cathedral

I live in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, which is a cathedral town. Not a city – contrary to what a lot of people think, a town doesn’t immediately become a city just because it has a big ole church in it. In fact, Suffolk doesn’t have any cities in it at all. It’s not alone in this – there are actually nine others which are also city free. Want to have a guess at which ones? Answers at the bottom of the post…

Bury St Edmunds Cathedral (photo by DAVID ILIFF. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0)

Anyway, I digress. A cathedral is called a cathedral because it contains a cathedra, which is basically a nice chair (or throne) for a bishop. Originally the Latin word cathedra didn’t have any religious connotations though – it literally just meant ‘armchair’, and was a term usually reserved for a chair specifically for ladies. I’m not sure what makes a chair female – maybe it gets paid significantly less than the men’s chairs?

The origins of ‘cathedra’ go way back to ‘kmt’ (you can tell that’s an old word because it doesn’t have any vowels in it), a Proto-Indo-European word meaning ‘down’ or ‘with’. It’s thought that the Proto-Indo-European language, or PIE, was spoken from 4500 BC to 2500 BC (I told you it was old). This went into Greek as ‘kata’, meaning ‘down’, and soon fused with ‘hedra’, which comes from another PIE root ‘sed’, ‘to sit’. This created ‘kathedra’ for ‘seat or bench’. When words went from Greek to Latin, the ‘k’s often changed to ‘c’s (which is something to do with how they’re pronounced I think) – hence, ‘cathedra’. And with the Catholic church’s penchant for Latin, it wasn’t long before it made it into their lexicon (losing its femininity along the way, of course).

Time for Bury St Edmunds facts. Did you know…

1. The single largest witch trial in England was held in BSE in 1645. It led to 18 women being executed by famous witchfinder general Vincent Price, sorry Matthew Hopkins, sorry utter sexist bastard. The site of the trial is now a Premier Inn hotel, and the places where the witches were executed are now a garden centre and a golf club.

2. Bury St Eds featured prominently in Armando Iannucci’s film The Personal History of David Copperfield. Dickens himself stayed in The Angel Hotel in town three times during his life. You can even sleep in the same four-poster bed as he did in room 215 (although presumably they’ve changed the sheets since then).

3. Measuring just 15ft by 7ft, The Nutshell pub is officially the smalled pub in Britain. Opened in 1867, it has a mummified cat hanging over the bar which was discovered behind the walls during renovations. Mummified cats were often placed in the walls of newly built homes to ward off unwanted spirits back in the day. There are also several mummified cats in our local museum – I’m not sure why we love them so much here.

Some mummified cats (and mice). Sorry

So, did you guess the other city-less counties? They are: Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Dorset, the Isle of Wight, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Rutland (also Britain’s smallest county), Surrey and Warwickshire. Buckinghamshire was on the list until quite recently, but the Queen made Milton Keynes a city at part of the Platinum Jubilee Civic Honours, whatever they are.

extremophile

It’s another ‘-phile’ word this week, but there’s nothing to worry about, honest. An extremophile is an organism that thrives in extreme environments previously thought to be uninhabitable, for example under massive pressure or really bastard cold. These organisms not only tolerate these conditions – for many, they need them to survive. Extremophiles have been found 6.7 km below the Earth’s surface, more than 10km deep in the ocean at pressures of up to 110 MPa (which is a lot, apparently), in acid, in frozen seawater at -20°C and in underwater hydrothermal vents at temperatures of 122°C. The name is made from the Latin extremus meaning, um, ‘extreme’, and the Greek philiā which means ‘love’.

A tardigrade*. Doesn’t he look like he’s about to start singing ‘Always look on the bright side of life’?

Extremophiles are also normally polyextremophiles (‘poly’ meaning ‘many’), which means they can live in more than one shit place – for example, the deep ocean is generally very cold and also under high pressure. So that’s a double whammy. And most extremophiles are microorganisms, but not all – the tardigrade (which I thought was a made-up thing in Star Trek) is one example. Also known as a water bear or moss piglet (awwww), a tardigrade is a microscopic eight-legged animal that thrives in environments that would kill most other forms of life – on mountaintops including the Himalayas, at the bottom of the sea, in mud volcanoes (which are literally what they sound like) and even in solid ice. They can go up to 30 years without food or water, and have been on earth for about 600 million years, which means they pre-date the dinosaurs by a mere 400 million years.

Not long ago, some nice scientists chucked a load of tardigrades out into outer space to see what would happen. Not only did lots of them survive, but some of them even went on to have babies. And in August 2019, scientists reported that some tardigrades might be living on the moon after an Israeli lunar lander carrying thousands of them crash landed (although it’s since been reported that they probably didn’t survive the impact, booooo). Both of these things sound like the start of really good sci-fi horror films.

The name ‘water bear’ comes from the way tardigrades walk, which apparently resembles the way bears get around. The largest ones can get to a (still pretty tiny) 1.5mm, which means you can see them using a bog-standard microscope if you have such a thing.

Extremophiles like the tardigrade are proof that life can exist in many different forms, and that oxygen and water aren’t pre-requisites. In the words of well-known mathematician and chaos theory specialist Dr Ian Malcolm (AKA Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park): ‘Life, uh, finds a way.’

*Wikipedia says I have to credit that tardigrade photo with this horrible bit of text: photo by Bob Goldstein and Vicky Madden, UNC Chapel Hill – http://tardigrades.bio.unc.edu/pictures/ >https://www.flickr.com/photos/waterbears/sets/72157607218607395/ >https://www.flickr.com/photos/waterbears/2851666759/in/album-72157607218607395 (note permission below), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4747599).

cacafuego

The Cacafuego getting its arse kicked by The Golden Hind.

You might know a cacafuego – it’s a swaggering braggart or boaster. Even if you’re not a linguist you’ve probably guessed that this is a Spanish word. And it literally means ‘fire shitter’, from the old Spanish verb cacar (now cagar), meaning ‘to void excrement’, and fuego, which means ‘fire’.

Cacafuego first appeared in English in the early 1600s, and that’s down to Sir Francis Drake, English explorer, sea captain, ahem, slave trader, naval officer, politician and circumnavigator of the globe (show-off). He was also a privateer, which is basically a government-sponsored pirate who went around attacking foreign vessels and stealing all their treasure. One of the ships he captured was a Spanish galleon called Cacafuego. Okay, the ship wasn’t actually called fire shitter (shame) – this was a nickname given to her by her crew due to her impressive cannon fire and other weaponry. Her real name was Nuestra Señora de la Concepción or Our Lady of the (Immaculate) Conception, which isn’t half as fun.

On 1 March 1579, while doing the aforementioned circumnavigation of the globe, Drake’s ship the Golden Hind caught up with Cacafuego near Ecuador. Having heard that she was packed to the rafters (not sure ships have rafters but never mind) with goodies, Drake decided to capture her. Rather than reduce the Hind’s sails in daylight (as this might look suspicious), Drake trailed some wine barrels behind to slow her down and wait for night to fall. In the early evening he came alongside and, because there weren’t many English ships in the Pacific at this time, the Cacafuego was taken completely by surprise and surrendered without much resistance. Drake sailed both ships to the South America coast and, after nicking all the treasure, treated the officers on board to a nice dinner, some presents (sadly Wikipedia doesn’t say what these were) and letters of safe conduct before offloading them. So that’s nice. And it wasn’t long before cacafuego became a byword for a swaggering person – probably due to the fact that Drake made such short work of taking control of such a supposedly impressive ship.

jiggery-pokery

I used this word in last week’s post, and a friend pointed out that it’s a bit of an odd one. So I thought I’d look into it a bit further. And it turns out it has a pretty interesting backstory (so thanks, Lorna).

Jiggery-pokery means dishonest or suspicious activity. It hit the headlines in 2015 when American Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used it in a legal argument against his colleagues’ reasoning in a decision about Obamacare, accusing them of ‘interpretive jiggery-pokery’. This quintessentially British phrase isn’t used that much outside of our shores, and certainly not in American legal writing (although Scalia has form for using these types of words – apparently he wrote the word ‘argle-bargle’ in another decision previously). The earliest-known use of jiggery-pokery in writing was in the Berkshire Chronicle in 1845. But it goes back much earlier than that.

The first part comes from a Scottish word, ‘jouk’, which means to twist your body to avoid a blow. This later became ‘joukery’ or ‘jookery’ to describe underhand dealing or trickery. The second part comes from ‘pawky’, another Scottish word which means something is artfully shrewd (a ‘pawk’ is a trick). By 1686, some bright spark combined the two to come up with ‘joukery-pawkery’, used to refer to clever trickery or sleight of hand. You can find this in Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 novel The Black Dwarf (which doesn’t sound very PC):

‘…I canna shake mysell loose o’ the belief that there has been some jookery-paukery of Satan’s in a’ this…’

It wasn’t long before joukery-pawkery morphed into the more familiar jiggery pokery we get today.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, ‘argle-bargle’ is copious but meaningless talk or writing, or waffle.)

gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is the manipulation of boundaries of electoral districts or constituencies to swing an election a particular way. A good example is when the 19th-century Republican Party split the Dakota Territory into two states instead of one. That’s because each state got at least three electoral votes, regardless of the size of its population.

The OG gerrymander

Gerrymandering is named after one Elbridge Gerry, an American founding father, politician and diplomat who was the fifth vice president from 1813 until he died in 1814. He was also the governor of Massachusetts. During his second term, Republican-controlled legislation created district boundaries designed to increase the party’s control of state and national offices. This lead to some oddly shaped legislative areas, including one in Essex County (a political stronghold for the rival party, the Federalists) that a newspaper said looked like a ‘salamander’ (obvs). They named it the ‘Gerry-mander’ after Elbridge who signed the legislation that created it.

It worked as well – the weirdly shaped district elected three Democrat-Republicans that year. Previously the county had had five Federalist senators.

It’s worth pointing out that apparently Elbridge wasn’t happy about this suspect map redrawing, even if he did still sign the legislation that made it happen. According to his biographer he was ‘a nervous, birdlike little person’ with a stammer, and a habit of ‘contracting and expanding the muscles of his eye’ (I can’t even imagine what that actually looked like). This makes him sound like he might have been bullied into it, but he was no stranger to not signing stuff – in fact he refused to put his name to the American Constitution because he thought the Senate it created could become too tyrannical. So perhaps he would have thought twice about signing that district-redrawing bill if he’d known that two-hundred-and-something years later his name would have become synonymous with this type of cloak-and-dagger political jiggery pokery.

(Gerrymander is an example of an ‘eponym’ or a word named after a person. Check out this post for lots more eponyms, including leotard, diesel and bloomers. Sounds like a party…)

(DISCLAIMER: My knowledge of American politics is shockingly bad. So apologies in advance if any of my facts or terminology are wrong.)

pognophile

Spoiler alert

Any word with ‘phile’ on the end immediately looks vaguely threatening, doesn’t it? Luckily, in this case, it’s fairly innocuous. A pognophile is someone who (hopefully in a healthy way) really likes beards. It has a pretty wide definition, and can include anyone who loves growing their own beard, beards on other people and even those who study beards (because apparently that’s a thing).

Etymology wise it’s quite a straightforward one. ‘Pogon’ is the Greek work for ‘beard’, while ‘phile’ is a suffix we put on the end of words to show that someone loves the thing that comes before it (if that makes sense). ‘Phile’ comes from another Greek word, ‘philos’ which means ‘to love’. If you’re scared of beards, you’re a pognophobe, poor you.

The longest beard in the world belonged to one Hans Nilson Langseth (born in 1846), a Norwegian man whose facial hair was a whopping 17 feet and 6 inches long (that’s 5.334 metres in new money). If you fancy having a go at beating his record you should probably get started now though – it took him 60 years to grow it that long. Apparently beard hair dies once it gets past about five feet. So you have to mat the dead hair at the end into dreadlocks to make it strong enough to keep growing. Ewww, I bet there was all sorts of crap in there. And somebody probably knows exactly how much crap there was in there, as the beard (sadly now sans Hans) is in the Smithsonian. You can see a picture of it in all its glory (and still attached to Hans) here.

biddy

We use the word ‘biddy’ to describe an old woman, usually in a derogatory way – ‘a nosy old biddy’, for example. Before I start getting cross about that (spoiler alert), here’s some etymology.

In the early 19th century, lots of Irish people were upping sticks and heading off to the US of A for a new life. Upper-class American families often paid for young women to make the trip, who’d then work as domestic servants to pay for their passage. In fact, this happened so often that these women came to be known as ‘biddies’, a shortening of ‘Bridget’, a popular Irish girls’ name. Which I think means it’s racist, as well as sexist. At some point it started being used to describe old ladies, which is where we find ourselves today.

(‘Biddy’ also seems to be a slang term for a chicken, although I don’t think that’s related to this meaning.)

Sadly, using a female name for a negative personality trait or as an insult still goes on today – the latest being ‘Karen’ for an entitled (usually) white woman who always runs to the manager to complain. There’s also a ‘Becky’, for a privileged, sheltered and unlikeable young woman (I believe the kids say ‘a basic bitch’). This one was made famous by Beyonce’s 2009 song ‘Sorry’ (‘Becky with the good hair’), but also appeared in Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 hit ‘Baby Got Back’. In this case Becky was a lady with a big butt, which he liked very much and could not tell fibs about. ‘Stacy’ is another one – an unattractive woman who’s vain and rude, and only interested in sex (GOD FORBID). Worryingly, this one comes from incel culture, when men who live in their moms’ basements blame women everywhere for the fact that they’re celibate.

The only male equivalent I could find is a ‘Chad’. But predictably, this one actually has some positive connotations – a Chad is a sexually active Alpha male whose antics in the bedroom are never held against him. Then of course there’s the slew of other defamatory words for women with no male equivalent (or, if there is one, it’s often positive – like ‘spinster’ vs ‘bachelor’), most of which are related to sexuality. For example: cougar, gold-digger, bimbo, drama queen, slut, whore, nympho, tramp, slapper… I could go on. But I won’t, because it’s depressing.

capricious

If you’re feeling capricious, it means you’re full of caprice, AKA a sudden and seemingly unmotivated notion or action. So it basically means you’re feeling impulsive or unpredictable, or you’re a bit fickle (we use it to describe weather quite a lot). I decided to look into the backstory of ‘capricious’ because I heard somewhere that it comes from the Italian word ‘capro’ for ‘goat’, and referred to the way goats are all frisky and unpredictable (and eat just about anything). But a little bit of research revealed that it actually has nothing to do with goats at all. It does involve another, much smaller animal though…

Try to contain your excitement.

Caprice came to us via French from an Italian word, capriccio. This originally referred to someone suddenly shuddering with fear rather than being all unpredictable. It’s a smooshing together of two other Italian words: capo, which means ‘head’, and riccio, which is their word for ‘hedgehog’. That’s because when you shudder in fear your hair stands on end, making you a ‘hedgehog head’. Nice, right? But absolutely nowt to do with goats, sorry.

Hedgehog facts:

• The average adult hedgehog has between 5,000 and 7,000 spines.

• Hedgehogs are nocturnal, and one of only three animals that hibernate in the United Kingdom (the other two are bats, and the hazel dormouse which I suggest you google immediately because it’s SOOOOOOO cute).

• They’re surprisingly fast – a hedgehog can run over six feet per second and walk over two miles in a night.

• Baby hedgehogs are called ‘hoglets’ while a group of hedgehogs is called an ‘array’.

(You probably shouldn’t actually put a hedgehog in a cup.)

peristeronic

No, I haven’t spelled (spelt?) ‘prehistoric’ wrong. If something or someone (god forbid) is peristeronic then it means it or they relate to or resemble a pigeon.

The etymology is pretty straightforward – the ancient Greek word for dove or pigeon is ‘peristera’. Both of these birds come from the columbidae family. We get a couple of nice words from that as well:

• ‘columbarium’ – another word for a pigeon loft or a dovecote (I wonder why pigeons get lofts but doves gets cotes? Seems a bit racist), and also any type of vault which has niches for storing urns in it

• ‘columbine’ – which means of or relating to a dove, in innocence, gentleness, colour and so on. It’s also the name of one of the stock characters in commedia dell’arte (a form of popular theatre from 16th-century Italy that Inside No. 9 used as a basis for an episode that most people – including me – didn’t understand).

Time for pigeon facts. Pigeons are monogamous and mate for life. Mum and dad pigeons share parental responsibilities equally, meaning they’re already far more evolved than most humans (and I bet there’s no gender-pay gap). They’re also pretty clever. Aside from their awesome navigational abilities – an Oxford University study found that pigeons use manmade landmarks as signposts and often fly along roads and motorways, even changing direction at junctions – they can apparently recognise all 26 letters of the English alphabet and solve problems (I think I need a pigeon assistant).

GI Joe. He’s not dead, he’s resting.

Homing pigeons were used extensively during the First and Second World Wars for communication and reconnaissance. In fact, pigeon USA43SC6390, AKA GI Joe, saved the lives of the inhabitants of an entire Italian village, and the British troops who were occupying it, on 18 October 1943. Air support had been requested to deal with German soldiers in the village (called Calvi Vecchia). GI Joe flew 20 miles in 20 minutes to deliver a message that the British 169th (London) Infantry Brigade had captured the village, arriving just as the planes were getting ready to take off to bomb the target. He saved the lives of at least 100 men. GI Joe was given the Dickin Medal (which sounds rude but isn’t) for ‘the most outstanding flight made by a United States Army pigeon in World War II’.

I’m not crying, I’ve just got something in my eye.

‘Feed the birds’ from Mary Poppins – the dirty old bird lady always makes me well up.

penthouse

You know what a penthouse is – the super-expensive apartment at the top of a block which has its own special key for the lift and amazing views (AKA something I’ll never live in). But why is it called a penthouse?

(Obviously there’s also a softcore porn magazine called Penthouse. If that’s what you’re interested in, you might need a different kind of website though – I’m afraid there’s only word porn here.)

Phwoarr, look at the views on that penthouse.

Well, it turns out penthouses haven’t always the purview of poshos. The word ‘penthouse’ has actually been around for about four centuries (so much longer than very tall buildings), and originally referred to any kind of outhouse or structure attached to the outside of a building. It comes from an Old French word, ‘apentis’, which means ‘attached building’ or ‘appendage’. This comes from a Latin verb, ‘appendere’, meaning ‘to hang something up’. That’s where we get other words like ‘pendulum’, ‘appendix’ and ‘depend’ (not ‘penis’ though, surprisingly).

In the 1300s, ‘apentis’ made its way into Middle English, dropping the ‘a’ somewhere along the way. It was still used to describe small structures with sloping roofs that were attached to other larger buildings though. People usually kept things like tools and animals in them, rather than super-rich celebs. Through a process called folk etymology (which is basically when we change a – usually foreign – word due to a mistaken assumption about its meaning, or mispronounce it so throughly and for so long that it becomes something else) the ‘is’ of ‘appentis’ became ‘house’.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century that penthouse took on the meaning it has today. As is often the case, no one seems completely sure how. Rooftop units were seen as pretty undesirable before the invention of lifts, and people tended to stick machinery, and servants, in them. The publisher Condé Nast takes some of the credit for popularising rooftop living. In the early 1920s he bought a building in New York and had the top floor – originally the servants’ quarters – converted into a 5,100-square foot apartment complete with six bedrooms, dining room, drawing room and library, all arranged around a 23 by 43 foot ballroom. Structures like this were often called ‘roof bungalows’ which doesn’t sound half as grand as ‘penthouse’ – so perhaps that’s why they were rebranded. The architect Emery Roth might have been responsible for this – he designed many top-floor apartments with terraces and is credited by his biographer Steven Ruttenbaum as having called these penthouses.

The upshot of all this is that I’m pretty sure that next time you’re in your shed, garage or outside loo, you can legit tell people you’re hanging out in your penthouse.

moxie

A few weeks ago I was doing the Wordle, and I was down to the very last row. I had MO?IE. Quite obviously, the word was ‘movie’. But for reasons known only to my subconcious, I put in an ‘x’, for ‘moxie’. FAIL. But it turns out that what’s bad for my Wordle statistics is good for the word of the week as it got me thinking – where does ‘moxie’ come from?

If you’ve heard the word ‘moxie’ before, you’ve probably watched a lot of black and white Hollywood movies from the early 20th century. It’s an American word which means having the ability to face difficulty with spirit and courage, or ‘spunk’ (hee hee hee). It’s generally rather patronisingly applied to women who want to achieve things (bloody women), much like ‘feisty’.

So where does it come from? Well, ‘Moxie’ is actually a brand name for a bitter syrup (yum) first marketed as a medicine called ‘Moxie Nerve Food’ in the US in 1876. It was invented by one Augustin Thompson, a physician, businessman and philanthropist, who sold it as a cure for ‘paralysis, softening of the brain, nervousness and insomnia’ (I could do with some of that). Thompson claimed that he named the drink after a secret South American ingredient which was in turn named after his friend who discovered it. This super-secret medicinal magic was later found to be gentian root extract, a pretty common ingredient of tonics. In fact, it’s been used in these since at least 170BCE. It’s more likely Thompson took the name from a few different rivers and lakes in Maine where he was born. Lots of these have names that sound like ‘moxie’ which is similar to the word for ‘dark water’ in some Native American languages.

In an early example of some excellent viral marketing, people soon started using the word ‘moxie’ as a generic term for having extra pep in the face of adversity. This was due to the original drink’s claim that it could improve your nerve.

In 1884 Moxie rebranded as a soft drink alongside better-known teeth-rotters like Dr Pepper (I LOVE Dr Pepper but I only drink it about once a year as I can feel my teeth decaying with every sip). And you can still buy yourself a can of Moxie if you live in the States, although it’s now owned by the behemoth that is Coca-Cola. In fact, it was designated the official soft drink (because apparently that’s a thing) of the state of Maine in 2005.

roorback

It’s a bit of an obscure – some might say obsolete – one this week (although I’ve never let that stop me before). A roorback is a false story published to damage someone politically, usually a candidate trying to get elected – AKA dirty dirty tricks. (It’s also the ninth studio album by Brazilian heavy metal band Sepultura, but that’s not what we’re interested in here.) Roorbacks are a form of black propaganda, which is propaganda intended to create the impression it was written by those it’s discrediting (as opposed to grey propaganda which doesn’t identify its source, and white propaganda which doesn’t care who knows where it came from). But how did political lies get the name ‘roorback’? 

In 1844, James K Polk, the 11th president of the United States, was trying to get elected. By all accounts it was a pretty nasty campaign, with both major party candidates throwing a lot of metaphorical mud at each other. One of these is known as the Roorback forgery. In late August an article appeared in an abolitionist newspaper quoting part of a book about the fictional travels through the deep south of one Baron von Roorback, a made-up German nobleman. A newspaper in Ithaca, New York printed this without mentioning it was fiction, and also added a sentence saying that the Baron had seen 40 slaves who’d been branded by Polk with his initials before selling them. (Polk was actually a prolific slave owner – he even replaced White House staff with his own enslaved people because it was cheaper – but there’s no evidence that he branded them. So that’s alright then.) The item was withdrawn by the newspaper when the Democrats challenged it, but not before it’d been widely reprinted elsewhere. Ironically Polk actually benefited from the lie – despite his questionable attitude to people ownership – as it reflected badly on his opponents when it was found out.

Because of this, many later political falsehoods were branded (see what I did there) as ‘roorbacks’. In today’s era of fake news and clickbait, maybe there’s still a place in modern English for this one?

geek

Unless you’ve seen Ryan’s Murphy’s TV show American Horror Story or Guillermo Del Toro’s film Nightmare Alley (both of which I highly recommend, as long as you have a strong stomach), you might think a geek is just a slightly derogatory word for a socially inept someone who spends a lot of time on a computer in their parents’ basement. A little sad, maybe (but also likely to make millions later in life with a tech start-up). But in fact, the word ‘geek’ actually has a pretty nasty backstory. Brace yourself…

The first OED citation of geek comes from 1876 in a glossary of words from northern England where it’s defined as ‘a fool, a person uncultivated; a dupe’. This is because it comes from a German word ‘geck’, which means ‘fool’ or ‘simpleton’. In early 19th-century America however, ‘geek’ took on a much darker meaning. Carnivals and freak shows were big business. Many of these featured a ‘geek show’, usually a man whose humiliating act consisted of chasing some live animals (generally chickens but sometimes snakes or rats), then (sorry) biting their heads off and swallowing them. Unlike many of the other members of the freak shows (like conjoined twins or bearded ladies), the geek looked just like the members of the audience. This meant they were easy to replace, so didn’t need to be paid much. They were considered the lowest of low in carnival circles, and were often drug addicts or alcoholics who were paid in booze or narcotics. Many broke their teeth and jaws during their gruesome acts, and suffered from animal-related illnesses. Definitely a tough gig.

Chang and Eng, conjoined twins who were widely exhibited in the 19th century. They married sisters and fathered 21 children. I’ll just leave that one with you.

So when did ‘geek’ change from exploited carnival worker to nerdy but clever computer person? As per usual, I can’t find a definitive answer for this. Jack Kerouac seems to get some of the credit for it in a 1957 letter where he wrote:

‘… unbelievable number of events almost impossible to remember, including … Brooklyn College wanted me to lecture to eager students and big geek questions to answer.’

It wasn’t until the 1970s and 80s that ‘geek’ took on the meaning we know today. Since then it’s been reclaimed as a positive (see ‘geek chic’ for example) which makes it a contronym – a word that started out as one thing and now means the opposite.

(If you’re wondered whether ‘nerd’ has similarly dark origins, you’ll be pleased to hear that it doesn’t – it was coined by Dr Seuss in 1950 in a book called If I Ran the Zoo. Phew.)

nidification

Spring be sprunging. And that means animals and birds be having babies. And it’s birds we’re looking at here – nidification is the act, process or technique of building a nest.

Nidification has its origins in Latin – nidificare means ‘to build a nest’. This comes from nidus, meaning (somewhat unsurprisingly) ‘nest’. A couple of related words are ‘nidifugous’, which means ‘to leave a nest soon after hatching’, and nidicolous, which means ‘reared for a time in a nest’, and also just ‘living in a nest’.

The Guinness world record for the largest birds’ nest is currently held by a pair of bald eagles and was found in Florida in 1963. It measured 2.9m (9ft 6in) wide and was 6m (20ft) deep. It was estimated to weigh more than two tonnes (4,409 lb). Another massive nest builder is the Australian mallee fowl whose creations can measure up to 4.57m (15ft) in height and 10.6m (35ft) across. We also have some big birds over here as well – in 1954 a golden eagle nest was found in Scotland that was an impressive 15 feet deep.

Phwoar, look at the nest on that – a sociable weaver nest in Namibia (photo by Harald Süpfle).

Little birds are also getting in on the big-nidification game as well. The sociable weaver (who sounds like it’d be a laugh in the pub) is only around 15cm long (so it’ll struggle to carry the drinks). But it builds massive nests which house hundreds of its mates. These are made up of several different ‘rooms’ – they use the inner ones for sleeping at night (as they’re warmer) and the outside ones for hanging out in during the day. They even place sharp sticks at the entrances to stop any predators from getting in.

Birds don’t have the monopoly on nidification. Lots of other animals build nests, including insects (termites and ants, for example), frogs and fish. Gorillas also build nests which they sleep in at night – they make a fresh one every day, which is the equivalent to changing the sheets, I guess.

wheelhouse

You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘that’s in my wheelhouse’ – it means that something is your area of expertise. But why wheel? And why is it in a house?

The word ‘wheelhouse’ has been around since the mid-19th century. Back then it meant exactly what it said on the tin – a building with a wheel in it, most usually on a boat or ship. In the nautical sense it referred to the place where the steering wheel was, i.e. where the captain was most likely to be found. It first appeared in writing in an 1835 travel memoir by an American writer called Joseph Holt Ingraham. He wrote: ‘The pilot (as the helms-man is here termed) stands in his lonely wheel-house.’ (Ingraham, who later became a clergyman, died by accidentally shooting himself at the age of 51 in the vestibule of his own church. That’s got to put a dent in your faith in the almighty.) Shortly after this, ‘wheelhouse’ appeared in an 1840 letter to Daniel Webster, then the American secretary of state, from a traveller who was on a ship that burned and then sunk (double whammy). He wrote that the ship’s captain ‘went into the wheel house, and that was the last I saw of him’. (You’ll be pleased to hear that the captain did manage to escape the on fire/sinking ship, along with three other people. The 136 passengers on the ship all drowned though. Wow, that’s really good captaining, mate.)

So how did ‘wheelhouse’ become a word for an area of expertise? Well, at some point in the 1950s (the internet wasn’t any clearer than that, sorry), baseball commentators and reporters picked up on the term and started using it to describe the area of the strike zone (I think this means where the batter swings the bat) that’s the prime spot for them to hit a home run. Which is a good thing, apparently. In the 1980s the term moved from sports writing into everyday language, when we started using it to figuratively describe an area in which someone excels.

shambles

I can’t imagine there are many of us who haven’t uttered the words ‘it’s a [expletive] shambles’ about something or other. So I’m sure you know that it means a state of disorder or confusion, AKA SNAFU. But, did you know that despite having been around since the end of the 16th century, it was only in the 1920s that ‘shambles’ came to mean this? Before that it had a much darker meaning… DUM DUM DUUUUUUM

Photo by Madie Hamilton on Unsplash

Okay, so the first meaning of shamble (singular) was a stool or a ‘money-changer’s table’ (this isn’t the dum dum dum, don’t worry), from the Latin for footstool, ‘scamellum’. After a time it took on the extra meaning of a ‘table for the exhibition of meat for sale’, with ‘shambles’ (plural) becoming a term for a ‘meat market’ (the kind that sells meat, not the Colchester Hippodrome on a Friday night in the 90s). It wasn’t long before ‘shambles’ became an alternative word for a slaughterhouse and, finally, was used figuratively to describe a scene of blood, like a battlefield or place of execution. DUM DUM DUUUUUUM (there it is).

Here’s ‘shambles’ in action in this way in Shakespeare’s Othello:

‘Desdemona: I hope my noble lord esteems me honest.

Othello: O, ay; as summer flies are in the shambles, That quicken even with blowing.’

Photo by Hayden Pollard on Unsplash

(I think this means he doth not esteem her honest.)

Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester (swoon) also uses it in this context:

‘If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter […] had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?"

YES, EDWARD, YES. Sorry. Where was I? Oh yes. The Shambles, the picturesque street of timber-framed buildings in York, is so called because there used to be lots of butchers’ shops there – 31 in 1885 apparently. Its full name was ‘The Great Flesh Shambles’. I can see why they rebranded.

I found a couple of different sources for ‘shambling’ as in wonky walking/zombies. Both stem from the stool/table-meaning I mentioned before all the dum dum dumming above. One source says that because people regularly hacked up chunks of meat on these tables, wobbly legs – or ‘shamble legs’ – were a hazard of the job. A second source says that it was to do with the bowlegged position you have to assume to sit on a stool, or shamble.

(I haven’t been able to find out why ‘shambles’ got sanitised in the early 20th century and came to have the hot-mess meaning it does today. Sorry.)

valentine

It’s that time of year again, when couples can be smug and single people can be depressed. To take my mind off my own spinsterhood, I thought I’d investigate exactly who the Valentine of St Valentine’s Day (note the apostrophe, card companies) is. And it turns out… no one’s entirely sure. Apparently there were a few Christian martyrs named Valentine who could have given their name to it, none of whom were particularly interesting (soz guys).

So, Christian martyrs were a bit of a dead end (both literally and figuratively). But while I was researching them I did stumble across Lupercalia, which is much more interesting. It was a Roman fertility festival which Valentine’s Day may or may not have its origins in (Wikipedia says it’s probably rubbish, but the Encyclopaedia Britannica is a bit more open to it). Lupercalia was held from 13th to 15th February, and was overseen by a group of priests called the Luperci, the name of which likely comes from ‘lupus’ – Latin for wolf. This is because Lupercalia was probably (the internet is a bit vague on this) connected to Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome who were suckled by a she-wolf (ewwww) after being abandoned on the banks of the river Tiber. They named the wolf Lupercal, and historians think that Lupercalia took place to honour her, and also to suck up to the Roman fertility god, Lupercus.

Lupercalia involved a bit more than flowers, chocolates and cards. It started with the priests sacrificing some goats and a dog, wiping the blood on themselves then laughing (yep). This was followed by the obligatory feast, after which the Luperci cut ‘thongs’ (which I assume are strips of leather rather than uncomfortable knickers) from the skins of the goats. They then took all their clothes off, and ran about whipping any women who got too close with the thongs. If you got hit with one, then lucky you, you’d immediately be super fertile.

Some scholars say there was also a jar of women’s names, which men would pick from. They’d then spend the festival with the woman whose name they’d pulled from the jar. Apparently lots of them went on to get married as well. Sounds better than Match.com to be honest.

In the late 5th century, the-then Pope, Gelasius I (who sounds like a super villain), decided that Lupercalia had to go (too much nakedness and BDSM I guess), and declared 14th February a day to celebrate some non-specific marytrs called Valentine. The new feast day didn’t have any of the lovey-dovey shenanigans that we have to put up with today though. These didn’t come about until the 14th century, when bloody Chaucer wrote a poem about it.

So how about it? Next year, forgo the sappy cards and garage forecourt flowers, and try hitting your other half with a piece of leather instead while running round the streets naked. They’ll LOVE it.

diaper

I was watching something American with babies in it the other day (possibly ‘This Is Us’?) and the word ‘diaper’ came up. Which started me thinking about why we (and a lot of other English-speaking countries) have nappies, and Americans have diapers. They’re not even close to being the same word. And while there are obviously lots of differences between British and American English, there aren’t that many words that I can think of where we say one thing and they say something completely different (obviously there are exceptions – many of them food-related (zucchini, egg-plant, scallions, etc.) – feel free to put me right in the comments with others).

A Chinese snuff bottle (1700–1800) showing three types of diaper background.

Because it’s American I assumed ‘diaper’ was fairly modern. Wrong. Check this out from The Taming of the Shrew by Billy Shakespeare:

‘Let one attend him with a silver basin
Full of rose-water and bestrew'd with flowers,
Another bear the ewer, the third a diaper,
And say 'Will't please your lordship cool your hands?’

So, it turns out ‘diaper’ is actually a really old word from Middle English (which was spoken from the Norman Conquest in 1066 until the late 15th century). At this point it was a term for a pattern of repeated squares, rectangles or lozenges on fabric, but also on brickwork or paving, and other architectural type-stuff. The word comes from the Greek ‘dia’ for ‘cross’ (as in ‘diamond’ or ‘diagonal’) and ‘aspros’, Greek for ‘white’. So why did a piece of fabric used to wrap up a baby’s bum come to be called a diaper? Well, the first cloth nappies were cut into geometric shapes (as that made them easy to wrap round the bub) – hence, ‘diaper’.

When we colonised North America, the settlers took the word ‘diaper’ with them, where it remained. ‘Nappy’ is actually a much more modern word – it didn’t turn up until the 1920s – and is probably a shortened version of ‘napkin’. Although you wouldn’t want to wipe your face on one.

aspersion

To cast aspersions on someone (or have them cast on you), is to make false or misleading claims about someone meant to harm their reputation. But have you ever wondered what an aspersion actually is? Well, it turns out that back in the day an aspersion was actually quite a nice thing to have thrown at you. Have a look at this quote from Sir William of Shakespeare’s tale of a magical island The Tempest:

‘No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall.’

So, why is the aspersion sweet here? Let’s get our etymology on… ‘Aspersion’ comes from the Latin word ‘aspersus’, which itself comes from the verb ‘aspergere’, meaning to sprinkle or scatter. It first appeared in English in the 16th century and was used for nice sprinklings (which sounds weird), like holy water in religious ceremonies. In fact ‘aspersion’ is a type of sprinkly baptism, alongside ‘immersion’ (which is self-explanatory) and ‘affusion’ (which is when you get water poured on your head). There’s a whole load of kit that goes along with aspersion as well, including an aspergillum (a tool that holds the water pre-sprinkle), and an aspersorium, AKA holy water bucket (good name for a band). Aspergilla (the plural of aspergillum) aren’t limited to the Christian church either – apparently modern-day pagans and Wiccans also use them to throw liquid at other people in various cleansing rituals.

(There’s also a fungus called aspergillus, so named by its discoverer because it looked like a holy water sprinkler – he was a priest as well as a biologist – under a microscope. According to Wikipedia, aspergillus are ‘found in millions in pillows’. Gross.)

So when did aspersions become bad? Pretty quickly, actually – by the end of the 16th century we were using the word to describe reports that stain someone’s reputation. Why? I don’t know, is the short answer. But I imagine it was because most sprinklings to the face (that aren’t holy or made of chocolate) probably aren’t good. Probably.

bug

I happened to be watching a bit of Countdown the other day (I definitely wasn’t skiving) when this came up in Susie Dent’s origins of words segment. And it was such a good story I had to share it. So, of course you know what a bug is. But in this case the bugs I’m referring to aren’t the insect-y ones, but the defect-y ones – like software or engineering bugs. ‘Bug’ in this sense is probably older than you think (turns out technology has been not working properly for a really long time), and goes all the way back to the 1870s. It probably came from the Middle English word ‘bugge’, meaning a bogeyman or goblin, which is also where we get ‘bugbear’ from (a previous word of the week).

Up until the 1940s, the word ‘bug’ in this context was really only known by by engineers, programmers and the like. That’s until Grace Hopper came along, computer pioneer and all-round amazing human woman. After serving in the American Navy, Hopper joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she worked on the Mark II and Mark III computers (used for ballistic calculations and other very complicated computer-y things). There was an error in the Mark II which operators traced to a moth trapped in a relay – an actual real-live bug in the system. It was logged in the log (obviously) book by one William Burke as ‘First actual case of bug being found’ (you can see the actual moth below, which is now in the Smithsonian Museum). Hopper loved to tell the story, popularising the term so much that we all use it today.