The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  It could have been worse, though – he could have made you eat humble pie. Humble pie is made using the umbles or innards of a deer. Here’s a recipe from Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Domesticum of 1736:

  Boil the umbles of a deer until they are very tender, set them by till they are cold, and chop them as small as meat for minc’d pyes, and shred to them as much beef suet, six large apples and half a pound of currants, as much sugar; seasoning with salt, pepper, cloves and nutmegs, according to your palate; mix all well together, and when you put them into the paste, pour in half a pint of sack, the juice of one orange and two lemons, then close the pie, bake it, and serve it hot to table.

  Of course, the umbles are the worst parts of the deer. After a hard day’s stag-hunting a rich man will dine on venison. Only his servants beneath the stairs would have to make do with umble (and therefore humble) pie.

  Folk Etymology

  The addition of the H to umble is an example of what’s known as folk etymology. Somebody who didn’t know what an umble was saw the words umble pie and got confused. Then they saw that umble pie was a humble dish, assumed that somebody had just missed off the H, and decided to put it back. Thus umble pie becomes humble pie. That’s folk etymology.

  A duckling is a little duck and a gosling is a little goose and a darling is a little dear, and on the same principle a little fellow who stood at an important chap’s side used to be known as a sideling.

  Then the origin of the word sideling was forgotten and in the seventeenth century people decided that it must be the participle of a verb, just as leaping and sleeping are participles of leap and sleep. There was only one problem with this theory: there didn’t seem to be a verb to fit the noun. So one was invented and from then on a sideling became somebody who sidled. These days there aren’t nearly as many lords and servant boys and so sideling itself has vanished. People still sidle around and sidle up to each other, but they are able to do so only because of a mistake of folk etymology and the backformation of a new word.

  Another common form of folk etymology happens when people alter the spelling of strange or unfamiliar words so that they appear to make more sense. For example, there’s a drowsy little rodent that the French therefore used to call a dormeuse, which meant she who sleeps. In English we call the same creature a dormouse. That’s despite the fact that it isn’t a mouse and has no particular affinity for doors. The reason is that the English had field mice and town mice and so they were, of course, going to look at the word dormeuse and conclude that someone just didn’t know how to spell.

  The same principle applies to fairies, or rather to the disappearance of fairies. Once upon a time, belief in fairies was commonplace. They lived not at the bottom of the garden, but in the woods, where they would play all sorts of mysterious games. They would milk people’s cattle in the night, or hide in flowers and under trees, and generally do the sorts of things that would get you or me arrested. They were known as the Folks. When it was cold the Folks liked to wear gloves, which is why there is, or used to be, a flower called a folks’ glove.

  But the fairies have all died (or maybe just got better at hiding) and people stopped referring to them as Folks many years ago, which is why the name folks’ glove became rather peculiar. Then some clever fellow decided that they weren’t folks’ gloves after all, they must be fox-gloves because foxes have such dinky little feet, and the error set in. They are foxgloves now, and foxgloves they will remain, until somebody makes a better mistake.

  By the same system, the old word crevis is now spelled and pronounced crayfish, even though it’s not very fishlike. The Spanish cucaracha became a cockroach, and most wonderfully of all, the Indian mangus became a mongoose, although there’s not a huge similarity between the furry, snake-devouring mammal and a goose.

  An exception to these folk etymologies is the butterfly. Butterflies do have something to do with butter, although nobody is quite sure what. They like to flutter around milk pails and butter churns, which might explain it. Many butterflies are yellow, which would be a good reason for the name. But there’s another, more troubling possibility: butterflies, like the rest of us, are subject to the call of the lavatory, and butterfly poo is yellow, just like butter.

  Now, you may ask yourself, what sort of person goes around peering at butterfly poo and then naming an insect after it? The answer, it would appear, is that Dutch people do that. Or at least, an old Dutch word for butterfly was boterschijte.

  Of course, you may dismiss that last theory as poppycock, but if you do, please remember that poppycock comes from the Dutch pappe-cack, meaning soft shit.

  Before the next link, can you guess what butterflies have to do with psychiatry and pasta?

  Butterflies of the World

  For some reason the languages of the world put more effort into the names of butterflies than those of any other creature. From Norway to Malaysia the words are extraordinary.

  Malay doesn’t have plurals like ours. In English you simply add an S to the end of the word. But in Malay you form your plural by repeating the noun, so tables would become table table. It’s a system with some sort of logic to it. When there’s more than one word, that means there’s more than one thing.

  It works out fine for the speaker of Malay, so long as the original singular noun wasn’t formed by reduplication itself, as is the case with their butterflies. The Malay for butterfly is rama-rama, so butterflies is rama-rama rama-rama. And it doesn’t stop there. The Malays also repeat verbs to intensify them, so I really like would be rendered as I like like, or suka suka. We occasionally do this in English, when somebody says, ‘I’ve got to, got to see that film’. All of which means that the Malay for I love butterflies is:

  Saya suka suka rama-rama rama-rama

  In Italian, butterflies are called farfalle and there’s a kind of butterfly-shaped pasta named after them that you can buy in most supermarkets. Outside Italy, though, most people don’t realise that it’s butterfly pasta, and in America they ignore the Italian name entirely and call farfalle bow-ties, because a butterfly resembles a bow-tie, and in an emergency could probably serve as a substitute.

  This is a point of dress not lost upon the Russians, who call a bow-tie a butterfly. And as a butterfly is, in Russian, a little lady, bow-ties, butterflies and girls are all called babochkas (like babushkas).

  In the bleak Norwegian winter there are no butterflies at all, so when they emerge from their chrysalises in the bleak Norwegian summer they are called summer-birds, or somerfogl.

  In French they rather boringly just took the Latin papilio and called their butterflies papillons. But then, in a fit of inventiveness, they realised that the grand tents in which kings sat at tournaments and jousts were shaped like the wings of a butterfly, so they called them papillons, and we call them pavilions, which means that there’s a butterfly at one end of Lord’s Cricket Ground.

  Why all these intricate and exquisite names? Nobody bothers with the humble fly (which does exactly what it says on the tin) or the beetle (biter) or the bee (quiverer), or the lousily-named louse. Butterflies hog all the attention of the word-makers.

  Perhaps this is because in many quite distinct and unconnected cultures the butterfly is imagined to be a human soul that has shaken off this mortal coil of woes and now flutters happily through a gaily-coloured afterlife.

  This was the belief of the Maoris, and of the Aztecs in whose mythology Itzpapalotl was the goddess of the Obsidian Butterfly: a soul encased in stone who could be freed only by another tongue-twisting god called Tezcatlipoca.

  There also seems to have been a ghost of this belief among the ancient Greeks. The Greek for butterfly was psyche, and Psyche was the goddess of the soul. There’s a lovely allegorical poem about her called ‘Cupid and Psyche’, and she’s also the origin of the study of the soul: psychoanalysis.

  Psychoanalysis and the Release of t
he Butterfly

  The great thing about creating something is that you get to give it a name. Who would endure the expense and incontinence of babies, were it not for the fun of saddling another human with a moniker that you chose yourself?

  With this in mind one can imagine Sigmund Freud sitting in his study in Vienna and considering Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul and mystical butterfly. That’s what he was analysing (with the stress on the first two syllables), so he decided to call his new invention psychoanalysis. Analysis is Greek for release. So Freud’s new art would be, literally, the liberation of the butterfly. How pretty! Freud was probably so pleased with himself that he became lazy, for most of the other psychological terms are Jungian.

  Carl Jung was Freud’s protégé. Then one day Carl had a dream that wasn’t about sex. He hesitated before telling Freud something quite that embarrassing. Confessing to a psychoanalyst that you’ve had an innocent dream is rather like confessing to your grandmother that you’ve had a dirty one. Freud was outraged. What sort of fruitcake, he demanded, has a dream that isn’t dirty? It was inconceivable. Freud decided that Jung had gone quite mad, that the dream really had been dirty, and that Jung was just being coy.

  Jung insisted that his dream wasn’t about sex and that, in fact, it was about his grandparents being hidden in a cellar. So he rejected Freud’s pansexualism (not a sin of cookery, but the belief that everything comes down to nooky) and ran off to become a Jungian.

  Having invented his own form of psychoanalysis, Jung now had naming rights. So it was Carl and not Sigmund who decided that a psychological problem should be called a complex. Then he thought up introverts and extroverts, and finally, realising that naming was a doddle, he invented synchronicity and ambivalent. And with that he sat down to rest on his laurels and consider his subterranean grandparents.

  But the grand panjandrum and greatest inventor of psychological terms was neither Sigmund Freud nor Carl Jung. It was a man who was just as important but is far less known today: Richard von Krafft-Ebing.

  Krafft-Ebing was born sixteen years before Dr Freud and 35 years before Jung. He was, essentially, the first doctor to start writing case histories of people whose sexual behaviour wasn’t entirely respectable.

  The book that resulted, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was so scandalous that large chunks of it had to be written in Latin, in order to keep it out of the hands of the prurient public. The idea was that if you were clever enough to understand Latin, you couldn’t possibly be a pervert (something that nobody mentioned to Caligula).

  Because Krafft-Ebing was a pioneer he had to invent terms left, right and centre. Humanity had a long history of condemning peccadilloes, but not of classifying them. So it was in the translation of Psychopathia Sexualis that English first got the words homosexual, heterosexual, necrophilia, frotteur, anilingus, exhibitionism, sadism and masochism.

  Sadism had in fact been around for a while in French. The French writer Donatien Alphonse François Marquis de Sade was famous for producing horrid books about people being horrid to each other in bed. Really horrid. Catchy titles like One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom should give you some idea, but a clearer image of the nature of Sade’s work comes from the fact that in the 1930s a historian by the name of Geoffrey Gorer, who was researching the marquis, went to the British Museum to read some of de Sade’s works that were stored there. However, he was told by the British Museum that it was a rule that people were only allowed to read de Sade’s books ‘in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury and two other trustees’.

  So it’s easy to see how de Sade’s notoriety meant that his favourite activity became known as sadism in French. But Richard von Krafft-Ebing also needed a name for sadism’s opposite: masochism.

  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who gave us the word masochism, is known to few, or less. This seems rather appropriate. While the Marquis de Sade strides around spanking Fame’s bottom with a hardbacked copy of The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, little Leo is forgotten in some ratty cellar, wearing a gimp-suit and whimpering over a copy of Venus in Furs.

  Venus in Furs (1870) was Masoch’s great work. It describes a chap called Severin who signs a contract with a lady (I use the term loosely) who is thereby:

  … entitled not only to punish her slave as she deems best, even for the slightest inadvertence or fault, but also is herewith given the right to torture him as the mood may seize her or merely for the sake of whiling away the time …

  As you can imagine, Venus in Furs would make a splendid book-group read, or christening present. Yet even Masoch’s masterwork is better known these days as a song by the Velvet Underground, whose lyrics have a fragile connection to the original novel, mainly in the use of the name Severin.

  Venus in Furs was rather closely based upon Leo’s own life. Masoch met a girl with the ridiculous name of Fanny Pistor. They signed just such a contract as the one above and set off to Florence together, with him pretending to be her servant. Exactly how much time Fanny Pistor whiled away and how is not recorded, and it’s probably best not to try to imagine.

  When, in 1883, Krafft-Ebing was casting around for a name for a newly classified perversion, he thought of Sacher-Masoch’s novel. He wrote in Psychopathia Sexualis that:

  I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly ‘Masochism,’ because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings … he was a gifted writer, and as such would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.

  Poor Leo was still alive when Krafft-Ebing appropriated his name for a psychological disorder. He was, apparently, peeved by the terminology. Mind you, he probably rather enjoyed the humiliation.

  The Villains of the Language

  History is written by victors. The Elizabethan poet Sir John Harington once wrote:

  Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?

  Why, if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.

  But history is a lot fairer than language. Language takes your name and applies it to whatever it likes. Sometimes, however, it is fair, as with the word quisling.

  Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian maths prodigy and invented his own religion. He also embarrassed himself rather during the Second World War by trying to get Norway to surrender to the Nazis so that he could be the puppet Minister-President. He succeeded in his plan and ten weeks after his appointment The Times wrote:

  Major Quisling has added a new word to the English language. To writers, the word Quisling is a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered to invent a new word for traitor … they could hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters. Aurally it contrives to suggest something at once slippery and tortuous. Visually it has the supreme merit of beginning with a Q, which (with one august exception) has long seemed to the British mind to be a crooked, uncertain and slightly disreputable letter, suggestive of the questionable, the querulous, the quavering of quaking quagmires and quivering quicksands, of quibbles and quarrels, of queasiness, quackery, qualms and quilp.

  And it serves him right. However, language isn’t always on the side of justice. Consider these three names: Guillotine, Derrick and Jack Robinson. Which of those do you think was the nasty one?

  Two Executioners and a Doctor

  Once upon a time, hanging was the punishment for almost any crime. Even the great Elizabethan poet Ben Jonson, for the trivial offence of murder, was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted when Jonson proved that he could read and thus got Benefit of the Clergy. Instead of being executed, he had a T branded on his thumb and was sent home with a warning.

  The T stood for Tyburn, which is where the hangings used to take place. We even know the name of the man who would have hanged Ben Jonson: he was called Thomas Derrick.

  Thomas
Derrick was a nasty man. There hadn’t been enough applicants for the role of executioner and so the Earl of Essex pardoned a rapist on condition that he would take on the job. That rapist was Derrick.

  Derrick was a bad man and a good executioner. The two are probably connected. In fact, Derrick was something of an innovator. Rather than just slinging the rope over the beam, he invented a complicated system of ropes and pulleys, and it was by this method that he, in 1601, executed the Earl of Essex.

  There’s a moral in that, but I haven’t the foggiest notion what it is – and the ethics get more complicated when you consider that Derrick’s name survives and Essex’s doesn’t. The rope system he invented started to be used for loading and unloading goods down at the docks and that’s why modern cranes still have a derrick. It’s named after a rapist and executioner. There’s no justice in this world: look at Jack Robinson.

  There are three main theories on why things happen before you can say Jack Robinson. The first is that Robinson used to be the French term for an umbrella (because of Robinson Crusoe, in which the hero has an umbrella and very little else), and that French servants were usually called Jacques. This meant that when rich Frenchmen visited England and were surprised by the inevitable shower of rain, they would shout, ‘Jacques, robinson!’ There is, though, no evidence for this theory at all.

  The second theory is that there was an eccentric fellow in early nineteenth-century London who would walk out of parties without warning, often before you could even say his name, which was Jack Robinson. However, there’s no contemporary evidence for this strange Jack Robinson’s existence, so the second theory looks as dicey as the first.

  The third and most plausible theory is that the phrase comes from Sir John Robinson, who definitely existed and was constable of the Tower of London from 1660 to 1679. He was therefore in charge of executions and was a stickler for efficiency rather than solemnity. The prisoner was marched out, put on the block and shortened without any opportunity for famous last words or blubbering. He didn’t even have the time to appeal to the overseer of the execution. He was beheaded before he could say Jack Robinson.