inaptronym

If a word has the prefix ‘in-’ before it, like this one, then it usually means ‘no’ or ‘not’ (sometimes it just means ‘in’, but let’s ignore that for the purposes of this post). Think ‘independent’ (i.e. not dependent), ‘invisible’ (i.e. not visible) and inoffensive (i.e. well, you get it now). So before we get into what an inaptronym is, let’s talk about aptronyms. An aptronym is a name that suits its owner in an apt (usually funny) way. Like Les McBurney, firefighter (yes, that is a real person – regular readers (hello parents!) might remember that I previously wrote a blog post about my favourite aptronyms which featured Les, as well as weather forecaster Sarah Blizzard and plastic surgeon Dr Alter). All of this means you’ve probably already worked out what an inaptronym is – when someone’s name is very inappropriate for what they do. Before I get into the funny real-life examples of inaptronyms (which, let’s face it, is why we’re all here), you must sit through some etymology. Sorry.

‘-onym’ comes from the Greek word for ‘name’, and has a starring role in words like ‘synonym’ (a word that has the same meaning as another word – literally ‘named with’) and ‘patronym’ (a name derived from a father’s). And the ‘apt’ bit is just that – apt. Aptronym is a relatively young word, although accounts differ as to who actually coined it. It might have been created by an American columnist and author called Franklin P. Adams, although the OED cites it as having appeared in an awesomely named dictionary, Funk & Wagnall’s, way back in 1921. The concept itself (also known as nominative determinism) isn’t young though, and goes all the way back to Aristotle, who called it ou ta tuchonta onomata (did you just start singing ‘Hakuna Matata’ from The Lion King?) or ‘purposeful names’.

Okay, on to the candidates for ‘best inaptronym’.

• Frank Beard, the only member of ZZ Top who didn’t have a beard

• Rob Banks, an officer with Avon and Somerset police force

• Peter Bowler, a cricketer who was mainly a batsman

• Samuel Foote, an actor who only had one foot.

But the winner for me, is one Jaime Lachica Sin. He was the 30th Roman Catholic Archbishop of Manila and also a cardinal which means his official title was… wait for it: Cardinal Sin.

Amazing.

steganography

Steganography is the practice of hiding a secret message inside another message or a physical object that isn’t secret. Think Tim Messenger, Adam Buxton’s character in the film ‘Hot Fuzz’ (one of my all-time favourites) who hides messages in misspelt newspaper headlines about what’s going on in the village of Sandford (‘He’s Judge Judy and executioner!’). Other examples of steganography include invisible ink or playing a record backwards to reveal a hidden message.

Steganography is action – if you look at the first image under white, blue, green and red lights you see different hidden numbers (not that well-hidden, but still).

Etymology time (my favourite time). ‘Steganography’ comes from the Greek word steganographia. That’s made up of steganós, meaning ‘covered or concealed’, and ‘-graphia’ meaning ‘writing’. The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by one Johannes Trithemius (amazing name) who wrote a book called ‘Steganographia’. It was a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on magic.

The advantage of steganography over cryptography – i.e. converting text into something unintelligible so only someone who has the key or cipher can convert it back – is that the secret message doesn’t attract attention because it’s hidden in something else. So while cryptography is just about protecting the contents of a secret message, steganography hides the fact that there’s a message at all.

The earliest recorded use of steganography was in 440 BC in Greece, which Herodotus (writer, philosopher and all-round clever dude) mentions in his book ‘Histories’ (an account of the Greco-Persian Wars). A ruler by the name of Histiaeus sent a message to a minion about an upcoming revolt by shaving the head of a servant, tattoing the message on to his scalp, then sending him to deliver it once his hair had regrown. Obviously there are a lot of issues here, not least that hair growth takes a long time. Oh, and you need a new servant for every message.

Today steganography has moved on a bit. The word is commonly used to descibe the ways hackers infect people’s computers i.e. by hiding nasty bits of code in common-or-garden documents like PDFs. Then when you open the doc it installs a horrible bit of malware or ransomware on your PC. Bastards.

Warning: contains a lot of blood and some swearing (just a ‘wanker’).

agathokakological

That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? If something is agathokakological it means it’s made up of both good and evil. Think Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Darth Vader.

Photo by Jack Hamilton on Unsplash.

Agathokakological is a combo of the Greek roots agath- (which means good), kako- (which is a variant of cac-, and means, you’ve guessed it, bad) plus -logical (which is a suffix based on logos, meaning word). It was probably coined by Robert Southey, the least famous of the Lake Poets (Wordsworth and Coleridge being much more well known). Southey loved inventing words (the OED has him as the creator of almost 400) but, unlike other well-known word inventors, very few of his have survived to the modern day. This isn’t particularly surprising as several of them seem to be as hard to say/spell as agathokakological. Exhibit 1: batrachophagous which means ‘frog-eating’. What?

In 1813 Southey became poet laureate after being bigged up by his pal Sir Walter Scott (he of Ivanhoe and Rob Roy fame). Not because he was nice, but because Scott didn’t want to do it – he described it as a ‘poisoned chalice’ and said that previous holders had ‘churned out conventional and obsequious odes on royal occasions’. Ouch. In 1837, while being poet laureate and presumably churning out those crappy odes, Southey got a letter from a then-unknown young lady named Charlotte Brontë, asking for some advice on her poems. He praised Brontë’s writing but told her she shouldn’t give up the day job stating ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life…’. What a dick. And thank goodness she didn’t listen.

pleonasm

As a copywriter, this is something I have to deal with Every. Single. Day. No, it’s not a nasty disease – a pleonasm is a redundant word or phrase. So it’s basically when people use more words than they need to. Here are some examples:

• future prospects (because prospects are always in the future)

• a true fact (facts are, by definition, true)

• free gift (because you never pay for a gift).

One of my pet hates is ‘in order to’ – you can just say ‘to’. Always. Go on, try it.

The word ‘pleonasm’ has been around for four centuries, and it comes from the Greek pleonazein, which means ‘to be excessive’ (from pleiōn or pleōn, meaning ‘more’).

Pleonasms are similar to tautologies, which is when you repeat the same thing in a slightly different way. Like ‘In my opinion, I think’ and ‘please RSVP’. In fact, it’s so similar that I’m not entirely sure what the difference is… From what I can work out by reading things on the internet, all tautologies are pleonasms but not all pleonasms are tautologies. But then my head exploded so I stopped looking.

Here are some other words for being overly wordy, almost all of which sound like they could also be medical conditions and/or STIs: garrulous, verbose, logorrhea, prolix and periphrasis.

doryphore

You probably know a doryphore. I think we all do, sadly. It’s someone who enjoys pointing out when you make a small or trivial mistake. Despite sounding quite old-fashioned, ‘doryphore’ is a relatively new word in this context – it was coined by one Sir Harold Nicolson, a British politician, diplomat, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, journalist, broadcaster and gardener (and over-achiever). Now I confess I didn’t think I’d heard of him, but a bit of not-very-in-depth research revealed he was married to the writer Vita Sackville-West, who I definitely have heard of (screw you, patriarchy). They had what’s euphemistically known as a ‘complicated marriage’ – they were both bisexual and had several affairs with people of both sexes. Which their son then wrote a book about. Hmmm.

A Colorado potato beetle, ‘the most destructive potato pest in Europe’ apparently. It also likes tomatoes.

Anyway, I digress – let’s get back to the much more interesting subject of etymology. Nicolson introduced the world to the word ‘doryphore’ in the Spectator magazine in August 1952, describing it as a:

‘…questing prig, who derives intense satisfaction from pointing out the errors of others.’

He took the word from the French name of the Colorado potato beetle, which itself comes from the Greek word ‘doruphoros’ meaning ‘spear carrier’ (presumably because of the spear-like stripes on its back). So why did he pick on this particular beetle? Well, it’s a massive pest and eats, you’ve guessed it, potatoes. There’s a clue in the name. There’s also another clue in the name as to where it comes from, which is, well, Mexico. It’s extremely difficult to control because of its ability to quickly develop resistance to insecticides (much like the Borg in Star Trek).

‘Doryphore’ has also been used in France as slang for the occupying German soldiers in World War Two, and as a derogatory term for tourists.

borborygmus

Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash.

Now unless you’re a medical professional, or a big old know-it-all, then chances are you haven’t come across this word before. But I can almost certainly guarantee that it’s happened to you before. Because borborygmus is the technical term for when your stomach rumbles.

Etymologically speaking, the term ‘borborygmus’ has been around a long time – since 1724 to be very specific. It comes from the Greek word borboryzein which means, unsurprisingly, ‘to rumble’. The nice thing about it is that people think that it’s probably onomatopoeic. Go on, say it out loud. Sounds a bit like a stomach gurgle, right?

Borborygmus isn’t entirely confined to medical circles. It sometimes turns up as an adjective – borborygmic – generally used to describe noisy plumbing. Vladimir Nabokov (yes, he of pervy ‘Lolita’ fame) used it in his lesser-known (to me at least) novel ‘Ada’ (which, it turns out, is also pervy, this time in an incest-y way):

“All the toilets and waterpipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions.”

Borborygmus facts: The sound your stomach makes when it rumbles actually comes from your small intestine – the noise is produced by muscle contractions (or peristalsis), as food moves through it.

astrobleme

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash.

An astrobleme is the name given to a site that’s been hit by a meteorite. Or, to put it in more science-y terms, an ‘impact structure’. This isn’t to be confused with an ‘impact crater’ which is, well, just the hole-y bit – the impact structure includes all the deformed bedrock and sediment that’s underneath the hole (assuming I’ve understood Wikipedia correctly of course).

I like the word ‘astrobleme’ because it’s super literal. Its etymology translates as ‘star wound’ – ‘astron’ is Greek for star, and ‘bleme’ (also Greek) means ‘throw of a missile; wound caused by a missile’. It was coined by an American geologist called Robert S Dietz (1914–1995). His most notable feat was identifying the Sudbury Basin (Sudbury in Ontario, Canada, not the one in Suffolk which is just up the road from where I type this) as an ancient astrobleme – the second (or third, depending on which website you look at) biggest in the world.

But what’s the biggest, I hear you cry? Well, that honour belongs to the Vredefort crater in South Africa. It’s just over 300km (186.4 miles in old money) across. That means that the meteor that hit it was over 15km (9.3 miles) in diameter. Don’t panic though – it happened a VERY long time ago in the Paleoproterozoic Era which was between 2,500 and 1,600 million years ago.

The Vrefort crater has competition for the top spot from the Wilkes Land crater, which is underneath the ice caps in Antarctica and is as yet unverified. If it is an astrobleme then it’s a massive 480 km (300 miles) across. That means that the meteorite that caused it was at least 55km (34.5 miles) in diameter, which is four or five times wider than the Chicxulub impactor (good name for a band) AKA the one that killed all the dinosaurs, and also three-quarters of all the plant and animal species on Earth. Fuck.

adamant

Ridicule is nothing to be scared of…

To be adamant about something is to have an opinion about it which you absolutely refuse to change, despite evidence to the contrary. It’s also, of course, a popstar from the 80s who I once dressed up as for a fancy-dress party (and yes, I did do the Prince Charming dance when I was there, despite being stone-cold sober due to driving, and also only knowing the crossed-arms move and nothing else). But the meaning of adamant as we know it only dates back to around the 1800s. Before that it was used as both a noun and an adjective for something that was really bloody hard – that’s hard like a diamond, not Jason Statham. In fact, ‘adamant’ was used as a synonym (i.e. another word for) a diamond.

If you’re a fan of the Marvel comic/film franchise you’ll probably have realised that this meaning is where ‘adamantium’ comes from – the fictional metal alloy that’s grafted onto Wolverine’s skeleton and claws and is virtually indestructible. ‘Adamant’ or ‘adamantine’ as an unbreakable substance also pops up in lots of classical literature – in Greek mythology, Cronus (Zeus’ dad) castrated his father Uranus using an adamantine sickle given to him by his mother Gaia. That must have made family gatherings quite awkward. And here it is in action in a particularly sexist bit of the novel ‘Romola’ by George Eliot (even though SHE WAS A WOMAN):

Trust not in your gold and silver, trust not in your high fortresses; for, though the walls were of iron, and the fortresses of adamant, the Most High shall put terror into your hearts and weakness into your councils, so that you shall be confounded and flee like women.

Oh, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the name Adam – that’s a Hebrew word meaning, basically, ‘man’.

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 …”

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.

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.

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.

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?).

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.’