Words of the week — Emma Wilkin

These days a hench(wo)man is a villain’s loyal-to-a-fault sidekick, and the one who does the dirty work. But where does the ‘hench’ bit come from? Well, it actually has a quite noble backstory.

(Just FYI, henchperson sounds weird, which is why I’ve gone for that less sexist bracketed version.)

Hench comes from an Old English word ‘hengest’, which meant a horse – more specifically, a stallion or gelding ridden into battle. In the Middle Ages, a henchman (or henxman – an early spelling) was someone who walked or rode beside a noble or royal, often leading their horse. They were trusted servants, sometimes young noblemen, who acted as attendants in a lord’s household or during travel. The role was both practical and symbolic – yes, they were there to help with the horses, but having a henchman also showed off the lord’s status.

‘Henchman’ first appeared in Middle English in the 14th century. Records from 1360 mention ‘henxmen’ in the service of King Edward III. Over time, as the roles of squires and personal grooms disappeared, ‘henchman’ came to mean any loyal supporter or follower. By the 17th and 18th centuries, it was used more generally for someone who backed up a powerful figure. The more sinister meaning – a thug or blindly loyal enforcer – only became common in the 20th century, helped along by fiction books and films.

Talking of which, the most famous henchmen and women have probably gone up against James Bond. Here are just a few of my favourites along with JB’s perfectly delivered one liner.

Oddjob in Goldfinger (1964), who’s electrocuted when Bond jams his steel-brimmed hat into electrified metal bars: ‘He blew a fuse.’
Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye (1995) is crushed against a tree when Bond shoots down her helicopter harness: ‘She always did enjoy a good squeeze.’
Necros, The Living Daylights (1987) (my favourite Bond film), who falls to his death after Bond cuts his bootlace during a fight hanging out the back of a plane: ‘He got the boot.’
Vargas, Thunderball (1965), is shot by Bond with a speargun, and impaled against a palm tree: ‘I think he got the point.’

(Oh, and the slang term ‘hench’ for someone who’s big, strong and muscular probably does come from hench(wo)man, although no one’s completely sure.)

If you refurbish something, you renovate, refresh or rejuvenate it to make it look new again, like furniture or phones. Although I could definitely do with some refurbishing…

My personal issues aside, where does the word come from? You undoubtedly already know that the prefix ‘re’ means ‘again’, so added to ‘furbish’ it means ‘to furbish again’. But what’s furbishing? Well, it appeared in Middle English in the 14th century from an Anglo-French word, ‘furbisshen’, a verb which originally meant ‘to polish’. Its lineage stretches even further back than that though, to ‘furben’, an Old High German word which also meant ‘polishing’. There was obviously a lot of stuff that needed a shine back in the day. (Oh, and in case you’re not up on your ancient languages, High German was spoken roughly between 500 AD and 1050, and was the earliest stage of the German language. And Anglo-French words are words that originated from the French language as it was used in medieval England after the Norman Conquest.)

Over time, ‘furbish’ developed an extended sense of ‘renovate’ just in time for English speakers to coin ‘refurbish’ in the 17th century with the same meaning. Its first appearance in print was in 1611, in Randall Cotgrave’s A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. Cotgrave was an English lexicographer (AKA ye olde Susie Dent), and his bilingual dictionary was seen as groundbreaking at the time – that’s because as well as basic translations and explanations of French words in English, it also included idiomatic expressions, phrases, technical terms and even recipes. Cotgrave’s work contributed to the development of bilingual dictionaries and language-learning resources, and influenced how dictionaries were compiled for centuries. Think of it as the 17th-century version of Duolingo, but without the passive-aggressive owl.

Back to ‘refurbish’. It’s an example of an unpaired word, i.e. one that looks like it should have an opposite, but doesn’t anymore. This usually happens because the antonym (a fancy way of saying ‘opposite word’) has fallen out of fashion. Or it might be that it never existed in the first place, for example if we nicked the unpaired word from another language. Other examples of unpaired words include disgruntled, unruly and impervious. If you’d like to know more about whether you can actually be gruntled, ruly or pervious, head to the blog. Spoiler alert – you totally can.