nickname

You know what a nickname is, of course – a substitute for someone or something’s proper name. But have you ever wondered who Nick is?

As it’s Christmas, it would be great if the ‘nick’ was St Nick. But, sadly, it turns out there’s no Nick in nickname. It’s a very old word, going all the way back to the early 1300s. And it looked a bit different then, as it was spelled ‘ekename’. This literally means ‘additional name’ from the Old English word ‘eac’, which comes from ‘eacian’ – to increase. So how did it become ‘nickname’? This is down to a process called rebracketing (also resegmentation or metanalysis if you want to get really technical), which is a fancy-dancy way of saying that the ‘n’ of the ‘an’ got moved to the beginning of the noun. So it went from [an][ekename] to [a][nekename], which eventually morphed into ‘nickname’.

This specific type of rebracketing is called ‘false splitting’. Other words that have lost an ‘n’ because of false splitting include:

• a napron ⇾ an apron (the thing you wear when you’re cooking)

• a naddere ⇾ an adder (snake)

• a noumpere ⇾ an umpire (the tennis people).

Another type of rebracketing is when words become split in a way that’s different from how they were built. If you just said ‘huh’, here are some examples which will hopefully help:

• hamburger – hamburgers are called hamburgers because they come from Hamburg i.e. [Hamburg][er]. But because ham is a food, at some point we decided they were made from ham (even though they’re not), and created a new word, ‘burger’. Then we attached that to lots of other foodstuffs (cheeseburger, veggieburger, etc). Ooh, I’m hungry now

• helicopter – this is made up of ‘helico’, from the Greek word ‘helix’ meaning ‘spiral’, and ‘pter’ from ‘pterón’ which means ‘wing’. So it’s actually [helico][pter]. Presumably because ‘pter’ is quite hard to pronouce, we’ve rebracketed it as [heli][copter] and use both of these as parts of other words (helipad and gyrocopter being the only two I can think of at the moment)

• alcoholic – this is actually made up of [alcohol] and [ic], with alcohol being, well, alcohol, and the suffix ‘ic’ meaning ‘relating to’. We’ve rebracketed this as [alco][holic] and added the [holic] bit to anything vaguely addictive (shopaholic, workaholic, etc.).

Well, that was a lot of technical gubbins, wasn’t it? Let’s finish up with some awesome historical nicknames.

Henry the Impotent doing a medieval finger gun

• Viscount Goderich, AKA The Blubberer: Goderich (1782–1859) holds the dubious honour of being the briefest-serving British prime minister ever (who didn’t die in office) at only 144 days. He got his nickname from crying in the House of Commons about people who died in riots against the Corn Laws (which I think makes him sound like quite a nice bloke).

• Ragnar Hairy Pants: This one’s slightly cheeky as Ragnar might not have been a real person, although he does turn up in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which is apparently pretty reliable. I think his nickname’s fairly self-explanatory (he had hairy trousers). His son also had an awesome nickname – Ivar the Boneless – although no-one knows for sure where that came from.

• Charles XIV of Sweden, AKA Sergeant Pretty Legs: He was king of Sweden and Norway from 1818 until he died in 1844, and he had good legs. Nuff said.

• Honourable mentions to: Constantine the Dung-Named (Byzantine emperor from 741 to 775); John The Babymaker (born in 1458 and ruled Cleves – where ‘Anne of’ came from presumably, apparently fathering 63, yep, 63 illegitimate children); and Henry the Impotent (King of Castile from 1454 to 1474, who failed to consummate his 13-year marriage to his cousin, although didn’t have trouble doing it with anyone else apparently).

ihi

This is the noise Michael Jackson used to make in most of his songs. I jest, of course. This is in fact a really lovely Māori word that doesn’t have an equivalent in English. It describes that feeling you get from an amazing performance that gives you goosebumps. Here’s a quote from Māori Language Commission chief executive Ngahiwi Apanui on the meaning of ‘ihi’:

‘It's a combination of something spiritual and something physical … It's the kind of x-factor the performer has ... it’s hitting you in the heart and the hair is standing up on the back of your neck and you’re thinking, “wow, this is amazing”.’

‘Ihi’ is often accompanied by ‘wehi’, which describes the impact that ihi has on someone.

Another awesome Māori word that doesn’t have an English equivalent is pōhēhē, a person who wrongly assumes they know something and then continues to insist that they’re right. I think we all know a pōhēhē.

The Māori language is called ‘te reo’, which simply means ‘the language’. It became one of New Zealand’s three official languages in 1987 (the others being English and NZ sign language). Originally there was no written version of it, until European settlers came along. These days the Māori alphabet is made up of 15 letters, two of which are digraphs (which is a fancy way of saying there are two pairs of letters for one sound). Oh, and that little line over the ‘a’ of Māori is called a ‘macron’ (nothing to do with the French president), which tells you it should be pronounced as a long vowel.

The Māori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa which means ‘land of the long white cloud’ (the much less romantic English name comes from the Dutch province of Zeeland).

[Disclaimer: I’m by no means an expert on te reo, so if you’d like to find out more, head on over to the Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori or Māori Language Commission’s website to find out more.]

shrift

Have you ever given someone or someone short shrift? And if you have, have you ever wondered what it actually means? No? Oh.

For anyone who’s still here, if you get or are given short shrift, it means you’re treated without sympathy and don’t get much in the way of attention. The word ‘shrift’ is well old, going all the way back to ye olde Anglo Saxons. Back then a shrift referred to the penance you were given by a priest for doing something naughty. That comes from the verb ‘shrive’, which means to hear confession, or give someone penance or absolution. And ‘shrive’ goes all the way back to the Latin word ‘scribere’, which means ‘to write’. I told you it was well old.

Ricky III #nohunchback

But why are shrifts generally short nowadays? As with many of our words and phrases we can thank Shakespeare for that. ‘short shrift’ appears in ‘The Tragedy of King Richard the Third’, first performed in 1594. Lord Hastings, who’s loyal to Ricky’s bro Edward IV, is sentenced to be executed for treason. He’s told to make his pre-beheading confession – AKA his shrift – quick, because the Duke of Gloucester (the Lord Protector of England who’s ordered the separation of H’s head from his body) is hangry:

‘Dispatch, my lord [Hastings]; the duke would be at dinner:

Make a short shrift; he longs to see your head.’

It wasn’t long before people took the phrase ‘short shrift’ and started using it to describe giving something little thought or sympathy.

The word ‘shrive’ also gave us the ‘Shrove’ in Shrove Tuesday. That’s because it’s traditionally a day for Christians to be be shriven (or shrove) i.e. do some confessing before Lent. Oh, and eat a load of pancakes at the same time.