The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  All of this has nothing to do with the Czech Republic, which is ruled not by a shah but a president. However, Ivan Lendl’s wife could reasonably be said to have a Czech mate.

  Sex and Bread

  Freud said that everything was secretly sexual. But etymologists know that sex is secretly food.

  For example, mating with somebody was originally just sharing your food, or meat, with them (meat meant food of any kind and not just flesh). Likewise, your companion is somebody with whom you share your bread (from the Latin panis).

  The Old English word for bread was hlaf, from which we get loaf; and the Old English division of labour was that women made bread and men guarded it. The woman was therefore the hlaf-dige and the man was the hlaf-ward.

  Hlafward and Hlafdige

  Hlaford and Hlafdi

  Lavord and Lavedi

  Lord and Lady

  And Indian bread is in the nude, but to explain that I’m going to have to explain how half the languages in the world began, or at least the best theory on the subject.

  Once upon a terribly long time ago, four thousand years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, there were some fellows living between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Whenever one of them died the others would bury him, or her, in a pit. They were therefore called the Kurgan Pit Burial culture. They also had some distinctive pottery and all the other tedious accoutrements of Neolithic man.

  Well, we call them the Kurgans. We don’t know what they called themselves. This was in the time before the invention of writing, or even of the internet, so we don’t know what language they spoke, but we can take a very educated guess, and that educated guess is called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short.

  The Kurgans probably invented the chariot, and probably used it to invade their neighbours. However, they did these invasions in a deplorably disorganised manner. Rather than all banding together and attacking in one direction, they split up and attacked hither and thither. Some of them ended up in northern India and some of them ended up in Persia. Some went to the cold, rainy lands around the Baltic, and some of them went to Greece and became Greek. Still others got lost and ended up in Italy and it was, to put it gently, a big mess.

  We can tell where they went by digging up their burial pits and their distinctive pottery and whatnot. But their pottery is not what makes them interesting. They also took with them their language – Proto-Indo-European – and spread it all over Europe and Asia.

  One would have hoped that this would operate like a reverse Tower of Babel, but it did not. You see, all the different groups developed different accents and these accents became so strong that their languages became mutually incomprehensible. After a few hundred years the Kurgans in northern India wouldn’t have been able to make out what their cousins in Italy were saying. If you want to see this process in action today, visit Glasgow.

  So the ancient Indians called their dads pitar, and the Greeks called their dads pater, and the Romans called them pater. The Germans, though, started pronouncing the letter P in a very funny way that made it sound more like an F. So they called their male parent fater, and we call him father, because English is descended from Old German.

  Similarly, the PIE word seks became German sechs, English six, Latin sextus, Sanskrit sas and Greek hex; because the Greeks pronounced their Ss funny.

  There are rules of pronunciation like the German P-F and the Greek S-H that mean we can trace all these fundamental words. That’s how we can work back and take an educated guess about what Proto-Indo-European was. However, it isn’t always so simple.

  Just looking at changes in pronunciation works very well on the great unchanging concepts like fathers and numbers. However, many words change their meaning as they go along. Let’s look at the Proto-Indo-European word neogw, which meant unclothed.

  In the German languages (of which English is one) neogw became naked. In the Latin languages neogw became nude. But a funny thing happened in Persia to do with cookery.

  You see, the ancient Persians cooked their meat by burying it in hot ashes. However, they baked their bread uncovered in an oven. They still used the PIE neogw, and therefore called their bread nan.

  Nan was taken into Hindi as naan, and if you go into an Indian restaurant today you can still buy a lovely, puffy sort of bread called naan, and it’s etymologically naked.

  Some bread names are even stranger. Ciabatta is the Italian for slipper, matzoh means sucked out, and Pumpernickel means Devil-fart.

  Now what has Pumpernickel got to do with partridge?

  Concealed Farts

  Aubrey’s Brief Lives contains this sad story about the seventeenth Earl of Oxford:

  This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his return the Queen welcomed him home and sayd, My Lord, I had forgot the Fart.

  Farts are quickly delivered and slowly forgotten. The English language, though, has had much more than seven years to let the world forget its flatulence. The smell of the original meaning slowly peters out.

  Take, for example, the phrase peter out. Nobody is quite sure where it comes from, but one of the best theories is that it comes from the French peter, which meant fart. Peter definitely gave us the word petard, meaning a little explosive, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has eaten beans.

  However, when Hamlet says, ‘’Tis sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard’, he doesn’t mean that the poor engineer is raised into the air by the jet-power of his own flatulence, but that he’s blown upward by his own explosive. The fart had ceased to smell.

  The same thing has happened with the phrase fizzle out, which once meant cutting the cheese and was delicately described in one nineteenth-century dictionary as ‘an escape backwards’. The same dictionary describes a fice as:

  A small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged [blamed] on their lap-dogs.

  And fice itself comes from the Old English fist, which likewise meant fart. In Elizabethan times a smelly dog was called a fisting cur, and by the eighteenth century any little dog was called a feist, and that’s where we get the word feisty from. Little dogs are so prone to bark at anything that an uppity girl was called feisty, straight from the flatulent dogs of yore. This is a point well worth remembering when you’re next reading a film review about a ‘feisty heroine’.

  The fart lingers.

  Our word partridge comes from the Old French pertis which comes from the Latin perdix which comes from the Greek perdix­ which comes from the Greek verb perdesthai which means fart, because that’s what a partridge sounds like when it flies. The low, loud beating of the wings sounds like the clapping of the buttocks when the inner gale is liberated.

  A polite, even beautiful, word for foods that make your bottom quack is carminative. There used to be carminative medicines, for it was widely believed that farting was good for you, as in the rhyme:

  Beans, beans, they’re good for the heart

  The more you eat, the more you fart;

  The more you fart, the better you feel;

  So let’s have beans for every meal.

  This belief in the curative powers of flatulence was, originally, based on the idea of humours. The body was thought to be filled with substances that could get horribly out of balance. A fart was a like a comb or card being pulled through wool and removing the knots. The Latin for a wool card was carmen, which has nothing to do with the opera, but is exactly the same as heckling.

  Wool

  Heckling is, or once was, the process of removing the knots from wool. Sheep are notoriously lackadaisical about their appearance, so before their wool can be turned into a nice warm jumper it must be combed.

  It’s easy to see h
ow combing wool and teasing out the knots could be used metaphorically for combing through an oration and teasing the orator, but the connection is probably far more direct and goes to the Scottish town of Dundee.

  Dundee was a radical place in the eighteenth century. It was the local centre of the wool trade and was therefore overrun with hecklers. The hecklers were the most radical workers of all. They formed themselves into what today would be called a trade union and used collective bargaining to guarantee themselves good pay and perks. The perks were mostly in the form of alcohol, but that was to be expected.

  They were a political lot, the hecklers. Every morning while most of them were busy heckling, one of their number would stand up and read aloud from the day’s news. They thus formed strong opinions on all subjects and when politicians and dignitaries tried to address them, their speeches were combed over with the same thoroughness as the wool. Thus heckling.

  Wool is everywhere in language. If you possess a mobile phone you are probably wooling your friends every day without even realising it. You are, after all, currently reading wool.

  Or had you never noticed the connection between text and textile?

  That you send woolly messages on your telephone and read wool and cite wool from the Bible is all down to a Roman orator named Quintilian. Quintilian was the greatest orator of his day, so great that the Emperor Domitian appointed him as tutor to his two grand-nephews who were also his heirs. Nobody knows what exactly Quintilian taught them, but Domitian soon sent them both into exile.

  The two lines of Quintilian that interest us are in the Institutio Oratorico, a gargantuan twelve-volume work on absolutely everything to do with rhetoric. In it, Quintilian says that after you have chosen your words you must weave them together into a fabric – in textu iungantur – until you have a fine and delicate text[ure[ile]] or textum tenue atque rasum.

  It’s the sort of thing we say all the time. We weave stories together and embroider them and try never to lose the thread of the story. Quintilian’s metaphor lasted. Late classical writers took up text to mean any short passage in a book and then we took it to mean anything that was written down and then somebody invented the SMS message. This sheep-skin writing is all rather appropriate, given that the size of books depends upon the size of sheep.

  Paper was invented in China about two thousand years ago, but we in the West didn’t take up the invention until the fourteenth century. Even then, paper was considered an oriental oddity. The first English paper mill was founded in 1588.

  Before paper, readers had to make do with one of two alternatives. They could use the papyrus plant, which grew plentifully in Egypt. If you mashed up papyrus you could make something that resembled paper – indeed, it was similar enough that papyrus is where we get the word paper.

  Unfortunately, there’s very little papyrus in England. Instead, we used sheepskins, and now you can too. Here’s the recipe.

  Take one sheep.

  Kill it and skin it (it’s vital to do this in the right order).

  Wash the bloody skin in water, then soak it in beer for a couple of days until the hair falls out.

  Let it dry stretched out on a wooden rack called a tenter. To keep it taut and flat, attach it using tenterhooks.

  After a couple of days you should have something that’s approximately rectangular with four sad extrusions that used to be legs.

  Cut off legs and discard.

  Trim the remainder down until you have an exact rectangle.

  Fold in half.

  You should now have four pages (printed front and back) that are roughly the size of a modern atlas. This is called a folio. All you now need to make an atlas of more than four pages is more sheep.

  Fold it in half again and you’ll have eight pages at roughly the size of a modern encyclopedia. You’ll need to slice the pages at the top to make the pages turnable. This is called a quarto.

  Fold again.

  Provided you started off with an average-sized medieval sheep, you should now be holding something pretty much the size of a hardback novel. This is called an octavo.

  Fold again.

  Mass-market paperback.

  When Caxton built his printing press in the fifteenth century, he set it up to use sheepskin and not paper. When paper was finally introduced it was manufactured to fit the existing printing presses, and that’s the reason that both the text you’re reading and the book that contains it are dependent upon sheep.

  Of course, you may be reading this on your e-book reader, but as those have been designed to mimic the size of normal books, you’re still at the mercy of the sheep.

  Wool gets everywhere in language. Muslim mystics are called Sufis because of the woollen, suf, garments that they wore. Burlesque dancers on the other hand are taking part in a nonsensical or trifling show named after the Latin burra meaning a tuft of wool. Burras were used as coverings for desks, and that gave us bureaus and then bureaucracies.

  Then there are all different kinds of wool: cashmere came originally from Kashmir and Angora came from Ankara, the capital of Turkey.

  Turkey is, of course, the country you eat for Christmas.

  Turkey

  Early explorers in the Americas saw flocks of turkeys singing in the magnolia forests, for the turkey is native to America. Indeed, it was domesticated and eaten by the Aztecs. Why it should therefore be named after a country in Asia Minor is a little odd, but explicable.

  Many animals are misnamed. Guinea pigs, for example, aren’t pigs and they aren’t from Guinea. They are found in Guyana in South America, and it takes only a little mispronunciation to move them across the Atlantic. The pig bit is just weird.

  The same is true of the helmeted guinea fowl, or Numidia meleagris, which was once native to Madagascar but not Guinea. The helmeted guinea fowl is an ugly bird. It has a big bony knob on the top of its head (hence the name), but it tastes delicious.

  People started importing helmeted guinea fowl from Madagascar to Europe, and the people who did the importing were usually Turkish traders. They were known as Turkey merchants, and the birds that they brought were therefore called turkeys. But those aren’t the turkeys that we eat at Christmas with bread sauce and relatives. That bird is Meleagris gallopavo, which is also delicious.

  It was the Spanish conquistadors who found Meleagris gallopavo in the magnolia forests and brought it back to Europe. It became popular in Spain and then in North Africa. And though it’s a different species from the helmeted guinea fowl, the two birds do look surprisingly alike.

  People got confused. The birds looked the same, tasted similar and both were exotic new dishes brought from Somewhere Foreign. So it was assumed that they were the same thing, and the American bird got called turkey as well, in the mistaken belief that it was a bird that was mistakenly believed to come from Turkey.

  In Turkey itself, of course, they didn’t make this mistake. They knew the bird wasn’t theirs. So the Turks made a completely different mistake and called it a hindi, because they thought the bird was probably Indian. The French thought the same and they still call turkey dindon or d’Inde, which also means from India. It’s a most confusing bird but delicious.

  In fact it was so delicious that, though it was introduced to England only in the 1520s or 30s, it had become the standard Christmas meal by the 1570s. None of which explains why people occasionally talk turkey. Indeed, they demand to talk turkey. This all goes back to an old joke, that isn’t, I’m afraid, very funny.

  The joke involves a turkey and a buzzard. Now, it may be possible to eat buzzard. I don’t know. But the bird’s absence from any menu that I’ve ever encountered makes me suspicious. I suspect the buzzard is a foul fowl, and that’s certainly the point of the story.

  Once upon a time, a white man and a Red Indian went out hunting together. They killed a t
asty turkey and a buzzard. So the white man said to his companion: ‘You take the buzzard and I’ll take the turkey, or, if you prefer, I can take the turkey and you can take the buzzard.’

  To which the Red Indian replied: ‘You don’t talk turkey at all.’

  This joke was immensely popular in nineteenth-century America. It was even quoted in Congress, though history doesn’t recall whether anybody laughed. But it was popular enough to spawn two phrases.

  By 1919 talking turkey had been altered somewhat: people had started inserting the adjective cold. Talking cold turkey is like talking turkey only more so. You were getting beyond the brass tacks and down to the barest of bare essentials. Talking cold turkey was the bluntest, directest form of speech.

  And a couple of years later, in 1921, people started to use the phrase cold turkey to describe the bluntest, most direct method of giving up drugs.

  So going cold turkey has nothing whatsoever to do with the miserable leftovers so sorrowfully consumed in the week after Christmas. Cold turkey isn’t a food at all, even though it sounds like one. It’s a blunt way of talking, and a blunt way of giving up drugs.

  However, when you give someone the cold shoulder, that is a food.

  Insulting Foods

  There are two sorts of guests: welcome and unwelcome. The host is not permitted to tell you which you are, though he may give you a clue.

  If your host cooks you a nice hot dinner, you’re probably welcome. If he gives you yesterday’s leftovers – for example a cold shoulder of mutton – then he probably wishes you hadn’t come around.