charisma

The excellently named Charisma Carpenter – yes, that is her real name – of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame (photo credit: Gage Skidmore – also an excellent name)

Someone who’s charismatic is charming, attractive and often a little bit sexy. But you know that already. But did you know that ‘charisma’ actually has its roots in religion, specifically Christianity? It was only in the early 20th century that it came to have the little-bit-sexy meaning it has today.

‘Charisma’ originally comes from the Greek word ‘kharisma’ (so not much of a leap there) which means ‘favour freely given’ or ‘gift of grace’. Both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles talk about divinely conferred charisma, which is used to talk about someone who’s a favourite of him/her upstairs i.e. who’s received God’s favour. In English, from about 1640 onwards, people used ‘charisma’ to refer to a gift or power bestowed on someone by the Holy Spirit for the good of the church.

So where did the sexy come in? I’m afraid that’s a very unsexy story. German sociologist Max Weber came up with a new definition of charisma some time before 1920 (it was found in an unfinished manuscript after he died), which is generally regarded as having dragged the concept from theological obscurity into everyday use. He described it as:

“… a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person …”

lalochezia

This one’s for everyone whose Christmas has been ruined by the goddamn corona virus. Lalochezia is the emotional relief you get from shouting out a big old dirty swear. So go on, I won’t tell anyone. Better? Good. Scientific studies have shown that swearing relieves stress, dulls pain and can actually make you physically stronger – there’s more about that in this article.

The word lalochezia itself has an interesting etymology. It’s got Greek roots and the first part, ‘lalo-’, means ‘speech’. The second part means ‘to defecate’. Yup. Other words which share the same roots include glossolalia, which is incomprehensible speech in an imaginary language (from someone who’s in a trance for example), and dyschezia, which means to poop with difficulty. So that’s nice.

Ironically, this word of the week is all about swearing, but doesn’t actually have any swearing in it (unlike 99.9 per cent of my other posts). So let’s end with a Merry shitty Christmas, and a happy fucking new year.

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.

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.

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.’

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…