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’.