gargoyle

I’m sure you know what a gargoyle is – an ugly little devil-like figure, often winged, that sits high up on the outside walls of churches, cathedrals and other Christian buildings to ward off evil. Well, you’re half right. A gargoyle is one of those things, but only if it has a hole where its mouth is for water to flow out of. That’s because gargoyles actually have a very practical purpose – to channel rainwater through their mouths and away from church walls, so the stonework didn’t crumble. If it doesn’t have any water flowing through it, it’s a grotesque. So all gargoyles are grotesques, but not all grotesques are gargoyles.

‘Gargoyle’ goes back to an Old French word, ‘gargouille’, which means ‘throat’ or ‘gullet’. That comes via Medieval Latin from ‘gargola’/‘gargulio’. It’s the same root as ‘gargle’ – both words echo the sound of liquid gurgling down the throat.

So far, so good. But who decided to gussy up gutters as gargoyles in the first place? Well, we have a French legend to thank for that. The story goes that in 7th-century Rouen, a dragon-like creature called La Gargouille was terrorising the town, breathing fire and flooding it with water (I’m not entirely sure how the fires turned into floods, but let’s gloss over that). When the townspeople finally defeated it, they mounted its head and neck on the town’s church. And that’s apparently the reason why gargoyles came to be carved onto churches as both water spouts and protectors.

(In truth, it was probably just the whimsy of medieval architects and designers – but that doesn’t make for nearly as good a story.)

Gargoyles and grotesques might feel like an olde worlde thing, but they’re still being added to buildings today. Paisley Abbey in Scotland was built in the 12th century and restored in the 1990s. A stonemason hired to replace 12 crumbling stone gargoyles added a grotesque that looks exactly like the xenomorph from the 1979 film ‘Alien’ – great to see a modern movie monster keeping company with its medieval cousins.

Image credit: Colin, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

heckle

Today, I think probably everyone thinks heckling is a thing that happens to people on stage, mostly comedians. But it has genuinely surprising origins. And they involve… sheep. Scottish sheep, to be precise.

In the early 14th century, ‘heckle’ (then spelled ‘hechel’) was a noun that referred to a comb for flax or hemp. It came into English from the Middle Dutch ‘hekelen’, which itself is from a root meaning ‘hook’ or ‘tooth’, a nod to the rows of sharp teeth on the combs. The verb followed soon after around 1350, meaning to comb out fibres before spinning them into linen.

Although flax was the main thing being heckled at this point, the same process of combing applied to wool, which is where my sheep come in. Farmers and spinners would literally heckle wool fibres into shape before weaving them into cloth.

So how did it go from combing to shouting at gigs? Come with me to 18th-century Dundee. This was the local centre of the wool trade and therefore full of hecklers, skilled workers employed to comb out wool. These hecklers had a reputation for radical politics, forming themselves into what we’d call a union today, and bargaining for better salaries and perks (mainly booze, apparently). At public meetings they’d bombard politicians with awkward questions, ‘combing through’ their arguments just like they did with those tangled fibres. And by the 1790s, ‘to heckle’ had also come to mean challenging or interrupting a speaker. Fast forward to the 19th century, and the textile sense of ‘heckle’ had pretty much faded away completely.

There you go. From pulling fibres apart to pulling people on stage apart in less than 500 years.

set

If you had to guess the English word with the most meanings, what would you go for? Okay, so there’s a bit of a spoiler in the heading – it is, obviously, ‘set’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘set’ has more definitions than any other word in English – over 430 (WHAT) across nouns, verbs and adjectives. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for one little three-letter word.

Here it is showing off just some of those meanings:

• as a verb: you can set the table, set your alarm, set off fireworks or set a bone

• as a noun: you can own a set of tools, perform on a film set, play a set in tennis or study a data set

• as an adjective: you can have set beliefs, a set routine or a set expression on your face.

So how did that happen? Well, laziness, it seems. It’s much easier to adapt an existing word than come up with a new one (unless you’re Dickens, Carroll or Milton). ‘Set’ didn’t start out doing all that work though. It comes from the Old English verb ‘settan’ which was usually used to mean ‘to cause to sit or place something’. But even then people were stretching it to other things. Here’s a brief timeline of what happened next…

• by the mid‑13th century, ‘set’ could mean ‘make or cause to do, act, or be; start or bring to a certain state’ (e.g. ‘set something on fire’, ‘set in order’) and also, randomly, ‘mount a gemstone’

• by around 1300, it also meant things like ‘determine upon, resolve’ (as in ‘I’m set against setting that shoddy gemstone’)

• by the late 14th century, it had also taken on the meaning of ‘make a table ready for a meal’ and ‘regulate or adjust by a standard’ (like setting a clock)

• after that, it all went nuts and loads of other uses followed in printing, music, medicine and many more, including idioms like ‘but I’ve set my heart on that shoddy gemstone’.

The adjective version has been around a while too. In late Old English (spoken from 900–1100ish), ‘set’ meant something like ‘appointed or prescribed beforehand’, eventually shifting to ‘fixed, immovable, definite’ and later ‘ready’.

As a noun, it came about a bit later – around the mid‑15th century. Then it was linked to ‘religious sect’. Later, around Shakespeare’s time (the 16th century), it came to mean ‘collection of matching things’ (like a tea set, for example).

I asked ChatGPT for a sentence that uses lots of different meanings of set, and here’s what it came up with (deep breath):

Yesterday I set my alarm too early, so I set my feet on the cold floor and set off down the hall, only to find the builders had set ladders against the wall, while the decorator had set about painting the ceiling; in the kitchen I set a pan of milk to warm, then set the table with a breakfast set, but before eating I set my phone to silent, set my watch by the radio pips, and set my mind to solving the crossword, until the dog set up a racket at the postman, who was trying to deliver a boxed chess set, which reminded me to set aside time later to meet friends for a set at the tennis club, though I feared the rain clouds already set in would set back our plans, so I set down my pen, set my heart on baking instead, and left the cake mixture on the side to set.

That squeezes in 20 meanings of ‘set’ which are (assuming there’s anyone still reading this):

1. set = adjust/alarm

2. set = place (feet on floor)

3. set off = depart

4. set = position/prop (ladders)

5. set about = begin/attack task

6. set = put to cook (pan)

7. set the table = prepare for meal

8. set (noun) = group of items (breakfast set)

9. set to silent = adjust/arrange

10. set watch = regulate/adjust

11. set one’s mind = focus

12. set up = cause to make a noise

13. set (noun) = boxed collection (chess set)

14. set aside = reserve

15. set (noun) = a tennis sequence of games

16. set in = begin (weather)

17. set back = delay

18. set down = put in writing

19. set one’s heart on = desire

20. set (of jelly/cake) = solidify

I’m off for a lie down now.

alcohol

This is quite apt, as I’m writing this with a bit of a hangover (don’t judge me). But whether you’re a drinker or not, you might not know that the word ‘alcohol’ has an interesting backstory.

Like lots of words starting with ‘al-’, ‘alcohol’ comes from an Arabic word: ‘al-kohl’. If you’re someone who likes a smoky eye, you’ll probably recognise that last bit from kohl eyeliner. And that’s what it meant – by the 10th century, ‘al-kohl’ was used to refer to the mix of lead-based minerals (including galena, cerussite, laurionite, phosgenite, stibnite and malachite) used as eyeliner in the Middle East. (And no, rocking a lead-based cat-eye isn’t a good idea – research has found that lots of people got lead poisoning as a result. There’s an upside though. It also acted as a toxin, killing off infections that got into people’s eyes when the Nile flooded. Bonus.)

Much like me walking home after a night at the pub, the word ‘alcohol’ took a slightly circuitous route to get to English. Because kohl was made by grinding, over time, the meaning of ‘al-kohl’ shifted in Arabic to mean any very fine powder. In the 13th to 14th centuries, Medieval Latin borrowed the word as ‘alcohol’ or ‘alcochol’, using it for fine powders or refined substances that were ground or distilled. By the 14th to 16th centuries, alchemists were applying it to the purified ‘essence’ of something – for example, ‘alcohol of wine’ meant highly concentrated ethanol. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the meaning narrowed further in English to ethanol specifically, and then more broadly to any drink containing it. AKA, booze.

Us humans have been finding ways to get pissed for the best part of 13,000 years. In 2018, residue from a beerlike fermented drink was found in stone mortars in a cave in Israel. They’re believed to date back to 9750–11,750 BCE. There’s also a theory that the hunt for beer is what prompted us to start farming cereals, which led to one of the biggest social-technological changes in human history. (It might also have been the hunt for bread or porridge, but that doesn’t make for such a good story.)

buttload

This one sounds American, and that’s because it is. You’ve probably heard it US films or TV used in the same way we’d say ‘shed/shitload’: ‘I’ve got a buttload of laundry’ or ‘They made a buttload of money’. It just means ‘a lot’.

Before you start muttering ‘These words of the week have really gone downhill, Emma,’ ‘buttload’ IS a real word. And it’s nothing to do with bottoms. If you’re a gardener, you might already be one step ahead of me – because the ‘butt’ of ‘buttload’ is the same one you might use to collect rainwater, AKA a waterbutt. That’s because ‘butt’ is an old word for a barrel. But it was a more fun barrel than a waterbutt, as this one was filled with wine or beer. A standard butt held about 108 imperial gallons or around 477 litres. So a ‘buttload’ literally meant the amount a butt could hold. You can even find references to ‘buttload’s in old brewing and shipping records. (I told you it was real.)

The slang version first appeared in print as a jokey way to say ‘loads’ in the late 1980s. That was in an autobiographical cult (according to Amazon) travelogue called ‘Los Angeles Without a Map’ by Richard Rayner, first published in 1988 (and made into a film starring David Tennant in the 90s). According to the synopsis, Brit Rayner left his long-term girlfriend and steady job in London to ‘fly on a whim to track down Barbara, a bunny girl, athlete and party head’. A party head is 80s slang for someone who likes to have a good time, apparently. And Richard sounds like a buttload of dickheads, frankly.

ornery

I saw this word in the blurb of a book I was looking at, where it referred to an ‘ornery teen’. In case you haven’t come across it before, it means ‘bad-tempered or difficult to deal with’. Despite its grumpy meaning, it’s a nice word, right? But where does it come from? Well, it turns out that ‘ornery’ actually has quite an ordinary background. Literally.

Let’s take a trip to 18th-century America. The word ‘ordinary’ was often slurred in speech to something like ‘ornary’ or ‘ornery’. Because of that, this pronunciation became associated with rural, working-class or ‘uneducated’ speakers. It then started to pick up negative connotations, implying something a bit rougher or more unsophisticated than ‘ordinary’. Over time, it moved even further from its ordinary roots, coming to mean contrary, grumpy or mean-spirited.

You’re most likely to hear ‘ornery’ in the south or midwest of Murica. It turns up a lot in ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ by Mark Twain. He often uses it to show a kind of cranky self-loathing or backwoods stubbornness (this novel is also one of the earliest and most famous literary uses of the word):

‘… though I couldn’t make out how he was a-going to be any better off then than what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant, and so kind of low-down and ornery.’

‘There was empty drygoods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting on them all day long, whittling them with their Barlow knives; and chawing tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretching—a mighty ornery lot.’

‘Ornery’ is an example of how pronunciation, social attitudes and a bit of good old-fashioned snobbery can shape the meaning of a word. This is called semantic drift. Not the snobbery bit – ‘semantic drift’ is where words acquire new senses, lose old ones or completely change their meaning (like how ‘gay’ shifted from meaning ‘cheerful’ to ‘homosexual’).

Semantic drift can lead to ‘polysemy’, which is when a word ends up with more than one meaning at the same time – like ‘wicked’, for example, which can mean ‘evil’ (from ‘wicca’, the Old English word for a male sorcerer) or ‘super cool’. As well as polysemy, ‘wicked’ is also an example of semantic inversion – where a word flips to mean its opposite (‘sick’ is another one that’s done that in slang).

Finally, if you’re looking for a band name, ‘semantic drift’ would be awesome.

flensing

I heard this gruesome little word on ‘Bookish’, a new detective show written by and starring Mark Gatiss, and set in post-war London. It isn’t for the faint-hearted or any animal lovers out there – it refers to the slicing and stripping of skin and fat from whales or seals.

‘Flensing’ itself is pretty old, and comes from an Old Norse word, ‘flesja’, meaning ‘to flay’. It came to English in the 1700s via the Netherlands and the Dutch word ‘flensen’, when commercial whaling was at its peak. At that time, every part of the whale had a use, including oil for lamps, baleen for corsets and blubber for soap.

Nowadays, most of us won’t hear or see flensing outside of ‘Moby Dick’ or grim Arctic documentaries. And thank goodness – because whales are some of the most extraordinary creatures on Earth. For example, male humpback songs can be heard up to 10 km (more than 6 miles) away, and follow patterns that are similar to human language.

This brings me on to the so-called ‘loneliest whale in the world’ – a mysterious creature that calls out at 52 hertz, a much higher pitch than other whales use. It’s been tracked since the 1980s but never seen, and scientists don’t think any other whales can hear its calls (sob).

The story of the loneliest whale has inspired books and documentaries, and even music – including ‘Whalien 52’ by K-pop behemoth BTS, which uses the 52-hertz whale as a metaphor for the alienation often felt by adolescents. The good news is that whale calls picked up by a sensor in California in 2010 suggest there might be more than one whale calling at 52 hertz. So maybe, at last, someone’s answering back.

Well, that was all a bit depressing, wasn’t it? To cheer us up, here’s a video of the Commerson’s Dolphin, a tiny black-and-white dolphin that lives in the cold waters near South America and the Kerguelen Islands. They look like teeny-weeny killer whales. (Of course, they’re critically endangered. Sorry.)

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scurrilous

It sounds posh, doesn’t it? But ‘scurrilous’ is actually the linguistic equivalent of getting slapped round the head with a rolled-up newspaper. It means ‘grossly or obscenely abusive’ or ‘slanderous’. So if you’re accused of making scurrilous claims, your pants are almost certainly in need of a visit from the fire brigade.

But how did such a fancy-sounding word end up doing such dirty work? Like lots of refined-but-rude words, ‘scurrilous’ comes to us from Latin. It traces back to ‘scurrilis’, which means ‘buffoon-like’ or ‘coarse’. And that comes from ‘scurra’, meaning ‘jester’ or ‘clown’ AKA someone who made a living making rude jokes (like previous star of the word of the week – and best job title evs – Roland the Farter).

Over time, ‘scurra’s association with low humour, insults and botty burps (sorry) stuck. So it wasn’t long before ‘scurrilous’ came to describe anything vulgar, mocking or abusive – especially in speech or writing.

Us English speakers got hold of ‘scurrilous’ in the 16th century. The earliest known printed use is in 1570 in the ‘Thesaurus Linguæ Romanæ & Britannicæ*’ by Thomas Cooper (theologian, Bishop of Winchester and master of Magdalen College at Oxford University): ‘Scurrilous iesting and vnshamefast rayling.’

Translation: rude jokes and shameless ranting – or in modern terms, social media.

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*The full title of this is, deep breath, ‘Thesaurus Linguæ Romanæ & Britannicæ: tam Accurate Congestus, vt Nihil Penè in Eo Desyderari Possit, Quod Vel Latinè Complectatur Amplissimus Stephani Thesaurus, Vel Anglicè, Toties Aucta EliotæBibliotheca’. Phew. You can also read it online, if you have a spare six months or so, and a magnifying glass.

cacophony

A cacophony is a big old noise, and an unpleasant one at that. Looking and sounding as chaotic as what it describes, ‘cacophony’ comes from the Greek kakophōnía. That’s a mash-up of kakos meaning ‘bad’, and phōnē which means ‘voice’ or ‘sound’. So it literally means ‘bad sound’. No sugar-coating here.

In classical rhetoric (the ancient art of persuasion through language), ‘cacophony’ referred specifically to harsh or clashing combinations of sounds in speech or writing – phrases that were awkward to say, unpleasant to hear or stylistically jarring. So if a sentence was hard to say out loud or just didn’t flow well, it might be criticised as ‘cacophonous’.

‘Cacophony’ first turned up in English in the mid-1600s, when people were busy developing new types of machinery and opera. So you can see why a word for noisy noises might be useful. Its first appearance in print was in Thomas Blout’s Glossographia, one of the earliest dictionaries (published in 1656 with the subtitle ‘A Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words… As Are Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue’ which I love). There it was used to describe ‘an ill, harsh, or unpleasing sound’.

Despite its unpleasant meaning, ‘cacophony’ has a classy family tree, sharing a root with ‘symphony’ – that’s the same phōnē, but this time combined with sym-, meaning together. Its antonym (a fancy way of saying ‘opposite’) is the lesser-known ‘euphony’, which literally means ‘good sound’.

aspersion

Aspersions are critical or mean remarks about someone. They’re almost always ‘cast’, and usually a bit sneaky. But do you actually know what an aspersion is? Nope, me neither.

‘Aspersion’ actually has surprisingly saintly roots. It comes from the Latin ‘aspergere’, which means ‘to sprinkle’ or ‘to scatter’ (see also, ‘disperse’ and ‘intersperse’). In ye olde church services, priests would sprinkle holy water over the congregation – a ritual called, you’ve guessed it, an aspersion.

An AI-generated picture of people casting aspersions on each other

In print, one of the earliest known uses of ‘aspersion’ (in that blessing sense) appears in John Foxe’s 1570 translation of Actes and Monuments, a work of Protestant history and martyrology (sounds like a banger). The exact phrase is ‘the aspersion of the blood of Jesus Christ’. I’m pretty sure this isn’t literal (I hope so, at least – the dry cleaning bills would be a bitch).

You can also find this use of ‘aspersion’ in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

‘No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall / To make this contract grow.’

So how did we get from a light dousing of holy water to someone suggesting you’re morally bankrupt? Well, by the late 16th century, the OED and other sources record the word shifting meaning. It picked up a figurative use as a ‘bespattering with slander, derogatory criticism’ in the 1590s, losing its literal connection to holy water. By 1749 it was firmly in the negative, as shown in this quote from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones:

‘… for I defy all the world to cast a just aspersion on my character: nay, the most scandalous tongues have never dared censure my reputation.’

Are aspersions always plural? No, they can be singular – ‘an aspersion was made against me’, for example. But you’ll sound super weird if you say that (and deserve that aspersion).

‘Aspersion’ is a great example of how words evolve – from blessing people with holy water to lightly soiling their reputation. Sprinkle responsibly.

nimrod

You probably know nimrod as a slightly old-fashioned way of calling someone an idiot. A dope or a dimwit. But like lots of our words, it didn’t start out like that.

‘Put your hands in the air like you just don’t care’ (Nimrod by David Scott, 1832)

The OG Nimrod was a biblical figure. In the Book of Genesis, he’s described as ‘a mighty hunter before the Lord’. He was one of Noah’s great-grandsons, a warrior, a king, a symbol of power and skill, and an all-round over-achiever. Oh, except for the fact that he commissioned the Tower of Babel which, if you know your bible, didn’t end well. Despite that, for centuries, the word ‘nimrod’ was used to mean a hunter or someone with great prowess.

Then Looney Tunes got involved. Yup.

In a 1948 cartoon, What Makes Daffy Duck, Daffy calls Elmer Fudd a ‘nimrod’. Not because Elmer was a great hunter – quite the opposite. He was famously incompetent, and Daffy was being hella sarcastic. Bugs Bunny also used the word later, calling Yosemite Sam ‘the little Nimrod’ in Rabbit Every Monday (1951).

But here’s where it gets interesting: the audience didn’t always get the reference. In fact, most people didn’t know the biblical meaning. So while they understood that Daffy and Bugs were mocking Elmer/Yosemite, they took ‘nimrod’ to mean idiot, not hunter. And because Looney Tunes was such a massive part of pop culture at the time, that misinterpretation stuck.

This is a great example of how language evolves in unexpected ways – not because of formal definitions or careful usage, but because a cartoon duck and rabbit made high-brow jokes that nobody got.

pontificate

These days, to pontificate is to talk about something in a self-important way. To hold forth. To bang on. If someone’s pontificating, it usually means they think they’re making an important point, but everyone else is just waiting for them to stop (cough Donald Trump cough).

Originally, ‘pontificating’ didn’t have anything to do with pompous speakers. It comes from the Latin ‘pontificatus’, which means the office or duties of a pontifex – a high-ranking priest in ancient Rome. Later, the term was used for popes and bishops in the Catholic church. So to pontificate once simply meant to act as a pontiff i.e. to carry out religious ceremonies.

Over time, the link between pontiffs and authority became more important than the religious context. By the early 1800s, ‘pontificate’ had taken on a more figurative meaning – to speak like someone with unchallengeable authority. Over a bit more time, it came to mean someone talking at length with way more confidence than they should actually have.

The papacy has been around for nearly 2,000 years. That means there’s been plenty of time for drama, scandal and the occasional orgy. Here are some weird pope facts:

• In 897, Pope Stephen VI had the corpse of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, dug up, dressed in papal robes, propped up on a throne and put on trial for perjury and abuse of power. The verdict? Guilty. His body was thrown in the river.

• Pope John XII (955–964) was allegedly killed by a jealous husband who caught him in bed with his wife – though some accounts say he died of a stroke (heehee) during sex. Either way, it’s not exactly holy.

• Pope Benedict IX first became pope around the age of 20 (or possibly younger), in 1032. His reign was so corrupt and chaotic that he sold the papacy to his godfather. Yep – sold it. Benedict was pope three separate times and is considered one of the most scandalous popes in history. So much so that he was eventually excommunicated.

• Legend says there was once a female pope – Pope Joan – who disguised herself as a man and gave birth during a procession. Most historians agree it’s just a myth, but it was taken so seriously in the past that popes reportedly had to sit on a chair with a hole in it to prove they were male. Nice to see men’s bodies being subjected to humiliating checks for once…

shoo-in

A shoo-in (not a ‘shoe-in’ as I thought) is someone or something that’s certain to succeed – the winner before the race has even started. Today, we use it for everything from obvious Oscar contenders to politicians with an easy lead. But did you know that its roots actually lie in early 20th-century American horse racing? And dodgy horse-racing at that?

‘Shoe-in’ first appeared in print around the 1920s – Merriam-Webster’s earliest citation dates it to 1928. The ‘shoo’ bit comes from the verb ‘to shoo’, as in to urge or guide someone or something away, like an annoying fly or other people’s children. But the things being shooed in this case are those horses I mentioned earlier, in races that had been rigged for betting purposes. Jockeys would deliberately hold their horses back and shoo the chosen horse to the front, guaranteeing it would win. So that horse was – you’ve guessed it – the shoo-in. And as long as enough of the jockeys were in on it, it was easy for trainers, owners, bookies, syndicates or whoever to quietly control the result and cash in.

By the 1940s, the term ‘shoe-in’ had broadened its meaning beyond the racetrack and was being used metaphorically in politics, entertainment and business – wherever someone seemed like a guaranteed winner. So while it’s now a harmless way to say ‘that’s a sure thing’, like lots of our words (and politicians), ‘shoe-in’ actually has quite the shady past.

discombobulate

Discombobulate is one of those words that sounds exactly like what it means. If you’re discombobulated then you’re confused, off balance or generally flustered (AKA me, 99 per cent of the time). In my family we call it ‘having a sweaty moment’.

Because it’s got loads of syllables, ‘discombobulate’ might sound like it has some serious historical and etymological chops. But the truth is, it’s a fairly new kid on the block, and even has a bit of a fun backstory (WHAT).

‘Discombobulate’ first appeared in American English in the mid-1800s. It’s what linguists call a ‘fanciful coinage’ – a word invented for humorous effect, typically with a focus on the sound or a playful association, rather than one that evolved naturally from older roots. It was most likely created as a mock-Latin version of ‘discompose’ or ‘discomfort’. Why? I hear you ask. Well, in the 1800s, Latin was seen as the language of the educated – so pretending to use it badly or exaggeratedly was a way of taking the piss out of seriousness or formality. ‘Discombobulate’ was part of that – it sounds grand, academic and archaic, but was actually completely made up by some smug smart arses.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first recorded use of ‘discombobulate’ as 1916. Related forms (including ‘discombobricate’) appeared in slang earlier than this though, especially at universities, as part of this trend for deliberately silly-sounding words.

Little did those smarty-smart arses know that ‘discombobulate’ would become a fully accepted word in both British and American English. So joke’s on you, smuggos.

hench(wo)man

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

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

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

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

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

• Oddjob in Goldfinger (1964), who’s electrocuted when Bond jams his steel-brimmed hat into electrified metal bars: ‘He blew a fuse.’

• Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye (1995) is crushed against a tree when Bond shoots down her helicopter harness: ‘She always did enjoy a good squeeze.’

• Necros, The Living Daylights (1987) (my favourite Bond film), who falls to his death after Bond cuts his bootlace during a fight hanging out the back of a plane: ‘He got the boot.’

• Vargas, Thunderball (1965), is shot by Bond with a speargun, and impaled against a palm tree: ‘I think he got the point.’

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

refurbish

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

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

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

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

gambol

This is inspired by the gorgeous lambs I saw running about this morning while I was walking my dog, Gus. (I also saw two dead ones which kind of ruined my day. Sorry. Anyhoo, moving on…) To gambol is to skip, frolic or jump about playfully, just like those lambs (the alive ones, obviously). It’s light, carefree and unbothered.

‘Gambol’ has been bouncing around the English language since the 1500s. It comes from the Middle French word ‘gambade’, which means ‘a leaping or springing action’. That, in turn, comes from ‘gamba’ which is Italian for ‘leg’. ‘Gamba’ also gave us ‘gambit’ and ‘gamble’ – I’m not going to tell you more about that now though, as I’m going to use both of these as future words of the week. Mean, I know.

One of ‘gambol’s first appearances in print in English was in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’: ‘Full oft he gamboled up and downe.’ So it’s describing a character literally leaping or frolicking around – very much in line with the way we still (occasionally) use the word today. Gambolling – not just for lambs.

Golding’s ‘Metamorphoses’ translation was a big deal in Elizabethan England because it made classical mythology widely accessible in English for the first time. He translated the entire work from Latin into English verse – and in a style that was rhythmic, vivid and packed with dramatic imagery. It was one of the most popular books of the time, and lots of writers drew on it (by which I think we mean plagiarised it) for stories, imagery and language. Shakespeare ‘borrowed’ some scenes and references from ‘Metamorphoses’ for plays including ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘The Tempest’. Luckily for Will, there weren’t any copyright laws then. (To be fair, he did transform those stories into something new, often with better pacing, deeper characters or sharper language. So that’s alright then.)

Golding translated the entire ‘Metamorphoses’ in just over a year – between 1564 and 1567. He mentions in his preface that he worked on it during his ‘leisure time’ while staying at the country estate of his nephew, Edward de Vere (the 17th Earl of Oxford – and one of the people some claim wrote Shakespeare’s plays, though that’s a whole other rabbit hole). Considering the translation runs to over 15 books of Latin poetry – around 12,000 lines – doing that in just over a year, by hand, in rhyming couplets is pretty bloody impressive. Thanks goodness he didn’t have Netflix.

descry

To descry something is to spot it – to catch sight of something faint, distant or difficult to see. You might descry land on the horizon, for example, or a face in the crowd. It’s easy to confuse ‘descry’ with ‘decry’ (although I doubt either of them are coming up that regularly in your daily life), which is understandable – they look and sound similar, but mean very different things. If you decry something then you condemn it, usually loudly and with lots of disapproval.

‘Descry’ and ‘describe’ come from the same Latin root – dēscrībere, meaning ‘to write down’ or ‘to represent’. That Latin word gave rise to an Old French verb, ‘descrier’, which meant ‘to proclaim’ or ‘cry out’ (often in the sense of calling something out that you’ve just seen). That’s where we borrowed it from.

‘Descry’ has been around for a long time, having first appeared in print in 1330, in the Middle English romance Reinbrun. Nope, me neither – it sounds pretty awesome though. Apparently Reinbrun is abducted by some merchants as a child and shipped off to Africa, where he’s presented to King Argus. During his captivity, he gets all buff and turns into a kickass knight. He goes on to rescue Amis, a friend of his father’s, from an enchanted castle controlled by a fairy knight. Sounds good, right? Oh, and just FYI, medieval ‘romances’ don’t actually involve much in the way of snogging – they’re more about heroic adventures, quests, battles and chivalric deeds, often with a bit of the supernatural thrown in. Sadly they’re also in Middle English which means they’re unpossible to comprehenden.

magenta

Magenta is that colour that sits somewhere between red and purple. It’s also one of the four inks in your printer (showing my age there) that the colour cartridge uses. But where does the word ‘magenta’ come from? Well, it turns out it has quite the bloody backstory.

Magenta is a town in Lombardy in northern Italy. It’s also the site of the Battle of Magenta. This was a key moment in the Second Italian War of Independence which took place in 1859, when the French and Sardinians fought the Austrians. Not sure where the Italians were*. Around the same time, lots of chemists were in fierce competition to develop new synthetic dyes. In 1859, the same year as the battle, French chemist François-Emmanuel Verguin created a vibrant reddish-purple dye from coal tar derivatives. Originally called ‘fuchsine’ (after the fuchsia flower), it was soon rebranded as ‘magenta’, probably because the colour was reminiscent of the bloodshed at the battle.

Before synthetic dyes like magenta, rich red and purple hues were difficult and expensive to produce. They were often made from crushed insects (like cochineal) or rare plants. The invention of magenta dye changed this, making vivid colours more accessible for clothing, art and industry. PHEW.

Magenta isn’t a real colour in the way that red or blue are. That’s because it doesn’t have its own wavelength of light. Instead, our brains create magenta when we see both red and blue light at the same time, basically filling in the gap in the spectrum where green would normally be. Weird, right? This reminds of the mindblowing (or noseblowing) fact that our brains filter our noses out of our vision, as otherwise they’d get in our way.

* I did some Wikipedia searching and here’s a quick history lesson – Italy wasn’t unified at the time, and lots of Italian states didn’t take part in this war. The one that did, Piedmont-Sardinia, knew it couldn’t win on its own, so it teamed up with France (the cost was that they had to hand over Nice and Savoy to Napoleon III). And because much of northern Italy was under Austrian rule, it was essentially a war between Austria and France (there were lots of Italian nationalist volunteers in it too though). The battle of Magenta was a decisive victory for the Franco-Sardinian alliance.

This is the linear visible spectrum – look, no magenta!

macaroni

Now, you might think you know what I’m talking about here – pasta, right? Wrong. Penguins? No, not them either. Allow me to take you back to the 18th century. If you were a macaroni, then you were likely the most flamboyant and extravagantly dressed man in the room (which was no small feat in an era of powdered wigs and embroidered everything).

A macaroni was the 18th-century equivalent of a fashion influencer – but with more lace, bigger wigs and a worrying obsession with teeny-tiny hats. The term referred to young men who’d been on the Grand Tour, a kind of aristocratic gap year where wealthy Brits swanned around Europe pretending to appreciate Renaissance art. Italy was a popular destination for these men and many developed a taste for maccaroni (okay, so it is pasta-related) which was little known in Britain at the time. When they returned to London draped in silk, covered in frills and with wigs so tall they made walking through doorways a logistical nightmare, they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club – not an actual club, but a subculture of worldliness, superior style, sophistication and enlightenment. They would even refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as ‘very maccaroni’.

It wasn’t all fun and games and tiddly hats though. Macaronis came to be seen in stereotyped negative terms in Britain, and as symbols of inappropriate effeminacy and bourgeois excess – satirical prints of the time show them mincing around in ludicrous outfits, clutching canes and sporting expressions of supreme self-satisfaction. And with the aristos over the Channel in France losing their heads, this type of extravagant dressing began to fall out of favour at the end of the 18th century when a more restrained aesthetic took over. Don’t worry though – although the French Revolution definitely put a dampener on the most OTT aristocratic styles, dandyism (led by figures like Beau Brummell) emerged soon after. And while it was a little more understated, it still embraced a meticulous approach to fashion. No small hats though, sadly.

The most famous reference to macaronis is probably in the nursery rhyme Yankee Doodle, where the American hero ‘stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni’. Written by a Brit, the joke was that the Yankees were so naïve that they believed a feather in the hat was enough to turn them into a sophisticated European macaroni.

But what about the penguin, I hear you ask? Well, the macaroni penguin sports a very fetching yellow crest. They were named by English sailors who came across them in the Falkland Islands in the early 19th century, and thought they bore a spooky resemblance to our macaroni fashionistas.