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.

assassin

An assassin is someone who murders prominent people like politicians (I’m saying NOTHING) or royalty. You know that. But where does the word come from? And why has it got so many goddamn ‘s’s in it? Well, the word ‘assassin’ derives from has even more ‘s’s: hashshashin (it is physically impossible to not sound drunk when attempting to say this).

If you’re thinking ‘hashshashin’ sounds a bit marijuana-y, then you’re bang on – it means ‘hashish eaters’. But how did stoners become associated with political killers? Let me start by taking you back a thousand years or so to the mountains of Persia and Syria. Why? Because this is where we find a Muslim sect called the assassins, carrying out covert murders of both Muslim and Christian leaders they considered enemies of their state. According to my usual not-very-in-depth research, the assassins were pretty hardcore, and their missions were often suicidal. Their preferred method of killing was with daggers, and, over nearly 300 years, they took out hundreds of people including three caliphs and a ruler of Jerusalem.

This unassuming chap is Lee Harvey Oswald who assassinated JFK (OR DID HE?) on 22 November 1963.

So how did the link between the word ‘assassin’ and ‘hashish’ come about? Disappointingly, historians say there’s no real evidence that they smoked any hashish at all (which is probably a good thing as they’d never have got any murdering done with all the giggling and going to the 24-hour garage for snacks). One theory is that because ‘hash’ means ‘weed’, the name comes from the idea that they cut down their enemies as easily as if they were weeds. Whatever the answer, we can apparently blame Marco Polo for popularising the link between the two.

The earliest known use of the verb ‘assassinate’ in print in English was in a pamplet by one Matthew Sutcliffe printed in 1600. Sutcliffe was an English clergyman, academic, lawyer and ‘controversialist’ (according to Wikipedia). The pamplet was called A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel, Lately Published by a Seditious Jesuite (I don’t know if this was controversial or not). Five years later a little-known writer by the name of William Shakespeare introduced ‘assassinate’ to the masses (sorry Matt), in Macbeth.

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.

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.’

nocebo

Sounds like ‘placebo’, right? Exactly – the nocebo effect is basically placebo’s evil twin. It’s when a patient’s bad expectations about a treatment mean that the treatment has a more negative effect than it otherwise would have. Which is a very long sentence. To give you an example, if someone is given a list of nasty side effects which they then get after taking a placebo, then they’re suffering from the nocebo effect.

The word ‘placebo’ means ‘I shall please’, from the Latin ‘placeō’ (‘I please’). So ‘nocebo’ means ‘I shall harm’ from, you’ve guessed it, noceō: ‘I harm’. It was coined in 1961 by a doctor called Walter Kennedy who I can’t find anything else to say about at all, sorry.

The word ‘placebo’ has been around for much longer than its dark counterpart – there’s a theory that it comes from a medieval practice where mourners were paid to chant for the dead during evening prayers. Because this was seen as a bit of sucky-uppy to him upstairs, these hired mourners were called ‘placebos’.

autological

I’m sticking with grammar words this week. Assuming you’re still here, an autological word is a word, usually an adjective (i.e. a describing word like ‘beautiful’ or ‘transparent’) that expresses a property it also possesses. Got it? Nope? Let’s look at an example – ‘word’ is autological. Because the word ‘word’ is also a word.

Assuming that didn’t make your head explode, here are some slightly less ridiculous examples:

• ‘longer’, because it’s a longer word than ‘long’

• ‘elongated’, because it’s an elongated version of ‘long’

• pentasyllabic (which has nothing to do with ‘long’), because it means having five syllables, and it has five syllables.

BOOM.

You can find lots more examples of autological words here to impress your friends with (unless your friends are cool).

Let’s not forget the etymology (god forbid!). In this case ‘auto’ as a prefix means ‘self’ (like ‘automobile’ i.e. something that moves by itself, or autopilot i.e. flying itself). And ‘logical’ means ‘true’ (kind of).

Autological words are also called homological words, ‘homos’ being the Greek word for ‘same’. The opposite of an autological word is a heterological one, which, you can probably guess, is where the meaning of the word doesn’t apply to itself. Like ‘long’ which is actually a short word, and ‘monosyllabic’ which most definitely isn’t made up of one syllable.

loophole

A loophole is one of those legally ambiguous things that celebrities (I’m looking at you Take That/Jimmy Carr) exploit to avoid paying tax. The word itself has an interesting backstory, and actually doesn’t have anything to do with loops. OOOH.

Allow me to take you back to the 16th century. There’s peasants and mud everywhere. It’s probably raining. You’re looking up at a medieval stone castle, which has slits in it for people to shoot arrows out of, with little risk of being hit by their attackers (unless they’re Kevin Costner). And these were known as… wait for it… loopholes. But they’re not called this because they (sort of) look like loops. The name comes from the Dutch word lûpen, which means ‘to watch’. So it’s literally a hole to watch out of (I probably didn’t need to explain that, did I?).

It’s not entirely clear how the meaning of loophole changed from window you shoot stuff out of to tax dodging. It’s more likely that the modern sense of loophole is related to actual loops, rather than windows (especially as you close a loophole). There’s also a second theory that it comes from another Dutch word loopgat (which isn’t used anymore), which describes a hole which someone or something could escape through.

contronym

This is a bit of a scary grammar term (wait! Come back!). It describes single words that have two contradictory meanings. Here are some examples:

• bolt: to stick something together, or to run the hell away

• dust: to put dust on something, or take it off

• peer: someone who’s super-posh, or someone who’s equal

• sanction: to approve something, or to boycott it

• bound: tied up, or bouncing about

• oversight: to watch over something, or to miss or omit it.

(I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – ENGLISH IS A VERY STUPID LANGUAGE.)

Janus – his name has ‘anus’ in it, tee hee.

The word itself was coined by one Jack Herring in 1962. I’m afraid I don’t know who Jack Herring is, sorry. Although I do enjoy a fish-based name, which is why I’ve included this bit of info here.

The prefix ‘contra’ means ‘against’ or ‘opposite’, which is why ‘contronym’ is also sometimes spelled ‘contranym’ (I think either is fine TBH). Contronyms are also called auto-antonyms, which is boring, and Janus words, which is a bit more interesting. This is after the Roman two-faced god (he literally had two faces – he wasn’t talking behind the other gods’ backs). Janus was the god of (deep breath) beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames and endings. He’s got two faces because one is looking towards the past, and the other towards the future apparently (dunno what happens if he turns round). Presumably it’s the two-faced bit which applies to contronyms.

pareidolia

We’ve probably all experienced pareidolia to some extent. Don’t worry, it isn’t another world-ending pandemic. Pareidolia is the word for when we humans find shapes in abstract patterns or inanimate objects. So when you next see a face in the trunk of a tree or a penis in the clouds (come on, we’ve all done it. No? Just me?) you’ll be able to show off to whoever you’re with that you’re experiencing pareidolia. It also applies to sounds – so if you think you’re hearing a hidden message in a piece of music, you probably aren’t – it’s just that pesky pareidolia.

Etymology-wise, the word itself is unsurprisingly Greek: para means ‘beside, alongside, instead [of]’ and eidōlon means ‘image, form, shape’.

So why do we do it? Evolutionary psychologists reckon that pareidolia helped our ancestors survive. There are two reasons for this. One is that babies who couldn’t recognise faces smiled less, which meant their parents cared about them less (mean). So they evolved to recognise faces to make sure their ma and pa would love them and, ultimately, protect them. The second one is to do with predators – in (very) simple terms, you’re more likely to run away from something that has a face than something that doesn’t. So it makes sense to see a face in anything that’s potentially threatening and just peg it.

Pareidolia used to be considered a sign of madness. And studies do show that people suffering from neuroses are more likely to experience it, as are people who in a negative mood. That might be because when we’re pissed off we’re on higher alert for danger, so more likely to see things that aren’t there. Women are also more likely to experience pareidolia, which is possibly due to the fact that we’re generally better than men. Sorry, better than men at using facial expressions to recognise emotions.

One of the most famous examples of pareidolia is the face on Mars. Located in the Cydonia region of the planet, it was first photographed by the Viking 1 spacecraft on 25 July 1976.

It’s a face on Mars!

Oh no it isn’t.

And in 2004, a ten-year-old cheese sandwich which supposedly has the image of the Virgin Mary burned on it sold for $28,000 on eBay. Where there’s pareidolia there’s brass, apparently…

hazard

We can trace the word hazard all the way back to the 14th century, although not with the meaning it has today i.e. something which you can fall into/over/under and so on. Allow me to take you back to medieval Arabia, where games of chance involving dice were all the rage. The Arabic word for dice was ‘al-zhar’ or ‘az-zhar’, and as these dice games spread across Europe, they became known as al-zhar games. As generally happens with words though, ‘al-zhar’ got a bit messed up on its travels, and by the time it got to Spain it had morphed into ‘azar’. And although it was still being used to describe the game, people also used it when they were talking about the random results of the dice throws.

When ‘azar’ made its way to France, it changed to ‘hasard’, and the Frenchies used it to describe unlucky dice throws. Over time people started using it to talk about anything that was a bit unlucky or risky. And when it made the leap over the Channel to British shores, ‘hasard’ became ‘hazard’. For a while it was just a noun, but at some point in the 16th century it got verbed, as people started hazarding things (maybe only guesses? I’m not sure what else you can ‘hazard’… Okay, I just looked it up and the definition of ‘hazard’ as a verb means to ‘offer or present as a risk’ so maybe you can hazard other things…? But people might think you’re a bit weird).

Let’s finish with a be-mulletted (although, SPOILER ALERT, not by the end) Richard Marx singing ‘Hazard’. This always used to make me sad as a child, and having googled it I realise it comes under the genre of ‘murder ballad’, which probably explains that.

gobbledygook

As regular readers will know (hello Mumsy!), last week I left you with something of a wordy cliffhanger. While researching the background of ‘maverick’, I found out that Samuel Maverick’s grandson, Maury Maverick, coined the word ‘gobbledygook’. So, this week we’re going to look at exactly how that came about. Better than EastEnders, right?

Maury Maverick was born in 1895 in Texas. After various jobs he became a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from 3 January 1935 to 3 January 1939. After losing out on a third term in office, he wound up working for a company called the Smaller War Plants Corporation (anyone know what a small war plant is?). And it was here that he wrote a note to his staff imploring them to stop using complicated bureaucratic language and jargon in memos, and just get to the point (can I get an amen, copywriter pals?). His exact words were:

Stay off the gobbledygook language. It only fouls people up.

Maverick’s inspiration for the word was the turkey, who, he said is ‘always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity’. (Personally I think he missed a trick by not saying that it ‘fowls people up’, but that might just be me.) 

This is a rare case of a word whose invention we can trace back to the actual day it came into being. So that’s nice. Here’s an article which was published in the Pittsburgh Press about it on 31st March 1944. I’m going to try the last line on some of my clients – I’ll let you know how it goes.

maverick

The original maverick

A maverick is an independent-minded or unorthodox person/sexually ambiguous American pilot who feels the need, the need for speed. But it has a second, less well-known meaning – it’s also the name given to unbranded calves in the world of ranching in the good ole US of A. It’s named after one Samuel Maverick, a Texas lawyer, politician and land baron (awesome job title) who was born in 1803. Maverick was a cattle owner and, unlike his contemporaries, refused to brand his cattle to show they belonged to him, because he thought it was cruel. At least that’s what he said – other, more cynical cattle-type people said he only did it so he could claim any stray non-branded baby cows as his own. Whatever the actual reason, Maverick’s name was soon used to describe any calf found without an owner’s brand, as well as people who refused to conform.

Samuel was married to Mary, meaning his wife’s name was Mary Maverick, which is pleasingly alliterative and sounds like a superhero alter ego. Their grandson was Maury Maverick (love it), a Texas politician who coined the word ‘gobbledygook’. More on that next week. Ooh, an etymological cliffhanger. Doesn’t get much better than that, right? Right…?

Oh, and thanks to my sister for telling me about maverick’s origins on this week’s family Zoom call (we might have run out of things to talk about…).

PS If all that etymological excitement hasn’t worn you out, here’s the Top Gun anthem for you. It features a grand piano alongside a man who looks like a woman with enormo hair playing guitar while wearing a sparkly tracksuit and standing on the wing of a plane (because, 80s). If it doesn’t make you punch the air at least once, then you’re dead inside.

tawdry

The Hay Festival, a literary festival in Wales that I’ve been to a few times (because I is well intellectual) has been doing a virtual version this year, because of you-know-what. I watched one sesh with Greg Jenner, writer and historian extraordinaire, where he briefly mentioned the origins of the word ‘tawdry’. And turns out it has an interesting backstory, which I’m now going to share with you, you lucky people.

St Audrey in her glad rags

If you describe something as ‘tawdry’, you’re saying it’s showy, and cheap or crappy quality. You can also use it to describe something that’s immoral, like a ‘tawdry extramarital affair’. So, where did it come from?

Allow me to transport you back to 7th century England. The daughter of the king of East Anglia is a young princess called Etheldrida, who’s known as Audrey (and who can blame her with a name like Etheldrida? Although spare a thought for her sisters, who were called Wendreda and Seaxburh). After a life which basically consisted of not having sex (she took a vow of virginity, despite having two husbands), Audrey died in the year 679 of a throat tumour. The Venerable Bede recorded this as a just punishment because poor old Audrey liked a lace necklace, and this vanity apparently meant she deserved to die from cancer. Wow. Nice one, Bede.

Despite this, Audrey still managed to get beatified (AKA saintified) as she founded an abbey in Ely (just up the road from where I’m writing this, and today the site of the gothic gorgeousness that is Ely Cathedral). Fast forward to the 16th century and admirers of St Audrey are buying saintly merch in the form of lace necklaces, called St Audrey’s laces. Over time, this gets shortened to ‘taudrey laces’.

100 years later, the Puritans are everywhere, and Audrey’s statement necklaces are now seen as old-fashioned and cheap. So it’s not long before the word ‘tawdry’ comes to mean the same. This meaning was cemented by Shakespeare in ‘A Winter’s Tale’ – the character Mopsa, who’s a bit of a country bumpkin, has the line: ‘Come, you promised me a tawdry-lace and a pair of sweet gloves’, which shows how unsophisticated she is.

I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Aud. The woman hung on to her virginity through two marriages, then founded an abbey, and this is what she’s remembered for? Shame.

hooligan

A couple of days ago I walked into my bedroom to find Gus, my one-year-old cavapoo, standing on my bed (which he’s not supposed to get on), having emptied the washing basket all over the bedroom. After failing to tell him off (because he’s literally the cutest dog in the world ever, even when he’s got my one nice bra in his mouth), I half-heartedly called him a ‘hooligan’. Which got me thinking… where does the word ‘hooligan’ come from?

I’ve found three origin stories for ‘hooligan’ all of which might be apocryphal (i.e. bollocks). The first is that it comes from the Irish surname Houlihan, which was used as a byword for hell-raising Irishmen in musichall songs on the late 1900s. The second is that it’s named for Patrick Houlihan, one of the aforementioned hell-raising Irishmen (sorry Ireland). He was a small-time crook who died in prison in London (Southwark to be precise) after killing a policeman in a brawl.

The third theory, which is my favourite so probably not true (and doesn’t involve any Irish people), is that during the Jacobite rising of 1745 in Scotland (when Charles Edward Stuart attempted to regain the British throne for his father James Francis Edward Stuart – but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that), a British officer was being eaten alive by midges (i.e. those bitey insects which ruin picnics and other outdoor activities, including several bike rides I did as a child where I accidentally rode through a cloud of them with my mouth open #neverforget). He misheard the Scots-Gaelic word for midge which is ‘meanbh-chuileagi’ as ‘midge hooligan’ and accidentally invented a new word which still survives today.

idiot

Alongside ‘moron’*, ‘idiot’ is one of my favourite non-sweary insults. But where does it come from? Turns out it’s derived from an Ancient Greek word, idiōtēs, which means ‘private person’. That doesn’t mean that idiōtēs didn’t want to go out (remember going out?), but that they didn’t have much to do with public affairs and the government. ‘Idiom’ (i.e. a word or phrase which is unique to a group of people or a place) also comes from the same root, as does ‘idiosyncrasy’ (a quirky thing that’s unique to one person), which makes sense when you think about the whole ‘private’ meaning.

Back to idiōtēs. As I said, an idiōtēs was basically just a normal – anyone who wasn’t a soldier, scribe, judge, politician, etc. But, people who weren’t idiōtēs saw them as the opposite of ‘citizens’. And because of this, ye olde Greeks soon started using the term to refer to people who they thought weren’t clever enough to talk about politics and public affairs. From this, it wasn’t long until ‘idiot’ began to take on the meaning we know today.

So, idiot. More than just a stupid person.

* While writing this post I discovered that ‘moron’ has some slightly shady origins. It, alongside ‘imbecile’, ‘cretin’ and ‘retard’, were once scientific terms used in psychology and psychiatry for people with mild intellectual disabilities. And they were also favourite terms of the American eugenics movement when pushing for enforced sterilisation. So that’s nice. With the exception of ‘retard’ (which most people now agree is pretty offensive), these have now slipped into the vernacular. But does that mean they’re okay to use? I DON’T KNOW.

curfew

This is another one I’ve shamelessly stolen from the Wittertainment podcast (which is technically about films, but lucky for me also features a lot of etymology, generally courtsey of Sir Simon of Mayo). You know what a curfew is – that thing your parents gave you which meant you had to be home by a certain time (you know, back when we were allowed to go outside and do stuff). ‘Curfew’ comes from an Anglo-French word, coverfeu, which itself comes from an Old French word cuevrefeu. This literally means ‘cover fire’ (as in to cover a fire in a fireplace to put it out, not the stuff that soldiers do when they’re advancing on a battlefield).

The story is that back in the Middle Ages, houses were mainly made of wood and straw, and other super-flammable things. And, due to the fact that electricity wouldn’t appear for another few hundred years, obviously everyone had candles for light and fires to keep warm. Which was a bit of a recipe for disaster (see The Great Fire of London*). To make sure that no one fell asleep without putting their fire out, Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror (no one’s quite sure who came up with it) put a law in place which meant someone rang a curfew bell at 8pm to remind everyone to do just that, and also blow out any candles, put out their pipes/ciggies, etc. Willie the Conq also used the curfew bell to make sure that everyone was back in their house by 8, to stamp out any pesky English people getting together after dark to talk rebellion.

The curfew law was rePEALed (bad bell joke, sorry) in 1103 by Henry I. But you can still find a few curfew bells round the UK, like this one in Leadhills, Scotland.

*Interesting fact alert: despite the fact that the GFOL, as no one calls it, destroyed around 70,000 of the 80,000 homes in London at the time, only six people are known to have died.