charisma

The excellently named Charisma Carpenter – yes, that is her real name – of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame (photo credit: Gage Skidmore – also an excellent name)

Someone who’s charismatic is charming, attractive and often a little bit sexy. But you know that already. But did you know that ‘charisma’ actually has its roots in religion, specifically Christianity? It was only in the early 20th century that it came to have the little-bit-sexy meaning it has today.

‘Charisma’ originally comes from the Greek word ‘kharisma’ (so not much of a leap there) which means ‘favour freely given’ or ‘gift of grace’. Both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles talk about divinely conferred charisma, which is used to talk about someone who’s a favourite of him/her upstairs i.e. who’s received God’s favour. In English, from about 1640 onwards, people used ‘charisma’ to refer to a gift or power bestowed on someone by the Holy Spirit for the good of the church.

So where did the sexy come in? I’m afraid that’s a very unsexy story. German sociologist Max Weber came up with a new definition of charisma some time before 1920 (it was found in an unfinished manuscript after he died), which is generally regarded as having dragged the concept from theological obscurity into everyday use. He described it as:

“… a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person …”

janitor

This is a bit of an American word – we tend to have caretakers over here. ‘Janitor’ has a less obvious backstory than caretaker though (because that’s presumably just ‘one who takes care of somewhere’ innit). ‘Janitor’ comes from the Latin word ‘janus’ (yes, it has ‘bum’ in it – no sniggering at the back please) which means ‘arch’ or ‘gate’. So in days of yore ‘janitor’ was used to describe someone who guarded, you’ve guessed it, an arch or gate (and any other kind of entrance – agin, no sniggering please). Here it is in action in Vanity Fair:

“At the expiration of that time, wheels were heard whirling up to the gate – the young janitor went out with his gate-keys. It was a lady whom he let in at the bailiff’s door.”

— ‘Vanity Fair’ by William Makepeace Thackeray

Janus is also the name of a Roman god (who’s starred in a previous word of the week – contronym), who was the doorkeeper/bouncer for heaven. He had two faces, which presumably made him very good at his job (as he could see people coming and going – although I can’t imagine many people were leaving…). I like to think he said things like ‘your name’s not down, you’re not coming in’ and ‘no shirt, no entry’.

lalochezia

This one’s for everyone whose Christmas has been ruined by the goddamn corona virus. Lalochezia is the emotional relief you get from shouting out a big old dirty swear. So go on, I won’t tell anyone. Better? Good. Scientific studies have shown that swearing relieves stress, dulls pain and can actually make you physically stronger – there’s more about that in this article.

The word lalochezia itself has an interesting etymology. It’s got Greek roots and the first part, ‘lalo-’, means ‘speech’. The second part means ‘to defecate’. Yup. Other words which share the same roots include glossolalia, which is incomprehensible speech in an imaginary language (from someone who’s in a trance for example), and dyschezia, which means to poop with difficulty. So that’s nice.

Ironically, this word of the week is all about swearing, but doesn’t actually have any swearing in it (unlike 99.9 per cent of my other posts). So let’s end with a Merry shitty Christmas, and a happy fucking new year.

forensic

Photo by Nicole Reyes on Unsplash.

I listen to a lot of true-crime podcasts, and the word ‘forensic’ comes up all the time. I’ve recently been listening to an audiobook about a forensic scientist, which said that it doesn’t (as I thought) just relate to physical evidence like bits of skin and other gross stuff people leave at crime scenes. It’s actually a much broader term, and is a synonym (i.e. a word that means the same as) for ‘legal’ or ‘related to courts’.

Etymology-wise, ‘forensic’ comes from the Latin term forēnsis, which means ‘of or before the forum’. This is because, back in Roman times, people accused of crimes were presented to a group of important public individuals in the forum (AKA the marketplace). The naughty person and the person accusing them of being naughty would both give a speech telling their side of the story. The person who gave the best speech would then win. Yup, it was all about the argument and how they delivered it – the definition of not letting the truth get in the way of a good story. So I guess as long as you could do a good presentation then you could literally get away with murder.

Stay sexy, and don’t get murdered.

ultracrepidarian

We probably all know an ultracrepidarian. It’s someone who gives advice or opinions on things they don’t know anything about.

A different type of cobbler.

The story behind this word comes, as do many of my words of the week, from Ancient Greece. A famous painter by the name of Apelles (said to have been court artist to Alexander the Great – so a pretty big deal then) heard a cobbler being rude about the way he’d painted a foot in one of his works. Apelles then said something very cutting and witty to the cobbler about how he shouldn’t judge things that were beyond him (although, to be fair to the cobbler, he probably had seen a fair few feet working as he did in the shoemaking game… Anyway, I digress). Sadly, Apelles’ exact remark has been lost in the mists of time, which is annoying. But much cleverer people than me think it probably went something along the lines of ultra crepidam, which means ‘beyond the sole’ in Latin. And from that we get ultracrepidarian. Or, in modern parlance, mansplainer.

disaster

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

You know what a disaster is – a shitshow. So basically the whole world at the moment (just in case you’re from the future, it’s late 2020 and we’re in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic). But ‘disaster’ is another everyday word that has an interesting backstory.

It first turned up in 1567, and the ‘aster’ bit comes from the Latin word for ‘star’ (‘astro’). And the ‘dis’ bit is Latin for ‘baaaaaaaaaaad’. Or, to put it in a more professional way, the ‘dis-’ prefix expresses that a word is negative (think discontent, dishearten, dislike, and so on). This all comes from ye olde idea that the position of the stars influences what happens on terra firma. And that if those stars are out of whack, bad stuff goes down here. Like how Romeo and Juliet are described as ‘star-crossed’ AKA (spoiler alert) doomed to be thwarted by outside forces.

‘Disaster’ isn’t the only word that has a galactic flavour – ‘influenza’ comes from the Medieval Latin word for ‘influence’, based on the idea that epidemics were influenced by the position of the stars. Well, it’s as good a theory as any, I guess.

relict

I saw this word on a gravestone while walking my pooch. In case you can’t see it clearly in the picture, it says:

‘In memory of Robert Harvey
Who died January 21st 1855
Aged 80 years
Also of
Maria, relict of the above
Who died December 1886, aged 87’

I immediately felt sorry for poor Maria, forever immortalised in sexist stone as just the ‘relict’ of her husband Robert (although it’s a better epitaph than this poor lady got, also in the same churchyard). A quick Google search revealed that yes, a relict is an archaic term for a widow. It comes from the Latin verb ‘relinquere’ which means ‘leave behind’. Okay, so it still feels a bit sexist, but it’s also quite sad.

The word ‘relict’ actually has a few different meanings. It’s sometimes used interchangeably with ‘relic’, and in fact saints’ bits, the selling of which was big business back in the day, were originally called ‘relicts’. Somewhere along the way the ‘t’ fell off (much like those saints’ bits).

In biology a relict is a once prolific plant or animal that still exists in a single place, when the rest of its mates have gone extinct (not to be confused with previous word of the week ‘endling’ which you can find here – it actually mentions ‘relict’ in this context despite me having no memory of writing about it already). Relictualism (ooh, fancy) usually happens when a small area of a habitat gets cut off from the rest.

Back to widows for a sec. According to Wikipedia, the collective noun for a group of widows is an ‘ambush’. This seems a bit mean, especially as it’s also used for a group of tigers. I blame the patriarchy.

palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript or scroll that someone’s written something on, which someone else has later scraped off and then written on again. So it’s very environmentally friendly, but also means that lots of historic words were destroyed just so some arsehole had a fresh piece of paper.

Etymology wise, this one’s really straightforward. ‘Palimpsest’ comes from a Latin word ‘palimpsestus’. And that comes from an Ancient Greek word, ‘palímpsēstos’, which literally means ‘again scraped’. That doesn’t leave me very much to say here, sorry.

Lots of palimpsests came about due to the Greeks and Romans doing their writing on wax tablets. When they didn’t need the words anymore they’d scrape them off and start again. Kinda like ye olde Etch-a-Sketch, if you will. Later on people used parchment made of lamb, calf or goat kid’s skin which was expensive, hence reusing it wherever possible.

The most famous (relatively speaking) palimpsest is the Archimedes (yes, he of ‘eureka’ and naked bum fame) Palimpsest. It’s a 13th-century prayer book which contains several erased texts that were written hundreds of years before that. That includes two treatises by Archimedes that have never turned up anywhere else, ‘The Method’ and ‘Stomachion’ (good name for a band). You can find out more about how a team of scholars recovered these, and other texts, here. Oh, and it only took them 12 bloody years.

Name and shame time. The scribe who erased Archimedes’ writings only went and wrote his name on the first page of the palimpsest. He was called Johannes Myronas, and he overwrote Archimedes’ words in Jerusalem, finishing up on 14 April 1229. What an idiot.

anachronism

An anachronism is a person or a thing that’s chronologically out of place. It was part of a question on The Chase recently – ‘Which one of these is an anachronism?’ or something similar – and the right answer was ‘a knight wearing a wristwatch’, which is a good example. The word comes from chronos which is the Greek word for ‘time’, and ana-, a Greek prefix which means ‘up’, ‘back’ or ‘again’.

This is Chronos, the Greek personification of time, which is where the ‘chron’ bit of ‘anachronism’ comes from. I don’t know what he’s doing to that child.

‘Anachronism’ first turned up in in English in the 17th century (in 1617 to be precise). But then it was used to talk about a mistake in dating – no, not my entire lovelife, but dating a thing (the example given on the Merriam-Webster site is in etymology (yay!), when a word or its use is mistakenly assumed to have been earlier than it actually was). Back then there was also a thing called a ‘parachronism’, which is a nice word, used to describe an error when a date is set later than it should be. Unfortunately this one’s largely fallen out of use nowadays though.

One of the most famous recent anachronisms was that Starbucks cup that turned up in Game of Thrones (although technically that’s not supposed to be historically accurate anyway – dragons, anyone? – so perhaps it doesn’t count). You won’t be surprised to hear that this is by no means the first anachronistic error committed to celluloid. Here are some other movies that failed their history A-levels.

• Braveheart and kilts: Mel Gibson proudly sports a Scottish man skirt in this epic about William Wallace (still never seen it), which is set in 1280. But plaid and tartan kilts weren’t introduced til the 1700s. FAIL. (Before anyone Scottish gets cross, there was a type of kilt around before this. But it certainly didn’t look like the one Mel sports in the film, and it’s highly unlikely WW would have been wearing one anyway.)

• Indiana Jones and a lot of countries: In Raiders of the Lost Ark, a plane drawing a red line flies over a map that includes Thailand. But the film’s set in 1936, when Thailand was still called Siam (it wouldn’t become Thailand until 1939). Sadly Steven Spielberg didn’t learn from his mistakes in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull either – this time the plane flies over Belize in 1957. But then it was called British Honduras and would be until 1973. D’oh.

• Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and telescopes: Morethan Freeman takes the piss out of Kevin Costner’s Robin for not knowing what a telescope is (but is apparently fine with him having an American accent). But telescopes wouldn’t be invented for another FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. Oh dear.

assassin

An assassin is someone who murders prominent people like politicians (I’m saying NOTHING) or royalty. You know that. But where does the word come from? And why has it got so many goddamn ‘s’s in it? Well, the word ‘assassin’ derives from has even more ‘s’s: hashshashin (it is physically impossible to not sound drunk when attempting to say this).

If you’re thinking ‘hashshashin’ sounds a bit marijuana-y, then you’re bang on – it means ‘hashish eaters’. But how did stoners become associated with political killers? Let me start by taking you back a thousand years or so to the mountains of Persia and Syria. Why? Because this is where we find a Muslim sect called the assassins, carrying out covert murders of both Muslim and Christian leaders they considered enemies of their state. According to my usual not-very-in-depth research, the assassins were pretty hardcore, and their missions were often suicidal. Their preferred method of killing was with daggers, and, over nearly 300 years, they took out hundreds of people including three caliphs and a ruler of Jerusalem.

This unassuming chap is Lee Harvey Oswald who assassinated JFK (OR DID HE?) on 22 November 1963.

So how did the link between the word ‘assassin’ and ‘hashish’ come about? Disappointingly, historians say there’s no real evidence that they smoked any hashish at all (which is probably a good thing as they’d never have got any murdering done with all the giggling and going to the 24-hour garage for snacks). One theory is that because ‘hash’ means ‘weed’, the name comes from the idea that they cut down their enemies as easily as if they were weeds. Whatever the answer, we can apparently blame Marco Polo for popularising the link between the two.

The earliest known use of the verb ‘assassinate’ in print in English was in a pamplet by one Matthew Sutcliffe printed in 1600. Sutcliffe was an English clergyman, academic, lawyer and ‘controversialist’ (according to Wikipedia). The pamplet was called A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel, Lately Published by a Seditious Jesuite (I don’t know if this was controversial or not). Five years later a little-known writer by the name of William Shakespeare introduced ‘assassinate’ to the masses (sorry Matt), in Macbeth.

orchid

Ah, human beings. We’re fundamentally filthy. And naming stuff is no exception. The word ‘orchid’ – those beautiful blooms so beloved that they’re the national flowers of at least eight countries (Venezuela, Colombia, Singapore, Costa Rica, Honduras, Belize, Panama and Guatemala, to name just a few) – means ‘testicle’. (See also avocado.) Yup. When you look at the picture below you can probably figure out why…

The Ancient Greek word for testicle is ὄρχις or ‘órkhis’, which is obviously where ‘orchid’ comes from. But we didn’t use that until the mid 19th century. In Middle English orchids were called ‘ballockworts’ which literally means ‘testicle plant’ (from ‘beallucas’, the Old English word for balls). Gotta love those dirty-minded Middle Englanders.

Let’s get our minds out of the gutter for the last paragraph of this post with some orchid facts.

• There are more than 25,000 documented species of orchid, and they grow on every continent of the world except Antarctica (#fail).

• Orchids have bilateral symmetry, which is a posh way of saying that if you draw a line down the middle of the flower, the two halves are mirror images of each other. Human faces also have this, which might be one of the reasons we like them so much.

• Not content with having tubers that look like human bollocks, orchids’ own reproductive bits look like insects. This is so they can trick them into pollinating them, the sneaky little bastards.

phoney

To be phoney (or phony if you’re in Murica), as you know, is to be fake or insincere. Like lots of our words, it’s reached us in a bit of a weird way though. And it doesn’t have anything to do with phones, as it appeared in print some 10 years before AGB (as no one calls Alexander Graham Bell) patented anything even vaguely telephone like.

Photo by Mariah Ashby on Unsplash.

Most authorities (I don’t know who these authorities are, but that’s by the by) agree that ‘phoney’ comes from an old English slang word, ‘fawney’, meaning ‘ring’ (from the Irish word ‘fainne’). Nope, still nothing to do with phones – instead this is referring to the type of ring that Beyoncé said you should have put on it, if you liked it. All this harks back to the 19th century, where English con artists ran a scam called the ‘fawney rig’ (‘rig’ is also slang, this time for ‘trick’). Here’s how it worked. The con artist would walk down a street then make a big song and dance about finding a gold ring on the ground. They’d then find a gullible passerby and reluctantly agree to sell it to them at a fraction of its actual worth. You can probably guess the rest – the conman/woman had actually dropped the ring themselves, and it was, of course, worthless. The people who carried out this scam were known as ‘fawney men’. ‘Fawney’ eventually mutated into ‘phoney’, possibly when the scam crossed to the US, and then into a synonym for anything that’s ‘false’ or ‘deceiving’.

ostracise

To be ostracised is to be exiled or excluded from a group, who all have a chat and decide you can’t hang around with them anymore, the utter bastards. Like a lot of our words it comes from a Greek word, ostraka, which refers to a shard of pottery. But what does that have to do with being exiled by a bunch of people, I hear you ask?

Well, imagine you’re a VIP in Athens in Ancient Greece. But you’re a bit of a renegade. A lone wolf, marching to the beat of your own drum. If all that rebelliousness meant you proved to be a bit too much of a thorn in the side of the powers that be, they’d get together and have a Big Brother-style vote to decide whether to get rid of you or not. But instead of going to ye olde diary room to cast their vote, they’d write your name down on, you’ve guessed it, a bit of pottery (also called a ‘potsherd’). And if you got enough pieces of pottery with your name on then you got exiled from Athens i.e. ostracised, for TEN WHOLE YEARS.

Why did they use broken pottery? Because there was a shit tonne of it hanging around, basically. Paper obviously wasn’t readily available and papyrus had to be imported from Egypt, making it much too expensive to be used for something like this.

These ostraka are from 482 BC, and were found in a well near the Acropolis. The name on them is ‘Themistocles’ who, after he was ostracised, defected to Persia where he was made governor of Magnesia (where ‘milk of’ comes from presumably?).

tenterhooks

This is what a tenterhook looks like: from an 1822 trade catalogue published by H. Barns & Sons, of Birmingham, England

You know what it means – to be on tenterhooks (not ‘tenderhooks’ as I’ve heard lots of people say) is to be nervously excited about something that’s going to happen in the future, like your Amazon delivery or the new series of Ozark. But do you know what a tenterhook actually is? If the answer’s yes, then you’re obviously far too clever to be reading this, and should go away. Thanks.

For those of us who are still here, a tenterhook is a sharp hook that fastens cloth to, you’ve guessed it, a tenter. And a tenter is a frame that people making cloth, usually woollen, stretch it on (like a tent, geddit?), to stop it shrinking while it dries. Obviously this means the cloth is very tense, which is where the phrase comes from. Back in the day (I’m not sure which day, but let’s gloss over that), it would have been common to see fields full of tenters, which is probably why the phrase made its way into the vernacular. It’s interesting (to me, at least) that while tenterhooks themselves have pretty much disappeared, we’ve kept the phrase, despite not knowing what it’s referring to. Oh, and the word ‘tenter’ comes from from a Latin word, tendere, which means ‘to stretch’.

Thanks to my pal Rob Frankson for recommending I investigate this one.

kakistocracy

I heard this one on ‘The Chase’ this week, and even though Bradders didn’t think it was a real word, it definitely is. A kakistocracy is a state or society run by the worst, least qualified or most stupid people.

Government, innit

Unsurprisingly, ‘kakistocracy’ saw a rise in popularity when Trump took office in 2017. It actually isn’t related to ‘kak’ as in poo as you might think (that comes from a South African word for ‘faeces’). It’s from the Greek root kakistos, which means ‘worst’. The ‘-cracy’ ending is also from Greek – it’s from kratos which means ‘power’ or ‘rule’. ‘Kakistocracy’ was first recorded in the 17th century, where it made an appearance in a rant, sorry sermon, by someone called Paul Gosnold in ‘A sermon preached at the publique fast the ninth day of August 1644 at St Marie’s, 1644’. Here it is in action:

‘…transforming our old Hierarchy into a new Presbytery, and this againe into a newer Independency; and our well-temperd Monarchy into a mad kinde of Kakistocracy. Good Lord!’

It was later made famous by Thomas Love Peacock (whose name is so close to being a sentence – I love people whose names are sentences. Like Jeremy Irons) in his 1829 novel ‘The Misfortunes of Elphin’ (nope, me neither). Peacock worked for the East India Company and wrote a poem about working in an office. Even though it has nothing to do with ‘kakistocracy’, I’ve included it here because it still seems pretty relevant today:

‘From ten to eleven, have breakfast for seven;
From eleven to noon, think you've come too soon;
From twelve to one, think what's to be done;
From one to two, find nothing to do;
From two to three, think it will be
A very great bore to stay till four.’

nocebo

Sounds like ‘placebo’, right? Exactly – the nocebo effect is basically placebo’s evil twin. It’s when a patient’s bad expectations about a treatment mean that the treatment has a more negative effect than it otherwise would have. Which is a very long sentence. To give you an example, if someone is given a list of nasty side effects which they then get after taking a placebo, then they’re suffering from the nocebo effect.

The word ‘placebo’ means ‘I shall please’, from the Latin ‘placeō’ (‘I please’). So ‘nocebo’ means ‘I shall harm’ from, you’ve guessed it, noceō: ‘I harm’. It was coined in 1961 by a doctor called Walter Kennedy who I can’t find anything else to say about at all, sorry.

The word ‘placebo’ has been around for much longer than its dark counterpart – there’s a theory that it comes from a medieval practice where mourners were paid to chant for the dead during evening prayers. Because this was seen as a bit of sucky-uppy to him upstairs, these hired mourners were called ‘placebos’.

autological

I’m sticking with grammar words this week. Assuming you’re still here, an autological word is a word, usually an adjective (i.e. a describing word like ‘beautiful’ or ‘transparent’) that expresses a property it also possesses. Got it? Nope? Let’s look at an example – ‘word’ is autological. Because the word ‘word’ is also a word.

Assuming that didn’t make your head explode, here are some slightly less ridiculous examples:

• ‘longer’, because it’s a longer word than ‘long’

• ‘elongated’, because it’s an elongated version of ‘long’

• pentasyllabic (which has nothing to do with ‘long’), because it means having five syllables, and it has five syllables.

BOOM.

You can find lots more examples of autological words here to impress your friends with (unless your friends are cool).

Let’s not forget the etymology (god forbid!). In this case ‘auto’ as a prefix means ‘self’ (like ‘automobile’ i.e. something that moves by itself, or autopilot i.e. flying itself). And ‘logical’ means ‘true’ (kind of).

Autological words are also called homological words, ‘homos’ being the Greek word for ‘same’. The opposite of an autological word is a heterological one, which, you can probably guess, is where the meaning of the word doesn’t apply to itself. Like ‘long’ which is actually a short word, and ‘monosyllabic’ which most definitely isn’t made up of one syllable.

loophole

A loophole is one of those legally ambiguous things that celebrities (I’m looking at you Take That/Jimmy Carr) exploit to avoid paying tax. The word itself has an interesting backstory, and actually doesn’t have anything to do with loops. OOOH.

Allow me to take you back to the 16th century. There’s peasants and mud everywhere. It’s probably raining. You’re looking up at a medieval stone castle, which has slits in it for people to shoot arrows out of, with little risk of being hit by their attackers (unless they’re Kevin Costner). And these were known as… wait for it… loopholes. But they’re not called this because they (sort of) look like loops. The name comes from the Dutch word lûpen, which means ‘to watch’. So it’s literally a hole to watch out of (I probably didn’t need to explain that, did I?).

It’s not entirely clear how the meaning of loophole changed from window you shoot stuff out of to tax dodging. It’s more likely that the modern sense of loophole is related to actual loops, rather than windows (especially as you close a loophole). There’s also a second theory that it comes from another Dutch word loopgat (which isn’t used anymore), which describes a hole which someone or something could escape through.

contronym

This is a bit of a scary grammar term (wait! Come back!). It describes single words that have two contradictory meanings. Here are some examples:

• bolt: to stick something together, or to run the hell away

• dust: to put dust on something, or take it off

• peer: someone who’s super-posh, or someone who’s equal

• sanction: to approve something, or to boycott it

• bound: tied up, or bouncing about

• oversight: to watch over something, or to miss or omit it.

(I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – ENGLISH IS A VERY STUPID LANGUAGE.)

Janus – his name has ‘anus’ in it, tee hee.

The word itself was coined by one Jack Herring in 1962. I’m afraid I don’t know who Jack Herring is, sorry. Although I do enjoy a fish-based name, which is why I’ve included this bit of info here.

The prefix ‘contra’ means ‘against’ or ‘opposite’, which is why ‘contronym’ is also sometimes spelled ‘contranym’ (I think either is fine TBH). Contronyms are also called auto-antonyms, which is boring, and Janus words, which is a bit more interesting. This is after the Roman two-faced god (he literally had two faces – he wasn’t talking behind the other gods’ backs). Janus was the god of (deep breath) beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames and endings. He’s got two faces because one is looking towards the past, and the other towards the future apparently (dunno what happens if he turns round). Presumably it’s the two-faced bit which applies to contronyms.

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…