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.