The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  Naughty used to be a much more serious word than it is now, but it has been overused and lost its power. So many stern parents have called their children naughty that the power has slowly drained from the word. If you were naughty it used to mean that you were a no-human. It comes from exactly the same root as nought or nothing. Now it just means that you’re mischievous.

  Every weakness of human nature comes out in the history of etymology. Probably the most damning word is probably. Two thousand years ago the Romans had the word probabilis. If something was probabilis then it could be proved by experiment, because the two words come from the same root: probare.

  But probabilis got overused. People are always more certain of things than they really should be, and that applied to the Romans just as much as to us. Roman lawyers would claim that their case was probabilis, when it wasn’t. Roman astrologers would say that their predictions were probabilis when they weren’t. And absolutely any sane Roman would tell you that it was probabilis that the Sun went round the Earth. So by the time poor probably first turned up in English in 1387 it was already a poor, exhausted word whose best days were behind it, and only meant likely.

  Now, if probable comes from the same root as prove, can you guess why the proof of the pudding is in the eating?

  The Proof of the Pudding

  As we’ve seen, both probable and prove come from a single Latin root: probare. But while probable has, through overuse, come to mean only likely, prove has prospered and its meaning has grown stronger than it ever used to be. However, you can still see its humble origins in a few phrases that don’t seem to make sense any more.

  Why would an exception prove the rule? And why do you have a proofreader? What happens on a proving ground that is so very definitive? And what kind of rigorous philosopher would require proof of a pudding?

  The answer to all of these can be found in that old Latin root: probare. Despite what was said in the last section, probare didn’t exactly mean prove in our modern English sense, but it meant something very close. What the Romans did to their theories was to test them. Sometimes a theory would be tried and tested and found to work; other times a theory would be tried and tested and found wanting.

  That’s the same thing that happens to a book when it’s sent to the proofreader. What the proofreader gets is a proof copy, which he pores over trying to fnid misspellings and unnecessary apostrophe’s.

  That’s also why an exception really does prove a rule. The exception is what puts a rule to the test. That test may destroy it, or the rule may be tested and survive, but either way the theory has been proved.

  Similarly, when a new weapon is taken to the proving ground, it’s not just to make sure that it exists. The proving ground is a place where a weapon can be tested to make sure that it’s as deadly as had been hoped.

  All of which should explain why the test of a good dessert and the proof of a pudding is in the eating. It’s the old sense of prove.

  Mind you, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to prove old puddings. A pudding was, originally, the entrails of an animal stuffed with its own meat and grease, boiled and stuck in a cupboard for later. One of the earliest recorded uses of the word is in a medieval recipe from 1450 for Porpoise Pudding:

  Puddyng of Porpoise. Take the Blode of hym, & the grece of hym self, & Oatmeal, & Salt, & Pepir, & Gyngere, & melle [mix] these togetherys wel, & then put this in the Gut of the Porpoise, & then lat it seethe [boil] esyli, & not hard, a good while; & then take hym up, & broyle hym a lytil, & then serve forth.

  The proof of porpoise pudding would definitely be in the eating. A pudding was effectively just a very strange (and possibly poisonous) kind of sausage.

  Now, before the next link in the chain, can you take a guess as to why glamorous people put sausage poison in their faces?

  Sausage Poison in Your Face

  The Latin word for sausage was botulus, from which English gets two words. One of them is the lovely botuliform, which means sausage-shaped and is a more useful word than you might think. The other word is botulism.

  Sausages may taste lovely, but it’s usually best not to ask what’s actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body. In nineteenth-century America, the belief that sausages were usually made out of dog meat was so widespread that they started to be called hotdogs, a word that survives to this day. Sausages are stuffed with pork and peril. They don’t usually kill you, but they can.

  There was an early nineteenth-century German called Justinus Kerner, who when not writing rather dreary Swabian poetry worked as a doctor. His poetry is now quite justifiably forgotten, but his medical work lives on. Kerner identified a new disease that killed some of his patients. It was a horrible malady that slowly paralysed every part of the body until the victim’s heart stopped and he died. Kerner realised that all his dead patients had been eating cheap meat in sausages, so he decided to call the ailment botulism, or sausage disease. He also correctly deduced that bad sausages must contain a poison of some sort, which he called botulinum toxin.

  In 1895 there was a funeral in Belgium. Ham was served to the guests at the wake and three of them dropped down dead. This must have delighted the undertakers, but it also meant that the remaining meat could be rushed to the University of Ghent. The Professor of Bacteria studied the homicidal ham under a microscope and finally identified the culprit, little bacteria that were, appropriately, shaped like sausages and are now called Clostridium botulinum.

  This was an advance because it meant that Kerner’s botulinum toxin could be manufactured. Now, you might be wondering why anybody would want to manufacture botulinum toxin. It is, after all, a poison. In fact, one microgram of it will cause near-instantaneous death by paralysis. But paralysis can sometimes be a good thing. If, for example, you’re afflicted by facial spasms, then a doctor can inject a tinsy-winsy little dose of botulinum toxin into the affected area. A little, temporary paralysis kicks in, and the spasms are cured. Wonderful.

  That, at least, was the original reason for manufacturing botulinum toxin; but very quickly people discovered that if you paralysed somebody’s face it made them look a little bit younger. It also made them look very odd and incapable of expressing emotion, but who cares about that if you can remove a few years’ worth of ageing?

  Suddenly sausage poison was chic! The rich and famous couldn’t get enough of sausage poison. It could extend a Hollywood actress’s career by years. Old ladies could look middle-aged again! Injections of Kerner’s sausage poison were like plastic surgery but less painful and less permanent. Sausage poison became the toast of Hollywood.

  Of course, it’s not called sausage poison any more. That wouldn’t be very glamorous. It’s not even called botulinum toxin, because everybody knows that toxins are bad for you. Now that botulinum toxin has become chic, it’s changed its name to Botox.

  So, if Botox is sausage poison and toxicology is the study of poison and intoxication is poisoning, what does toxophilite mean?

  Bows and Arrows and Cats

  A toxophilite is somebody who loves archery. The reason for this is that toxin comes from toxon, the Greek word for bow, and toxic comes from toxikos, the Greek word for pertaining to archery. This is because when the ancient Greeks went to war they always dipped their arrowheads in poison. The two ideas were so connected in the Greek mind that toxon became toxin.

  Archery used to be ubiquitous. That’s why there are so many people called Archer, Fletcher (arrow-maker) and Bowyer (bow-maker) in the phone book. In 1363 Edward III passed a law that required all men over the age of fourteen and under the age of 60 to practise the sport once a week. Obviously, it wasn’t so much a sport back then as a means of killing people. Edward III’s law has never actually been repealed.

  So, terms from archery are hidden all over the English language, for example upshot. The upshot
is the shot that decides who has won an archery contest. King Henry VIII’s accounts for 1531 include his sporting losses and:

  To the three Cotons, for three sets which the King lost to them in Greenwich Park £20, and for one upshot won of the King.

  Tudor archery was not necessarily a pleasant business. There are two theories on the origin of the phrase enough room to swing a cat. The first is that the cat is a cat-o’-nine-tails and that it’s hard to whip somebody properly in a small room. The other theory is to do with marksmanship.

  Hitting a stationary target was just too easy for the Tudors. So the best archers used to test themselves by putting a cat in a bag and hanging the bag from the branch of a tree. The ferocious feline would wriggle about and the sack would swing, and this exercise in animal cruelty provided the discerning archer with a challenge and English with a phrase.

  Incidentally, this has nothing to do with letting the cat out of the bag. That’s to do with pigs, obviously. In medieval markets piglets were sold in sacks, so that the farmer could carry them home more easily. This was a pig in a poke. A standard con at the time involved switching a valuable piglet for a valueless cat or dog. You were then being sold a pup, or, if you discovered the trick, you would let the cat out of the bag. Unlikely as that all sounds, there are equivalent phrases in almost every European language.

  But to return to archery, all this sagittopotent3 and toxophilite tosh brings us around to the odd phrase point blank.

  The blank here is not your usual English blank, though it’s closely related. The blank in point blank is the French blanc, which of course means white. The term bullseye is reasonably new. It was invented only in the nineteenth century. Before that, the white spot bang in the middle of an archery target was called the white or blank.

  The funny thing about archery is that you don’t usually aim at the target. Gravity decrees that if you aim straight at the blank your arrow will hit somewhere below. So you point the arrow somewhere above the blank, and hope that this cancels out the effects of Newton’s troublesome invention. That’s why aim high is another archer’s term; it doesn’t mean that you’ll end up high, or it’s not meant to. You aim high and hit on the level.

  However, there’s one situation in which this rule does not apply: if you are very, very, very, very close to the target. In that case you can aim straight at the blank point or white spot in the middle. If you’re that close to the target, you’re at point blank range.

  3 Good at archery, like Sagittarius, but we’ll come to the Zodiac (or little zoo) later.

  Black and White

  Etymologists have a terrible time distinguishing black from white. You’d think that the two concepts could be kept apart, but that wasn’t how the medieval English thought about things. They were a confusing bunch of people and must have had a terrible time ordering coffee. The Oxford English Dictionary itself feebly admits that: ‘In Middle English it is often doubtful whether blac, blak, blacke, means “black, dark,” or “pale, colourless, wan, livid”.’

  Chess would have been a confusing game; but on the plus side, racism must have been impractical.

  Utterly illogical though all this may sound, there are two good explanations. Unfortunately, nobody is quite sure which one is true. So I shall give you both.

  Once upon a time, there was an old Germanic word for burnt, which was black, or as close to black as makes no difference. The confusion arose because the old Germanics couldn’t decide between black and white as to which colour burning was. Some old Germans said that when things were burning they were bright and shiny, and other old Germans said that when things were burnt they turned black.

  The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everybody got bored and rode off to sack Rome. The English were left holding black, which could mean either pale or dark, but slowly settled on one usage. The French also imported this useless black word. They then put an N in it and later sold it on to the English as blank, leaving us with black and blank as opposites.

  The other theory (which is rather less likely, but still good fun) is that there was an old German word black which meant bare, void and empty. What do you have if you don’t have any colours?

  Well, it’s hard to say really. If you close your eyes you see nothing, which is black, but a blank piece of paper is, usually, white. Under this theory, blankness is the original sense and the two colours – black and white – are simply different interpretations of what blank means.

  And, just to prove the point even more irritatingly, bleach comes from the same root and can mean to make pale, or any substance used for making things black. Moreover, bleak is probably just a variant of bleach and once meant white.

  Such linguistic nonsenses are a lot more common than you might reasonably have hoped. Down means up. Well, okay, it means hill, but hills are upward sorts of things, aren’t they? In England there’s a range of hills called the Sussex Downs. This means that you can climb up a down.

  Down, as in fall down, was originally off-down, meaning off-the-hill. So if an Old Englishman fell off the top of a hill he would fall off-down. Then lazy Old Englishmen started to drop the word off. Rather than saying that they were going off-down, they just started going down. So we ended up with the perplexing result that the downs are up above you, and that going downhill is really going downdown.

  But we must get back to blanks and lotteries.

  Once upon a time, a lottery worked like this. You bought a ticket and wrote your name on it. Then you put it into the name jar. Once all the tickets had been sold, another jar was filled up with an equal number of tickets, on some of which were written the name of a prize.

  The chap running the lottery would pull out two tickets, one from the name jar and one from the prize jar. Thus, way back in 1653, the court of King James I was described as:

  A kind of Lotterie, where men that venture much may draw a Blank, and such as have little may get the Prize.

  Blank lottery tickets were thus the financial opposite of blank cheques (if you’re British) and blank checks (if you’re American), although as we shall see, the American spelling is older.

  Hat Cheque Point Charlie

  Almost every word in the English language derives from shah.

  Once upon a time, Persia was ruled by shahs. Some shahs were happy shahs. Other shahs were crippled or dead. In Persian that meant that they were shah mat. Shah went into Arabic as, well, shah (ain’t etymology fascinating?). That went into Vulgar Latin as scaccus. That went into vulgar French (all French is vulgar) as eschec with the plural esches, and that went into English as chess, because a game of chess is a game of king, the king being the most important piece on the board. And what happened to shah mat? When the king is crippled, a chess player still says checkmate.

  Chess is played on a chessboard. Chessboards are kind of useful because you can arrange stuff on them. For example, when Henry II wanted to do his accounts he did them on:

  a quadrangular surface about ten feet in length, five in breadth, placed before those who sit around it in the manner of a table, and all around it it has an edge about the height of one’s four fingers, lest any thing placed upon it should fall off. There is placed over the top of the escheker, moreover, a cloth bought at the Easter term, not an ordinary one but a black one marked with stripes, the stripes being distant from each other the space of a foot or the breadth of a hand. In the spaces moreover are counters placed according to their values.

  Dialogus de Scaccario, c. 1180

  It looked just like a chessboard and, as Henry II spoke French, it was called the Escheker – that’s why the finances of the British government are still controlled by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. (The S changed to X through confusion and foolishness.)

  But chess and Persian kings don’t stop there. We are nowhere near the endgame. Let us continue unchecked.

&n
bsp; You see, when your opponent puts you in check, your options become very limited. You have to get out of check in one move or it’s checkmate and the game is over. From this you get the idea of somebody or something being held in check. Checking somebody stops them doing what they want, and that’s why you can still body-check people, and why government is held in check by checks and balances.

  Check or cheque began to mean somebody who stopped things going wrong. For example, the Clerk of the Cheque, whom Pepys mentions in his seventeenth-century diaries, was the chap who kept a separate set of accounts for the royal shipyard. He checked fraud and served a good lunch.

  I walked and enquired how all matters and businesses go, and by and by to the Clerk of the Cheque’s house, and there eat some of his good Jamaica brawne.

  And from that you get the sense of a check as something that stops dishonesty. At a hat-check, for example, you get a check to prove that you’re not stealing somebody else’s hat. Bank checks (or cheques) were originally introduced as a replacement for promissory notes and got their name because they checked fraud.

  Bank checks started out being spelled with a –ck on both sides of the Atlantic. But British people, perhaps under the influence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, decided to start calling them cheques. This has a peculiar etymological result. A blank cheque is a cheque with no check on it. Given that blank cheques are found from as early as 1812, it’s a miracle that the first bouncing cheque isn’t recorded in the dictionary until 1927.

  And from there you get check off (1839) and check up (1889). And then the Wright Brothers invented the aeroplane and people would fly around and navigate by distinctive landmarks called checkpoints. And then the Second World War broke out and pilots were trained and given an examination or checkout. Then shops got checkouts and roadblocks became checkpoints and people went to doctors for checkups and guests checked out of hotels and checked in at check-ins wearing a checked shirt and all, dear reader, all because of crippled shahs from ancient Persia.