dear reader). He’s credited with coming up with several different doctrines including the idea of ‘haecceity’ (future word of the week), which is about there being some stuff in each thing that makes it an individual, or something – it’s very complicated. Duns’ nickname was Doctor Subtilis, which makes him sound like a Marvel villain, but was actually a scholastic accolade (a fancy-dancy name given to people to show that they was well clever), due to his ‘penetrating and subtle manner of thought’ (according to Wikipedia).

So, where did it all go wrong? Well, up until the English Reformation in the 16th century (when the Church of England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church), Duns’ ideas and work were still widely taught and respected. But, the Protestants started using some of his more out-there theories to discredit Catholicism, and called his followers ‘duns’. Over time, this morphed into ‘dunce’, and was soon being used to describe anyone who was a bit of a dumbo.

It’s not all bad news – Duns spawned a whole school of philosophy called Scotism. Even better, he was beatified (AKA saintified) by Pope John Paul II in 1996. Peaks and troughs.

A dunce cap – nothing to do with the KKK, honest.

Bonus fact: dunce caps (conical hats with a ‘D’ on them – badly behaved school kids back in the day were made to put these on while standing in the corner) might also come from our John, although no one’s entirely sure. Some sources claim it comes from a theory of his that wearing a conical hat made you cleverer (hmmm). But the OED says that ‘dunce cap’ didn’t enter the English language until 1833, which was well after ‘dunce’ had become a derogatory term – so chances are we can’t blame this one on him.

* You’re not a dunce either BTW.

shampoo

Obviously you know what shampoo is. But have you ever wondered where the word comes from? Luckily you have me to do that for you. So, let’s start with the most important question – does it have anything to do with poo? No, is the slightly disappointing answer (or is it just me who’s disappointed by that…?).

Photo by Dan Smedley on Unsplash.

Shampoo is an Indian word which goes all the way back to 1762. It comes from the Hindi word chāmpo, which is derived from the Sanskrit root chapati (yes, as in the flatbread), which means to press, knead or soothe. The word came over to us dirty Europeans from India by way of one Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian traveller, surgeon and entrepreneur, who used it to describe a form of massage. In 1814 he and his Irish wife Jane opened the first commercial ‘shampooing’ vapour masseur bath in Brighton (I don’t know what a ‘vapour masseur bath’ is, but it sounds like the sort of thing that would cost several hundred pounds to use in a health spa). He described shampoo in a local paper as ‘…a cure to many diseases and giving full relief when everything fails; particularly Rheumatic and paralytic, gout, stiff joints, old sprains, lame legs, aches and pains in the joints’. At some point after this ‘shampoo’ was used to refer to a scalp massage and then, in the 19th century to the soap used during that massage.

metonymy

Metonymy is a figure of speech (i.e. a thing we do to make language more fancy or poetic) that replaces the name of something with the name of something else it’s closely associated with, but isn’t a part of. Got it? Nope, me neither. Let’s look at a famous example of metonymy: ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’ (from Edward Bulwer Lytton’s play Richelieu, BTdubz – good to know in case it ever comes up in a pub quiz). The ‘pen’ refers to the written word, and the ‘sword’ is military power – so both ‘pen’ and ‘sword’ are representations of something else that they’re associated with. (Personally I’d rather have a sword than a pen in most situations, for example a zombie apocalypse, but that might just be because I watch too many horror films.)

Some other more modern examples of metonymy are:

• ‘Hollywood’ to refer to all celebs, film directors and producers and so on

• ‘top brass’ for management types

• ‘new blood’ for new people or ideas

• ‘the big house’ for prison.

It’s probably fairly unlikely that you’ll find yourself in a situation where it might be an issue, but try not to confuse metonymy with synedoche (pronounced si-nek-duh-keen – although I’ve never heard anyone say it out loud). Synecdoche is when you talk about a thing using the name of one of its parts. So it’s a bit more literal than metonymy – like calling business people ‘suits’, or your car your ‘wheels’ (although if you do either of those I’m afraid you might be a prick).

mountweazel

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.

Photo by REVOLT on Unsplash.

• 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.

sycophant

Photo by Deidre Schlabs on Unsplash.

You know what a sycophant is – someone who sucks up to someone else to get an advantage. Also known as a toady, creep, lickspittle and so on. But it hasn’t always meant that. Previously, a sychophant was someone who accused someone else of being a fig-smuggler. Nope, this isn’t another name for Speedos – it dates all the way back to classical Athens (which was a long time ago y’all).

So, way back in the sixth century (I said it was a long time ago), Athens law didn’t let anyone export food (apart from olives, because that would just be mean) outside its borders. Apparently this was torture for some fig-loving souls, who broke the law by smuggling the fruit* out. Unlike food transportation, blackmail wasn’t against the law (that’s some effed-up legal system right there). So if someone busted you leaving town with your pockets full of figs, they’d threaten to tell the fuzz about it. These blackmailers were called sykophantes, which translates as ‘revealer of figs’.

(At this point I should probably say that Wikipedia reckons this is a load of old cobblers, as there’s no concrete proof for the whole thing. But ‘sykophantes’ does mean ‘revealer of figs’, and Plutarch (Greek scholar and all round clever dude) said it was true, so let’s just go with it. Because the other explanations are nowhere near as interesting.)

I’ve just realised I’ve never had a fig.

---

*Interesting fact alert: A fig isn’t technically a fruit – it’s an ‘inverted flower’. And they only exist because of the fig wasp. (Warning: this is gross, sorry. Brace yourself.)

Female wasps clamber inside figs to lay their eggs. It’s a one-way trip – getting in rips their wings off (I told you it was gross). Once the eggs are laid, the wasp dies. The baby wasps grow up inside the fig then mate (wait, aren’t they all related? Ewww). Then the boys die (they’re born without any wings, so their only job is to get their rocks off with their sisters), and the females fly out of the fig, all covered in pollen, off to find a male fig of their own to do the whole thing again. But, PLOT TWIST: figs have genders, and only the male ones have the special egg area (not what it’s called) the wasps need to lay in. So as long as Mrs Wasp sets up shop in a male fig, everything’s fine (apart from the whole wing-ripping, dying part). But if she ends up in a female fig, she’s a bit screwed. So, she just dies, with no babies. But the good news is, she does pollinate the fig with the pollen she bought with her. Which means more figs, I think (I’m not a scientist, okay?).

Us humans only eat female figs (I’m not sure how you tell the difference – maybe they get paid less than their male counterparts), which contain an enzyme that digests the bits of dead wasp. But because of the absolute horror show mentioned above, a lot of vegans don’t eat them at all. And I don’t think I’ll be trying one any time soon.

tanka

A tanka is a Japanese lyric poem (stay with me). It’s like a haiku, which you probably had to learn about at school, but a bit longer – 31 syllables rather than 17. Tankas are made up of five unrhymed lines of five, seven, five, seven and seven syllables. They’re often romantic poems, and they talk about the weather a lot as well (so us Brits should LOVE them). They generally follow a set structure – the first three lines are usually about a particular image or thought, then the last two move the focus to something else (but still related to the original idea). Confused? Me too. Here’s an example of a tanka by Stella Pierides, a British writer and poet which hopefully shows what I mean.

this sultry evening
I mistake your eyes for two
hovering fireflies
such stillness only the dead
and the truly happy know

Nice, right?

The word ‘tanka’ was used in the second half of the eighth century in Japan to describe short poems, as opposed to chōka for (you’ve guessed it) long poems. As time went on, and probably due to a general lack of attention span, short poems became more popular. These were given the general name of ‘waka’, and the word ‘tanka’ fell out of favour for a bit (thank god they didn’t decide to combine the two names…). Then, in the early 20th century, a Japanese poet and critic by the name of Masaoka Shiki decided that waku needed updating for the times, and revived the word ‘tanka’. He also made the word ‘haiku’ popular as well (these were previously called hokkus) for the same reason. I’m not sure where he got all this renaming power from, but well done him.

Seventh-century nobles in the Japanese Imperial court held tanka poetry competitions. I like to think of these as ye olde rap battles.

licit

I came across this word in the book I’m reading at the moment (A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine in case you’re interested). You can probably guess that it’s the opposite of ‘illicit’, a word I’d always assumed is unpaired (i.e. one that looks like it should have an opposite, but doesn’t – I wrote a blog post on this a while back, which you can read here). Because that’s the kind of thing I think about. What a loser.

I don’t know what this picture has to do with anything, but it was the only one that came up when I put ‘illicit’ into the Unsplash image search (there was nothing at all for ‘licit’). So I stuck it here anyway. Oh, and it’s by timJ.

Licit means ‘lawful’ and comes from the Latin word licitus, meaning ‘lawful, permitted, allowed’ which is where we also get ‘licence’ from. Its first use in print was in 1483, and then someone stuck an ‘il’ on it to make its opposite number around 19 years later (‘il’ as a prefix often appears at the start of words beginning with ‘l’ to change the meaning – think logical/illogical, literate/illiterate, legal/illegal, and so on). For some reason – maybe because us humans much prefer doing/writing about bad behaviour over the good stuff…? – illicit went on to be used much more regularly while licit fell by the linguistic wayside. I also found a source that said that in the 19th century licit was ‘condemned unjustly as an Americanism’, which might be another reason we stopped using it (because it seems we’re xenophobic as well as naughty).

Read the other words of the week.

eggcorn

(Photo by Caleb Lucas on Unsplash.)

An eggcorn is when you mistakenly use a word or phrase for another word or phrase that sounds similar. But the end result still makes a weird kind of sense. Wow, that explanation sucked all the fun out of it, didn’t it? Sorry. Eggcorns are things like:

• ‘it’s a bit of a damp squid’ (should be squib, but it still make sense cos squids are wet)

• ‘for all intensive purposes’ (should be ‘intents and purposes’, but ‘intensive purposes’ sound like very important things)

• ‘he’s a card shark’ (it’s a sharp, not a shark, but still makes sense because we use shark to mean someone who’s really good at stuff, like a pool shark).

The name ‘eggcorn’ was coined by a linguistics professor called Geoffrey Pullum. He read an article by a linguist called Mark Liberman about a woman who used the word ‘egg corn’ instead of ‘acorn’ (because acorns look like eggs in egg cups), and pointed out that there was no name for this. Pullum suggested that we all just call them ‘eggcorns’. So now we do. I think I love Geoffrey Pullum.

Because the internet is a wonderful thing, there’s a whole website devoted to eggcorns. 648 and counting…

Bonus word: malapropism

A malapropism is the same as an eggcorn in that it’s when you use the wrong word in place of one which sounds similar. The difference is that the end result doesn’t make sense and you end up with something humorous (another super-fun explanation there, sorry). A couple of famous examples of malapropisms include ‘And then he’ll have only channel vision’ (Frank Bruno talking about Mike Tyson) and ‘Don’t upset the apple tart’ (Bertie Ahearn, former Taoiseach of Ireland).

The word malapropism comes from Mrs Malaprop, a character in a play called ‘The Rivals’ (1775, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan), who often mixes up her words. Her name’s probably based on the French phrase ‘mal à propos’, which means ‘poorly placed’.

According to the New Scientist, an office worker described a colleague as ‘a vast suppository of information’ (presumably they meant ‘repository’). They then apparently apologised for their ‘Miss-Marple-ism’, which is a malapropism for the word malapropism. HEAD EXPLODES.

Bonus, bonus word: malaphor

Wow, I’m really spoiling you this week, aren’t I? A malaphor is an informal term (which means it’s not really a proper word, hence it being a buy-one-get-one-free type of deal) for when you mix your metaphors, idioms, clichés or aphorisms. So that’s when you mash two phrases together like ‘we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it’, ‘you hit the nail on the nose’ or ‘stop winding my leg’ (© my sister, 1986).

Read the other words of the week.