rankle

If something rankles, it irritates you in a way that really gets under your skin. Like neighbours who leave their bins out for a week, people who eat loudly or drivers who don’t park at the back of the box on a street with very limited parking (that last one might just be me). It’s an annoyance that lingers, festers and keeps you muttering to yourself. And maybe sneaking out in the middle of the night to leave a rude note on someone’s windscreen.

‘Rankle’s etymology is quite literal – it came into English from an Old French word, ‘draoncle’, which meant ‘boil’ or ‘festering sore’. Lovely. That comes from a Latin word, dracunculus, which is less gross – it means ‘little serpent’ or ‘little dragon’ (and would have been an ace name for one of the Game of Thrones dragons).

So how did we get from serpents to sores? Well, in the ancient world, apparently people thought some ulcers looked like wriggling little snakes under the skin. I’m not googling this to check though.

When ‘rankle’ first slithered into English in the 14th century as ‘ranclen’, it was all about wounds festering away. Then, over the next couple of centuries, writers started using it in the figurative sense for feelings that behave like sores that refuse to heal. Shakespeare was of course leading the pack, using it as a metaphor for an emotional condition in Richard II:

‘Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more

Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.’

Thanks to our Will, and others like him, when something rankles today, there’s no pus involved. And ‘no pus involved’ is always a good thing, right?

muster

These days, most mustering is about courage or passing: ‘I mustered the courage to speak up’ or ‘that comment doesn’t pass muster.’ But originally it referred to a formal gathering of troops for inspection. Medieval armies would call all their soldiers together to check no one was AWOL, and that they were all properly armed and fit for duty – and that was called ‘a muster’.

14th-century ‘muster rolls’ show sheriffs and commanders doing just that: assembling the county’s able-bodied men, checking weapons and recording who turned up (muster rolls are not to be confused with roll calls, which are when someone reads aloud the names of the people on the muster roll to check who’s there).

‘Muster’ has other military uses too – when a military unit is created, it’s ‘mustered in’, and when it’s disbanded, it’s ‘mustered out’.

This is of course where we get the phrase ‘passing muster’ from, which has been around since the late 16th century, although then it was ‘pass the muster’. It wasn’t long until we dropped the ‘the’, and started using ‘muster’ in a more figurative, non-military way to mean ‘to gain acceptance or approval’.

‘Muster’ comes from a Latin word, ‘monstrare’, which means ‘to show’. This passed into Old French as ‘mostrer’ and then into Middle English as ‘muster’.

During Jubilee years, British armed forces perform a muster for the king or queen. This tradition dates back to Tudor times, and gives the military a chance to show the monarch what they do and what they look like. The 2012 Diamond Jubilee Armed Forces Parade and Muster was the first time all three service branches were present at the same time to celebrate Elizabeth II’s years on the throne. 2,500 servicemen and women took part in it, and it was the first major event of the Diamond Jubilee.

gargoyle

I’m sure you know what a gargoyle is – an ugly little devil-like figure, often winged, that sits high up on the outside walls of churches, cathedrals and other Christian buildings to ward off evil. Well, you’re half right. A gargoyle is one of those things, but only if it has a hole where its mouth is for water to flow out of. That’s because gargoyles actually have a very practical purpose – to channel rainwater through their mouths and away from church walls, so the stonework didn’t crumble. If it doesn’t have any water flowing through it, it’s a grotesque. So all gargoyles are grotesques, but not all grotesques are gargoyles.

‘Gargoyle’ goes back to an Old French word, ‘gargouille’, which means ‘throat’ or ‘gullet’. That comes via Medieval Latin from ‘gargola’/‘gargulio’. It’s the same root as ‘gargle’ – both words echo the sound of liquid gurgling down the throat.

So far, so good. But who decided to gussy up gutters as gargoyles in the first place? Well, we have a French legend to thank for that. The story goes that in 7th-century Rouen, a dragon-like creature called La Gargouille was terrorising the town, breathing fire and flooding it with water (I’m not entirely sure how the fires turned into floods, but let’s gloss over that). When the townspeople finally defeated it, they mounted its head and neck on the town’s church. And that’s apparently the reason why gargoyles came to be carved onto churches as both water spouts and protectors.

(In truth, it was probably just the whimsy of medieval architects and designers – but that doesn’t make for nearly as good a story.)

Gargoyles and grotesques might feel like an olde worlde thing, but they’re still being added to buildings today. Paisley Abbey in Scotland was built in the 12th century and restored in the 1990s. A stonemason hired to replace 12 crumbling stone gargoyles added a grotesque that looks exactly like the xenomorph from the 1979 film ‘Alien’ – great to see a modern movie monster keeping company with its medieval cousins.

Image credit: Colin, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

heckle

Today, I think probably everyone thinks heckling is a thing that happens to people on stage, mostly comedians. But it has genuinely surprising origins. And they involve… sheep. Scottish sheep, to be precise.

In the early 14th century, ‘heckle’ (then spelled ‘hechel’) was a noun that referred to a comb for flax or hemp. It came into English from the Middle Dutch ‘hekelen’, which itself is from a root meaning ‘hook’ or ‘tooth’, a nod to the rows of sharp teeth on the combs. The verb followed soon after around 1350, meaning to comb out fibres before spinning them into linen.

Although flax was the main thing being heckled at this point, the same process of combing applied to wool, which is where my sheep come in. Farmers and spinners would literally heckle wool fibres into shape before weaving them into cloth.

So how did it go from combing to shouting at gigs? Come with me to 18th-century Dundee. This was the local centre of the wool trade and therefore full of hecklers, skilled workers employed to comb out wool. These hecklers had a reputation for radical politics, forming themselves into what we’d call a union today, and bargaining for better salaries and perks (mainly booze, apparently). At public meetings they’d bombard politicians with awkward questions, ‘combing through’ their arguments just like they did with those tangled fibres. And by the 1790s, ‘to heckle’ had also come to mean challenging or interrupting a speaker. Fast forward to the 19th century, and the textile sense of ‘heckle’ had pretty much faded away completely.

There you go. From pulling fibres apart to pulling people on stage apart in less than 500 years.

set

If you had to guess the English word with the most meanings, what would you go for? Okay, so there’s a bit of a spoiler in the heading – it is, obviously, ‘set’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘set’ has more definitions than any other word in English – over 430 (WHAT) across nouns, verbs and adjectives. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for one little three-letter word.

Here it is showing off just some of those meanings:

• as a verb: you can set the table, set your alarm, set off fireworks or set a bone

• as a noun: you can own a set of tools, perform on a film set, play a set in tennis or study a data set

• as an adjective: you can have set beliefs, a set routine or a set expression on your face.

So how did that happen? Well, laziness, it seems. It’s much easier to adapt an existing word than come up with a new one (unless you’re Dickens, Carroll or Milton). ‘Set’ didn’t start out doing all that work though. It comes from the Old English verb ‘settan’ which was usually used to mean ‘to cause to sit or place something’. But even then people were stretching it to other things. Here’s a brief timeline of what happened next…

• by the mid‑13th century, ‘set’ could mean ‘make or cause to do, act, or be; start or bring to a certain state’ (e.g. ‘set something on fire’, ‘set in order’) and also, randomly, ‘mount a gemstone’

• by around 1300, it also meant things like ‘determine upon, resolve’ (as in ‘I’m set against setting that shoddy gemstone’)

• by the late 14th century, it had also taken on the meaning of ‘make a table ready for a meal’ and ‘regulate or adjust by a standard’ (like setting a clock)

• after that, it all went nuts and loads of other uses followed in printing, music, medicine and many more, including idioms like ‘but I’ve set my heart on that shoddy gemstone’.

The adjective version has been around a while too. In late Old English (spoken from 900–1100ish), ‘set’ meant something like ‘appointed or prescribed beforehand’, eventually shifting to ‘fixed, immovable, definite’ and later ‘ready’.

As a noun, it came about a bit later – around the mid‑15th century. Then it was linked to ‘religious sect’. Later, around Shakespeare’s time (the 16th century), it came to mean ‘collection of matching things’ (like a tea set, for example).

I asked ChatGPT for a sentence that uses lots of different meanings of set, and here’s what it came up with (deep breath):

Yesterday I set my alarm too early, so I set my feet on the cold floor and set off down the hall, only to find the builders had set ladders against the wall, while the decorator had set about painting the ceiling; in the kitchen I set a pan of milk to warm, then set the table with a breakfast set, but before eating I set my phone to silent, set my watch by the radio pips, and set my mind to solving the crossword, until the dog set up a racket at the postman, who was trying to deliver a boxed chess set, which reminded me to set aside time later to meet friends for a set at the tennis club, though I feared the rain clouds already set in would set back our plans, so I set down my pen, set my heart on baking instead, and left the cake mixture on the side to set.

That squeezes in 20 meanings of ‘set’ which are (assuming there’s anyone still reading this):

1. set = adjust/alarm

2. set = place (feet on floor)

3. set off = depart

4. set = position/prop (ladders)

5. set about = begin/attack task

6. set = put to cook (pan)

7. set the table = prepare for meal

8. set (noun) = group of items (breakfast set)

9. set to silent = adjust/arrange

10. set watch = regulate/adjust

11. set one’s mind = focus

12. set up = cause to make a noise

13. set (noun) = boxed collection (chess set)

14. set aside = reserve

15. set (noun) = a tennis sequence of games

16. set in = begin (weather)

17. set back = delay

18. set down = put in writing

19. set one’s heart on = desire

20. set (of jelly/cake) = solidify

I’m off for a lie down now.

alcohol

This is quite apt, as I’m writing this with a bit of a hangover (don’t judge me). But whether you’re a drinker or not, you might not know that the word ‘alcohol’ has an interesting backstory.

Like lots of words starting with ‘al-’, ‘alcohol’ comes from an Arabic word: ‘al-kohl’. If you’re someone who likes a smoky eye, you’ll probably recognise that last bit from kohl eyeliner. And that’s what it meant – by the 10th century, ‘al-kohl’ was used to refer to the mix of lead-based minerals (including galena, cerussite, laurionite, phosgenite, stibnite and malachite) used as eyeliner in the Middle East. (And no, rocking a lead-based cat-eye isn’t a good idea – research has found that lots of people got lead poisoning as a result. There’s an upside though. It also acted as a toxin, killing off infections that got into people’s eyes when the Nile flooded. Bonus.)

Much like me walking home after a night at the pub, the word ‘alcohol’ took a slightly circuitous route to get to English. Because kohl was made by grinding, over time, the meaning of ‘al-kohl’ shifted in Arabic to mean any very fine powder. In the 13th to 14th centuries, Medieval Latin borrowed the word as ‘alcohol’ or ‘alcochol’, using it for fine powders or refined substances that were ground or distilled. By the 14th to 16th centuries, alchemists were applying it to the purified ‘essence’ of something – for example, ‘alcohol of wine’ meant highly concentrated ethanol. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the meaning narrowed further in English to ethanol specifically, and then more broadly to any drink containing it. AKA, booze.

Us humans have been finding ways to get pissed for the best part of 13,000 years. In 2018, residue from a beerlike fermented drink was found in stone mortars in a cave in Israel. They’re believed to date back to 9750–11,750 BCE. There’s also a theory that the hunt for beer is what prompted us to start farming cereals, which led to one of the biggest social-technological changes in human history. (It might also have been the hunt for bread or porridge, but that doesn’t make for such a good story.)

buttload

This one sounds American, and that’s because it is. You’ve probably heard it US films or TV used in the same way we’d say ‘shed/shitload’: ‘I’ve got a buttload of laundry’ or ‘They made a buttload of money’. It just means ‘a lot’.

Before you start muttering ‘These words of the week have really gone downhill, Emma,’ ‘buttload’ IS a real word. And it’s nothing to do with bottoms. If you’re a gardener, you might already be one step ahead of me – because the ‘butt’ of ‘buttload’ is the same one you might use to collect rainwater, AKA a waterbutt. That’s because ‘butt’ is an old word for a barrel. But it was a more fun barrel than a waterbutt, as this one was filled with wine or beer. A standard butt held about 108 imperial gallons or around 477 litres. So a ‘buttload’ literally meant the amount a butt could hold. You can even find references to ‘buttload’s in old brewing and shipping records. (I told you it was real.)

The slang version first appeared in print as a jokey way to say ‘loads’ in the late 1980s. That was in an autobiographical cult (according to Amazon) travelogue called ‘Los Angeles Without a Map’ by Richard Rayner, first published in 1988 (and made into a film starring David Tennant in the 90s). According to the synopsis, Brit Rayner left his long-term girlfriend and steady job in London to ‘fly on a whim to track down Barbara, a bunny girl, athlete and party head’. A party head is 80s slang for someone who likes to have a good time, apparently. And Richard sounds like a buttload of dickheads, frankly.

ornery

I saw this word in the blurb of a book I was looking at, where it referred to an ‘ornery teen’. In case you haven’t come across it before, it means ‘bad-tempered or difficult to deal with’. Despite its grumpy meaning, it’s a nice word, right? But where does it come from? Well, it turns out that ‘ornery’ actually has quite an ordinary background. Literally.

Let’s take a trip to 18th-century America. The word ‘ordinary’ was often slurred in speech to something like ‘ornary’ or ‘ornery’. Because of that, this pronunciation became associated with rural, working-class or ‘uneducated’ speakers. It then started to pick up negative connotations, implying something a bit rougher or more unsophisticated than ‘ordinary’. Over time, it moved even further from its ordinary roots, coming to mean contrary, grumpy or mean-spirited.

You’re most likely to hear ‘ornery’ in the south or midwest of Murica. It turns up a lot in ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ by Mark Twain. He often uses it to show a kind of cranky self-loathing or backwoods stubbornness (this novel is also one of the earliest and most famous literary uses of the word):

‘… though I couldn’t make out how he was a-going to be any better off then than what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant, and so kind of low-down and ornery.’

‘There was empty drygoods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting on them all day long, whittling them with their Barlow knives; and chawing tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretching—a mighty ornery lot.’

‘Ornery’ is an example of how pronunciation, social attitudes and a bit of good old-fashioned snobbery can shape the meaning of a word. This is called semantic drift. Not the snobbery bit – ‘semantic drift’ is where words acquire new senses, lose old ones or completely change their meaning (like how ‘gay’ shifted from meaning ‘cheerful’ to ‘homosexual’).

Semantic drift can lead to ‘polysemy’, which is when a word ends up with more than one meaning at the same time – like ‘wicked’, for example, which can mean ‘evil’ (from ‘wicca’, the Old English word for a male sorcerer) or ‘super cool’. As well as polysemy, ‘wicked’ is also an example of semantic inversion – where a word flips to mean its opposite (‘sick’ is another one that’s done that in slang).

Finally, if you’re looking for a band name, ‘semantic drift’ would be awesome.

flensing

I heard this gruesome little word on ‘Bookish’, a new detective show written by and starring Mark Gatiss, and set in post-war London. It isn’t for the faint-hearted or any animal lovers out there – it refers to the slicing and stripping of skin and fat from whales or seals.

‘Flensing’ itself is pretty old, and comes from an Old Norse word, ‘flesja’, meaning ‘to flay’. It came to English in the 1700s via the Netherlands and the Dutch word ‘flensen’, when commercial whaling was at its peak. At that time, every part of the whale had a use, including oil for lamps, baleen for corsets and blubber for soap.

Nowadays, most of us won’t hear or see flensing outside of ‘Moby Dick’ or grim Arctic documentaries. And thank goodness – because whales are some of the most extraordinary creatures on Earth. For example, male humpback songs can be heard up to 10 km (more than 6 miles) away, and follow patterns that are similar to human language.

This brings me on to the so-called ‘loneliest whale in the world’ – a mysterious creature that calls out at 52 hertz, a much higher pitch than other whales use. It’s been tracked since the 1980s but never seen, and scientists don’t think any other whales can hear its calls (sob).

The story of the loneliest whale has inspired books and documentaries, and even music – including ‘Whalien 52’ by K-pop behemoth BTS, which uses the 52-hertz whale as a metaphor for the alienation often felt by adolescents. The good news is that whale calls picked up by a sensor in California in 2010 suggest there might be more than one whale calling at 52 hertz. So maybe, at last, someone’s answering back.

Well, that was all a bit depressing, wasn’t it? To cheer us up, here’s a video of the Commerson’s Dolphin, a tiny black-and-white dolphin that lives in the cold waters near South America and the Kerguelen Islands. They look like teeny-weeny killer whales. (Of course, they’re critically endangered. Sorry.)

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scurrilous

It sounds posh, doesn’t it? But ‘scurrilous’ is actually the linguistic equivalent of getting slapped round the head with a rolled-up newspaper. It means ‘grossly or obscenely abusive’ or ‘slanderous’. So if you’re accused of making scurrilous claims, your pants are almost certainly in need of a visit from the fire brigade.

But how did such a fancy-sounding word end up doing such dirty work? Like lots of refined-but-rude words, ‘scurrilous’ comes to us from Latin. It traces back to ‘scurrilis’, which means ‘buffoon-like’ or ‘coarse’. And that comes from ‘scurra’, meaning ‘jester’ or ‘clown’ AKA someone who made a living making rude jokes (like previous star of the word of the week – and best job title evs – Roland the Farter).

Over time, ‘scurra’s association with low humour, insults and botty burps (sorry) stuck. So it wasn’t long before ‘scurrilous’ came to describe anything vulgar, mocking or abusive – especially in speech or writing.

Us English speakers got hold of ‘scurrilous’ in the 16th century. The earliest known printed use is in 1570 in the ‘Thesaurus Linguæ Romanæ & Britannicæ*’ by Thomas Cooper (theologian, Bishop of Winchester and master of Magdalen College at Oxford University): ‘Scurrilous iesting and vnshamefast rayling.’

Translation: rude jokes and shameless ranting – or in modern terms, social media.

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*The full title of this is, deep breath, ‘Thesaurus Linguæ Romanæ & Britannicæ: tam Accurate Congestus, vt Nihil Penè in Eo Desyderari Possit, Quod Vel Latinè Complectatur Amplissimus Stephani Thesaurus, Vel Anglicè, Toties Aucta EliotæBibliotheca’. Phew. You can also read it online, if you have a spare six months or so, and a magnifying glass.

cacophony

A cacophony is a big old noise, and an unpleasant one at that. Looking and sounding as chaotic as what it describes, ‘cacophony’ comes from the Greek kakophōnía. That’s a mash-up of kakos meaning ‘bad’, and phōnē which means ‘voice’ or ‘sound’. So it literally means ‘bad sound’. No sugar-coating here.

In classical rhetoric (the ancient art of persuasion through language), ‘cacophony’ referred specifically to harsh or clashing combinations of sounds in speech or writing – phrases that were awkward to say, unpleasant to hear or stylistically jarring. So if a sentence was hard to say out loud or just didn’t flow well, it might be criticised as ‘cacophonous’.

‘Cacophony’ first turned up in English in the mid-1600s, when people were busy developing new types of machinery and opera. So you can see why a word for noisy noises might be useful. Its first appearance in print was in Thomas Blout’s Glossographia, one of the earliest dictionaries (published in 1656 with the subtitle ‘A Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words… As Are Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue’ which I love). There it was used to describe ‘an ill, harsh, or unpleasing sound’.

Despite its unpleasant meaning, ‘cacophony’ has a classy family tree, sharing a root with ‘symphony’ – that’s the same phōnē, but this time combined with sym-, meaning together. Its antonym (a fancy way of saying ‘opposite’) is the lesser-known ‘euphony’, which literally means ‘good sound’.