English Words

English Words

Etymology: English Grammar: Advanced English Words: Origins, History & Meanings

(2021 eBook Edition)

Albert Jack

Albert Jack Publishing

Copyright Page

English Words

Etymology: English Grammar: Advanced English Words: Origins, History & Meanings

(2021 eBook Edition)

Copyright © September 2015  Albert Jack

Cover Design: Albert Jack

ebook Production: Albert Jack

All rights are reserved to the author. no part of this ebook may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This is largely a work of non-fiction although the author could not resist the temptation to be creative with historical detail wherever possible.

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About the Author

Albert Jack, is a writer and historian. His first book, Red Herrings and White Elephants explored the origins of well-known idioms and phrases and became an international bestseller in 2004.

It was serialised by the Sunday Times and remained in their bestseller list for sixteen straight months. He followed this up with a series of bestsellers including Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheep, Pop Goes the Weasel and What Caesar did for My Salad.

Fascinated by discovering the truth behind the world’s great stories, Albert has become an expert in explaining the unexplained, enriching millions of dinner table conversations and ending bar room disputes the world over.

He is now a veteran of hundreds of live television shows and thousands of radio programmes worldwide. Albert lives somewhere between Guildford in England and Bangkok in Thailand.

Including;

Introduction

Names and Places

Food and Drink

Under the Influence

Love and Lust

Stuff and Nonsense

Trade and Industry

Fashion Statements

Crimes and Misdemeanours

Law and Order

Military and Nautical

Language, Literature and the Performing Arts

Science and Nature

Toys, Games and Sports

Nicknames and Insults

Foreign Languages

INTRODUCTION

The English language is perhaps the richest and most expressive in the world. One of the reasons for this is that we have so many weird and wonderful ways of describing exactly the same thing: we can be as colourful or as plain with our language as we choose. That is why it is so difficult to learn and how this book will help you so much.

Living in a foreign country, as I do, it is obvious to me that even the most fluent of English speakers still have a lot to learn. As have the native English speakers. You try explaining to an educated Vietnamese or Thai how your friend became addled and sozzled or blotto and befuddled, and maybe mullered, pie-eyed or bingeing. ‘What you say? What you mean? Why you say?’ All good questions. And all answered here.

On the face of it the history of the English language is, at best, rather dull. It is certainly not easy to write an entertaining book on the subject and not make it read like a text book. Or so I thought. When I looked a little closer – and in a slightly different way from that of etymologists and scholars with minds far greater than mine – I discovered all sorts of fascinating tales that will help to explain why we use the words and phrases we do.

Because, alongside the usual Latin-based words we picked up from the Romans and the words nicked from the Celts and Picts and other ancient Europeans, the English language has drawn its inspiration from some exceedingly odd places: clowns, facial hair, items of furniture, famous elephants . . .you name it. So in these pages I hope to pander to your curiosity thanks to a historical pimp, mesmerise you thanks to hypnotist Dr Franz Mesmer, and leave you googly-eyed with amazement thanks to an American cartoon strip.

And then there are the words that look and sound as if someone just plucked them out of thin air: Skulduggery, coddswallop, jiggery-pokery, claptrap. But rest assured these words are not mere gobbledygook: there’s a cracking story behind each one. And you will need to know them if you want to speak English like a native.

As my research progressed I found myself ever more fascinated by English-speaking people and our shared English-speaking history. There is so much about our cultures that can be learned through the strange journeys our words have made: how the medieval sheriff ended up in the Wild West; how an African snake-god inspired Hollywood’s zombies; how an English queen was defeated by Irish blarney and a Scottish queen by Portuguese marmalade; and how words from pommy to barracking have become lost in translation en route to Australia.

Some distinct themes emerged as I delved into the backgrounds of our favourite words. Amid the genteel romance of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries I found out what playing gooseberry has to do with gooseberries and what canoodling has to do with canoes.

But by far the most popular and most wonderful of English words come from the noble art of insulting people. Whether you call someone an Ignoramus, a Nincompoop, a Pipsqueak, a Bumpkin, a Jackanapes, a Scallywag or a Pikey, you are keeping alive a word that has travelled across borders and through centuries to get here, and surely nobody could take offence at that.

I hope you enjoy exploring this ode to the English language as much as I have enjoyed writing it. It turns out etymology is one of the most exciting –ologies out there. And if you want to learn more about it well then now is your chance.

Albert Jack

Bangkok, 2015

Learning English Words

It is assumed in some parts of America that the word tomfoolery – to mean high-spirited or silly behaviour (see also shenanigans) – originated in the Southern states, in connection with slavery and the derogatory nickname ‘Uncle Tom’. A second American connection offers another theory for the origin of the term, namely a popular racehorse called Tom Fool from the 1950s, who won many major races during his career and came in at number eleven on the list of thoroughbred American champions of the twentieth century.

But ‘tomfoolery’ was in fact recorded in England long before the height of the slave trade, and certainly long before that particular racehorse was speeding around the track. Its origin lies in William Shakespeare’s tragedy of 1606, King Lear, in which Tom the Fool plays a central role. In so naming the character, the Bard was paying tribute to one of his close friends, Tom Skelton, a court jester – believed to be the last in English history – at Muncaster Castle near Ravenglass in Cumbria who was popularly known as Tom the Fool.

In real life, it appears that Tom was a much more sinister character than perhaps even his playwright friend realised and not averse to a spot of very dirty work on behalf of his employer, Sir Ferdinand Pennington. It is said that on one occasion he murdered an apprentice carpenter on the orders of Sir Ferdinand after the lad was caught in a clinch with Pennington’s daughter. Skelton decapitated him as he slept in a stable block and the famous head-carrying ghost is said still to haunt the grounds to this day.

Skelton was also known to spend many hours under a tree on the road to Ravenglass, greeting travellers as they passed. Those Tom warmed to were directed to the ford over the River Esk while those he disliked were pointed in the direction of a hidden quicksand and bog marsh. Not all lived to tell the tale. Tom Skelton himself died in 1600, a victim, legend has it, of the very same quicksand, after losing his way back to the castle after a night in a local tavern. A portrait of Tom ‘the Fool’ Skelton still hangs in Muncaster Castle along with the original copy of his will. The present owners – descendants of the vindictive Pennington – claim that the spirit of Tom the Fool still lives at the castle and is responsible for much of the ghostly tomfoolery supposedly going on there to this day.

There are various suggestions for the origin of the word nincompoop, which surprisingly is still in such common usage today that the Microsoft spellchecker doesn’t pick up on it. So how did this word – usually applied to idiots and fools – evolve? To begin with, it is almost certainly not associated with the Latin phrase non compos mentis, meaning mentally incompetent or insane, as the great Dr Johnson would have us believe. First recorded in the 1670s, the word poop was widely used to describe a fool, and some etymologists have suggested that it was then combined with the French nicodème, ‘simpleton’. I believe they are wrong, and not least because Nicodème is a relatively popular French boys’ name that comes from the Greek nikodemos, ‘victory of the people’, and hence nothing to do with fools or idiots – except perhaps of the militant kind. It seems that we may remain in France, however, for the origin of ‘nincompoop’: the now obsolete phrase nic à poux (poux meaning ‘lice’ or ‘nits’) was a popular term of derision from the late 1500s.

An assassin is a paid mercenary, usually someone who kills a powerful or important figure for what he considers to be a just cause (i.e. his own). Historically, the assassins were a group of Muslim fanatics who defended the Holy Land from the Christian Crusaders in around ad 1090. They were led by Hasan-e Sabbah, a Persian missionary who enthusiastically established his own murderous credentials by dispatching several high-profile Muslim leaders over the next two decades.

The assassins’ main targets were members of the ruling Seljuk authority, who controlled vast areas of what was once the Persian Empire and had extended their dominion into Syria by the twelfth century. Living in remote areas in the mountains, Sabbah’s followers would identify a single target and send in one or two men to commit a violent attack, usually having fuelled themselves with their drug of choice, hashish. This is how they became known, and feared, as the Hashashshin or ‘Hashish Eaters’.

The original story behind this practice was told by Marco Polo in an account of his travels to the East in 1298. Polo wrote of the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’ (Sabbah, in other words) who kept boys as young as twelve at his fortress hideaway, with the intention of training them to become fearless warriors. The boys would be given hashish and, after passing out, they would be taken to a garden of tranquil beauty, where they would awake to find themselves surrounded by lovely maidens who would entertain them in any way they pleased.

After a few days, the Old Man would reappear and explain that they had been given a glimpse of the paradise that awaited them if they followed his instructions to the letter and were willing to die in the process. This was considered an innovative and effective tactic at a time when the art of warfare generally consisted in nothing subtler than a slugging match between two armies. The Hashashshin, however, remained hidden and appeared to be normal members of a community until the opportunity to strike presented itself. Sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it?

Bastard is a word that can be used in many effective ways. It appears to have been popularised by William Shakespeare, who plays around with the term in King Lear (1606), associating it with the similar-sounding ‘base’. Edmund, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, declaims: ‘Why bastard? wherefore base? ... Why brand they us / With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?’

‘Bastard’ has no connection etymologically with ‘base’, however. It is believed to have evolved from the Old French expression fils de bast, ‘the son of a packsaddler’ or indeed of any other long-distance traveller who passed through towns and villages, making the most of the local delicacies on offer and quickly disappearing before anyone could file a paternity suit. William the Conqueror (1028–87), the first Norman king of England, was known as ‘William the Bastard’ – and not only by the Anglo-Saxons he defeated at Hastings. In Normandy any illegitimate son of a nobleman was known as ‘the bastard’, pre-dating Shakespeare’s usage by five centuries.

Australians, on the other hand, generally use the word as a term of affection, but then they have never really got to grips with the English language (see pommy). These days, the word is rarely, if ever, used to describe an illegitimate child, but instead has found a happy home in football stadiums, where it is often prefixed with the word ‘cheating’. Although not by me, you understand.

A handicap refers either to a disability or to a way of levelling the odds in a game or sport, especially golf or horse racing. The origin of the latter definition is believed to derive from ‘hand in cap’, a lottery or trading game that was very popular in seventeenth-century England. Pastimes may have been few and far between in those days, but gambling was just as prevalent. For those too low on the social scale to participate in horse racing, the ‘Sport of Kings’ (see also cantering, steeplechase), hand in cap became a popular alternative, especially in London, in the coffee houses and on the street corners of the capital. As the great diarist of that age, Samuel Pepys, wrote on 18 September 1660: ‘And here some of us fell to handicap, a sport I had never known before and that was very good.’

Hand in cap was a game played by two men, often traders, with a neutral referee. All three would put their hands into the referee’s cap, each holding an unspecified amount of forfeit money. The referee would then announce a valuation, which could be either the value of an item presented for sale, the difference in value (‘odds’) between two items the players hoped to trade, or the odds of a sporting contest, such as prize fighting. Once the valuation had been announced, the two main players showed their assent or dissent by withdrawing their hands, each having either dropped the forfeit money into the cap (if he thought it an unfair deal) or kept hold of it (if he accepted the referee’s price or odds). The forfeit money went to the referee if the opponents agreed with each other and to the assenting player if there was disagreement between them, with the balance of the transaction made up if a deal had been struck. The purpose of all this was to reward a fair valuation by the referee.

By the mid-eighteenth century this practice of evening up the odds of a transaction was being used at horse-racing tracks across England, where it became gradually more common for race officials to ‘handicap’ a superior horse by adding weight to its saddle in an attempt to increase the chance of any horse winning (see also sandbagger).

While the use of the word to describe a disabled person can conceivably have arisen via this notion of advantage versus disadvantage, the etymology for this definition is probably unrelated, however. The origin of the term is believed to be more recent, in fact, dating instead to the nineteenth century, when significant medical advances were made especially when it came to treating wounded soldiers, thereby greatly increasing their chances of survival when they would previously have perished on the battlefield. These men may have escaped with their lives, but their injuries still resulted in permanent disability in many cases, preventing them from taking up their former occupations when they returned home.

In response to the number of incapacitated veterans of the Crimean War (1853–6), the British government made it legal for them to beg for money (‘cap in hand’) on the streets, as a result of which they became known as ‘cap handy’ or handicapped. The term was in standard use by 1915, when the government of the day introduced disability insurance for returning veterans of the First World War to discourage them from flooding into the cities with their caps in hand, which by then was deemed detrimental to public morale.

Technically, the first person ever to mesmerise anyone – that is, to leave someone spellbound at what they have seen or heard – was Dr Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), a leading Austrian physician who ruffled a few feathers in the medical establishment by using hypnotism as a way of treating illness. It was his belief that ill health was caused by obstructions in the harmonious ebb and flow of magnetic fluid circulating the body, and his treatment involved putting the patient into a trance-like state and then passing a magnet over the skin in order to free the blockage. This not only marked the birth of hypnotism but also paved the way for attempts at paranormal communication, which soon attracted its own devotees.

That said, the medical profession remained sceptical about Mesmer’s unconventional beliefs, and it took the dedication of his later followers for them to be accorded their own special term: mesmerism. The word was current by 1829 and the associated  ‘mesmerised’ was used to describe anybody in a trance-like state, chemically assisted or otherwise. In 1841, Scottish surgeon James Braid (1795–1860) used the principles of mesmerism for a series of lectures on the subject of hypnotherapy that eventually established his own reputation as the father of modern hypnosis.

Spondulics is a slang word for money, used mainly in the south of England. The Oxford English Dictionary explains that it is a word of ‘fanciful origin’, which doesn’t tell us much. My Greek friends have traced it back to classical times and the word spondulikos, which evolved from spondulos, a type of seashell that was supposedly once used as a form of currency throughout the ancient world. A second Greek connection comes from the word spondylo, ‘spine’, applied figuratively to money on the basis that a stack of coins resembles the column of vertebrae in the spine. It may sound far-fetched but the connection had clearly been made by 1867, the year in which John Mitchell Bonnell,