The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  1 That’s a blush to you and me.

  The Old and New Testicle

  Gonads are testicles and testicles shouldn’t really have anything to do with the Old and New Testaments, but they do.

  The Testaments of the Bible testify to God’s truth. This is because the Latin for witness was testis. From that one root, testis, English has inherited protest (bear witness for), detest (bear witness against), contest (bear witness competitively), and test­icle. What are testicles doing there? They are testifying to a man’s virility. Do you want to prove that you’re a real man? Well, your testicles will testify in your favour.

  That’s the usual explanation, anyway. There’s another, more interesting theory that in bygone days witnesses used to swear to things with their hands on their balls, or even on other people­’s balls. In the Book of Genesis, Abraham makes his servant swear not to marry a Canaanite girl. The King James Version has this translation:

  I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: And I will make thee swear by the LORD, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth

  Now, that may be the correct translation, but the Hebrew doesn’t say thigh, it says yarek, which means, approximately, soft bits. Nobody knows how oaths were sworn in the ancient world, but many scholars believe that people didn’t put their hands on their hearts or their thighs, but on the testicles of the man to whom they were swearing, which would make the connection between testis and testes rather more direct.

  Testicles. Bollocks. Balls. Nuts. Cullions. Cojones. Goolies. Tallywags. Twiddle-diddles. Bawbles, trinkets, spermaria. There are a hundred words for the danglers and they get everywhere. It’s enough to make a respectable fellow blush. Do you enjoy the taste of avocado? So did I, until the terrible day when I realised that I was eating Aztec balls. You see, the Aztecs noticed the avocado’s shape and decided that it resembled nothing so much as a big, green bollock. So they called it an ahuakatl, their word for testicle. When the Spanish arrived they misheard this slightly and called it aguacate, and the English changed this slightly to avocado. To remember that I used to like avocados with a touch of walnut oil only adds to my shame.

  Even if you flee to an ivory tower and sit there wearing an orchid and a scowl, it still means that you have a testicle in your buttonhole, because that’s what an orchid’s root resembles, and orchis was the Greek for testicle. Indeed, the green-winged orchid used to rejoice in the name Fool’s Ballocks. The technical term for somebody who has a lot of balls is a polyorchid.

  And it’s very possible that this orb on which we all live comes from the same root as orchid, in which case we are whirling around the Sun on a giant testis, six billion trillion tons of gonad or cod, which is where cod-philosophy, codswallop and codpiece come from.

  There are two codpieces at the top right of your computer keyboard, and how they got there is a rather odd story.

  Parenthetical Codpieces

  Your computer keyboard contains two pictures of codpieces, and it’s all the fault of the ancient Gauls, the original inhabitants of France. Gauls spoke Gaulish until Julius Caesar came and cut them all into three parts. One of the Gaulish words that the Gauls used to speak was braca meaning trousers. The Romans didn’t have a word for trousers because they all wore togas, and that’s why the Gaulish term survived.

  From braca came the early French brague meaning trousers, and when they wanted a word for a codpiece they decided to call it a braguette or little trousers. This is not to be confused with baguette, meaning stick. In fact a Frenchman might brag that his baguette was too big for his braguette, but then Frenchmen will claim anything. They’re braggarts (literally one who shows off his codpiece).

  Braguettes were much more important in the olden days, especially in armour. On the medieval battlefield, with arrows flying hither and thither, a knight knew where he wanted the most protection. Henry VIII’s codpiece, for example, was a gargantuan combination of efficiency and obscenity. It was big enough and shiny enough to frighten any enemy into disorganised retreat. It bulged out from the royal groin and stretched up to a metal plate that protected the royal belly.

  And that is significant. What do you call the bit of stone that bulges out from a pillar to support a balcony or a roof? Until the sixteenth century nobody had been certain what to call them; but one day somebody must have been gazing at a cathedral wall and, in a moment of sudden clarity, realised that the architectural supports looked like nothing so much as Henry VIII’s groin.

  And so such architectural structures came to be known as braggets, and that brings us to Pocahontas.

  Pocahontas was a princess of the Powhatan tribe, which lived in Virginia. Of course, the Powhatan tribe didn’t know they lived in Virginia. They thought they lived in Tenakomakah, and so the English thoughtfully came with guns to explain their mistake. But the Powhatan tribe were obstinate and went so far as to take one of the Englishmen prisoner. They were planning to kill him until Pocahontas intervened with her father and Captain John Smith was freed. The story goes that she had fallen madly in love with him and that they had a passionate affair, but as Pocahontas was only ten years old at the time, we should probably move swiftly on.

  Of course, it may not have happened exactly that way. The story has been improved beyond repair. But there definitely was a Pocahontas and there definitely was a Captain John Smith, and they seem to have been rather fond of each other. Then he had an accident with one of his guns and had to return to England. The cruel colonists told Pocahontas that John Smith was dead, and she pined away in tears thinking that he was lost for ever. In fact, he wasn’t dead, he was writing a dictionary.

  The Sea-Man’s Grammar and Dictionary: Explaining all the Difficult Terms of Navigation hit the bookstands in 1627. It had all sorts of nautical jargon for the aspiring sailor to learn. But, for our story, the important thing is that Captain Smith spelt braggets as brackets, and the spelling stuck.

  The original architectural device was called a bragget/bracket, because it looked like a codpiece. But what about a double bracket, which connects two horizontals to a vertical? An architectural double bracket looks like this: [

  Look around you: there’s probably one on the nearest bookshelf. And just as a physical bracket got its name because it resembled a codpiece, so the punctuation bracket got its name because it resembled the structural component.

  In 1711 a man called William Whiston published a book called Primitive Christianity Revived. The book often quotes from Greek sources and when it does, it gives both Whiston’s translation and the original in what he was the first man to call [brackets].

  And that’s why, if you look at the top right-hand corner of your computer keyboard, you will see two little codpieces [] lingering obscenely beside the letter P for pants.

  Suffering for my Underwear

  Once upon a time there was a chap who probably didn’t exist and who probably wasn’t called Pantaleon. Legend has it that he was personal physician to Emperor Maximianus. When the emperor discovered that his doctor was a Christian he got terribly upset and decreed that the doctor should die.

  The execution went badly. They tried to burn him alive, but the fire went out. They threw him into molten lead but it turned out to be cold. They lashed a stone to him and chucked him into the sea, but the stone floated. They threw him to wild beasts, which were tamed. They tried to hang him and the rope broke. They tried to chop his head off but the sword bent and he forgave the executioner.

  This last kindness was what earned the doctor the name Pantaleon, which means All-Compassionate.

  In the end they got Pantaleon’s head off and he died, thus becoming one of the megalomartyrs (the great martyrs) of Greece. By the tenth century Saint Pantaleon had become the patron saint of Venice. Pantalon therefore became a popular Venetian name and the Venetians themselves were often called the Pantaloni.

  Then, in the sixteenth cen
tury, came the Commedia Dell’Arte: short comic plays performed by travelling troupes and always involving the same stock characters like Harlequin and Scaramouch.

  In these plays Pantalone was the stereotypical Venetian. He was a merchant and a miser and a lustful old man, and he wore one-piece breeches, like Venetians did. These long breeches therefore became known as pantaloons. Pantaloons were shortened to pants and the English (though not the Americans) called their underwear underpants. Underpants were again shortened to pants, which is what I am now wearing.

  Pants are all-compassionate. Pants are saints. This means that my underwear is named after an early Christian martyr.

  Pans

  So pants and panties come from Saint Pantaleon and your undies are all-compassionate and your small-clothes are martyred.

  St Pantaleon was therefore a linguistic relation of St Pancras (who held everything) and Pandora, who was given everything in a box that she really shouldn’t have opened.

  Pan is one of those elements that gets everywhere. It’s panpresent. For example, when a film camera pans across from one face to another, that pan comes from the same Greek word that you’ll find in your underpants. Cinematic panning is short for the Panoramic Camera, which was patented back in 1868 and so called because a panorama is where you see everything.

  A panacea cures absolutely everything, which is useful if you’re in the middle of a pandemic, which is one up from an epidemic. An epidemic is only among the people, whereas a pandemic means all the peoples of the world are infected.

  Pan also gives you all sorts of terribly useful words that for some reason loiter in dark and musty corners of the dictionary. Pantophobia, for example, is the granddaddy of all phobias as it means a morbid fear of absolutely everything. Pantophobia is the inevitable outcome of pandiabolism – the belief that the Devil runs the world – and, in its milder forms, is a panpathy, or one of those feelings that everybody has now and then.

  However, not all pans mean all. It’s one of the great problems of etymology that there are no hard and fast rules: nothing is panapplicable. The pans and pots in your kitchen have nothing whatsoever to do with panoramas and pan-Africanism. Panic is not a fear of everything; it is, in fact, the terror that the Greek god Pan, who rules the forests, is able to induce in anybody who takes a walk in the woods after dark. And the Greek god Pan is not panipotent. Nobody knows where his name comes from – all we’re sure of is that he played the pan-pipes.

  Back in 27 BC the Roman general Marcus Agrippa built a big temple on the edge of Rome and, in a fit of indecision, decided to dedicate it to all the gods at once. Six hundred years later the building was still standing and the Pope decided to turn it into a Christian church dedicated to St Mary and the Martyrs. Fourteen hundred years after that it’s still standing and still has its original roof. Technically it’s now called the Church of Saint Mary, but the tourists still call it the Pantheon, or All the Gods.

  The exact opposite of the Pantheon is Pandemonium, the place of all the demons. These days pandemonium is just a word we use to mean that everything is a bit chaotic, but originally it was a particular palace in Hell. It was one of the hundreds of English words that were invented by John Milton.

  Miltonic Meanders

  A boring commentary in ten books of meandering verse on the first chapter of Genesis …

  … is how Voltaire described Paradise Lost, the great epic poem by John Milton. Voltaire was wrong, of course. Paradise Lost is mainly about Adam and Eve, and that pomavorous couple don’t actually appear until the second chapter of the book of Genesis.

  Paradise Lost is about the fall of Satan from Heaven and the fall of humanity from the Garden of Eden into the Land of Nod, and is generally speaking a downhill poem. However, it’s still the greatest epic in English, an achievement that’s largely due to its being almost the only epic in English that anybody has ever bothered writing, and certainly the only one that anyone has ever bothered reading. It’s also the origin of Pandemonium.

  In Milton’s poem, when Satan is thrown out of Heaven and into Hell, the first thing he decides to do is to get a roof over his head. So he summons all the other fallen angels and gets them to build a huge and hideous palace. And just as the Pantheon is the temple of All the Gods, so Satan decides to name his new pied-à-terre All the Demons or Pandemonium, and that’s how the word was invented.

  Of course, since then pandemonium has come to mean anywhere that’s a bit noisy, but it all goes back to Milton’s idea, and his fondness for inventing language.

  Milton adored inventing words. When he couldn’t find the right term he just made one up: impassive, obtrusive, jubilant, loquacious, unconvincing, Satanic, persona, fragrance, beleaguered, sensuous, undesirable, disregard, damp, criticise, irresponsible, lovelorn, exhilarating, sectarian, unaccountable, incidental and cooking. All Milton’s. When it came to inventive wording, Milton actually invented the word wording.

  Awe-struck? He invented that one too, along with stunning and terrific.

  And, because he was a Puritan, he invented words for all the fun things of which he disapproved. Without dear old Milton we would have no debauchery, no depravity, no extravagance, in fact nothing enjoyable at all.

  Poor preachers! People always take their condemnations as suggestions. One man’s abomination is another’s good idea. This is the law of unintended consequences, and yes, Milton invented the word unintended. He probably didn’t intend or imagine that one of his obscurer words would end up as the title for this book. Etymologicon, meaning a book containing etymologies, first crops up in his essay on Nullities in Marriage.

  Whether you’re all ears or obliviously tripping the light fantastic, you’re still quoting Milton. ‘[T]rip it as ye go, / On the light fantastic toe’ is from his poem L’Allegro, ‘In a light fantastic round’ and ‘all ear’ are from his play Comus. When a tennis player has an advantage, that’s Milton’s too, or at least he invented advantage in its sporting sense. When all Hell breaks loose, that’s Paradise Lost, because when Satan escapes from Hell a curious angel asks him:

  Wherefore with thee

  Came not all Hell broke loose?

  We rely on Milton. For example, he invented space travel, or at least made it linguistically possible. The word space had been around for centuries, but it was Milton who first applied it to the vast voids between the stars. Satan comforts his fallen angels by telling them that though they have been banned from Heaven,

  Space may produce new worlds

  And that’s why we don’t have outer distance or void stations or expanse ships. Because of Milton we have 2001: A Space Odyssey and David Bowie’s song ‘Space Oddity’. Indeed, if there were any justice in pop music John Milton would be raking in the royalties from Jeff Beck’s ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’, because Milton invented silver linings:2

  Was I deceived or did a sable cloud

  Turn forth her silver lining on the night?

  This chapter is becoming rather quotationist, which is one of Milton’s words that didn’t catch on. So let us proceed to pastures new (‘At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue,/Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new’). Let us forget about the silver linings and concentrate on the clouds.

  2 He’d also be making a little less from Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’.

  Bloody Typical Semantic Shifts

  Do you know the difference between the clouds and the sky? If you do, you’re lucky, because if you live in England, the two are pretty much synonymous. The clouds aren’t lined with silver. The weather is just miserable. It always has been and it always will be.

  Our word sky comes from the Viking word for cloud, but in England there’s simply no difference between the two concepts, and so the word changed its meaning because of the awful weather.

  If there’s one thing that etymology proves conclusively, it’s that
the world is a wretched place. We may dream of better things, but the word dream comes from the Anglo-Saxon for happiness. There’s a moral in that.

  It has always rained, happiness has always been a dream, and people have always been lazy. I should know, I’m lazy myself. Ask me to do something like the washing up or a tax return and I’ll reply that I’ll do it in five minutes.

  Five minutes usually means never.

  If the task that I have been assigned is absolutely essential for my survival then I might say that I’ll do it in a minute. That usually­ means within an hour, but I’m not guaranteeing anything.

  Do not condemn me. Remember that a moment is the smallest conceivable amount of time. Now, turn on the radio or the television and wait. Soon enough an announcer will come on and say that ‘In a moment we’ll be showing’ this, that or the other, ‘but first the news and weather’.

  There’s an old pop song by The Smiths called ‘How Soon is Now?’ The writers of the song must have been even lazier than I am, because the answer is available in any etymological dictionary. Soon was the Anglo-Saxon word for now.

  It’s just that after a thousand years of people saying ‘I’ll do that soon’, soon has ended up meaning what it does today.

  These days, now has to have a right stuck on the front or it doesn’t mean a thing. The same happened to the word anon (not the shortening for anonymous, but the synonym for soon). It derives from the Old English phrase on an, which meant on one or instantly. But humans don’t do things instantly, we just promise to. And the word instantly will, of course, go the way of its siblings.

  And people are nasty, condemnatory creatures. The way people overstate the faults of others is, frankly, demonic. There’s a lovely bit in King Lear where the Duke of Gloucester is having his eyes gouged out by Regan and responds by calling her a ‘naughty lady’.