The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  So derricks and brief spans of time were both named after cruel and psychotic executioners. The guillotine, on the other hand, was named after a jolly nice chap.

  Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had nothing whatsoever to do with the invention of the guillotine. In fact, so far as anybody can tell, he was against the death penalty. Nobody is sure who designed the first modern guillotine, but we know that it was built by a German harpsichord-maker called Tobias Schmidt.

  It was Guillotin’s kindness that got the machine named after him. You see, in pre-revolution France poor people were hanged, whereas nobles had the right to be beheaded, which was considered less painful (although it’s uncertain how they worked that out). So when the poor of France rose in revolution, one of their key demands was the right to be decapitated.

  Dr Guillotin was on the committee for reforming executions. He decided that hanging was horrid and that axes were inefficient. However, a newfangled mechanism from Germany was, probably, the least painful and most humane method available. If there had to be executions, it was best that they were done with this new device. He recommended it.

  In the debate that followed, on 1 December 1789, Dr Guillotin made one silly remark: ‘Avec ma machine,’ he said, ‘je vous fais sauter la tête d’un coup-d’oeil, et vous ne souffrez point.’ (‘With my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.’)

  The Parisians loved this line. They thought it was hilarious. In fact, they composed a comic song about it. And thus Dr Guillotin’s name was attached to one of the most famous methods of execution. Thomas Derrick and Jack Robinson were both sadistic, heartless thugs, whose names live on in innocence, if not glory. Poor Dr Guillotin’s family were so embarrassed that they had to change their surname. There’s no justice.

  And sometimes with these eponymous inventions it can be hard to work out which came first, the word or the man. This is the case with Thomas Crapper, who invented the crapper.

  Thomas Crapper

  There’s a myth that the word crap was coined for the sake of Thomas Crapper, the inventor of the flushing lavatory. There’s also a myth that the word crap was not coined for Thomas Crapper. It actually depends on where you come from, and if that sounds odd, it’s because crap is a sticky subject. Luckily, I have, as it were, immersed myself in it.

  The first mistake that must be wiped away is that Thomas Crapper (1836–1910) was the inventor of the lavatory. He wasn’t. The first flushing lavatory was invented by the Elizabethan poet Sir John Harington (who was quoted a couple of pages ago on the subject of treason).

  Sir John installed his invention in his manor at Kelston, Somerset, where it’s said that it was used by Queen Elizabeth herself. Harington was so pleased with the device that he wrote a book on the subject called A New Discourse Upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax. Ajax gets in there because in Elizabethan times the slang word for a privy was a jakes.

  A whiff of the book’s style and of the previous state of English crapping can be gained from the following extract:

  For when I found not onely in mine own poore confused cottage, but even in the goodliest and statliest pallaces of this realm, notwithstanding all our provisions of vaults, of sluces, of grates, of paines of poore folkes in sweeping and scouring, yet still this same whorson sawcie stinke, though he were commanded on paine of death not to come within the gates, yet would spite of our noses, even when we would gladliest have spared his company … Now because the most unavoidable of all these things that keep such a stinking stirre, or such a stinke when they be stirred, is urine and ordure, that which we all carie about us (a good speculation to make us remember what we are and whither we must) therefore as I sayd before, many have devised remedies for this in times past … but yet (as the ape does his young ones) I thinke mine the properest of them all.

  Americans like to talk about going to the john, and it has been suggested that this is in memory of John Harington. Unfortunately that’s unlikely, as john in the lavatorial sense didn’t appear until more than a hundred years after Harington’s death. However, it is likely that john was an alteration of jake. Or perhaps we just like giving boys’ names to the smelliest room in the house.

  Harington’s invention didn’t catch on. Unless there are sewers and running water, a flushing lavatory is never really going to be viable for the mass market. It’s like having an electric lamp without mains electricity, or skis without snow.

  Sewers and running water arrived in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, and what we generally think of as a lavatory was patented by Edward Jennings in 1852.

  So who was Crapper? Thomas Crapper was born in Yorkshire in 1836. In 1853, a year after Jennings’ patent, he came to London to start an apprenticeship as a plumber. He was jolly good at plumbing, and the 1850s were the golden age of the toilet trader. The new sewers meant that everyone could flush away their shame and smell. Business boomed.

  Crapper set up his own company, Thomas Crapper & Co., and designed his own line of thrones. He invented the ballcock system for refilling, which stopped water being wasted, and added extra devices to stop anything unpleasant flowing back into the bowl after the flush. His were very superior lavatories, the pinnacle of plumbing.

  Crapper lavatories were chosen for the residence of the Prince of Wales and for the plumbing of Westminster Abbey, where Crapper’s name can be seen to this day on the manhole covers. The brand-name Crapper was everywhere, but crap had been around for a long time before.

  All the dictionaries claim that crap first appeared in the 1840s, but in fact the word can be traced back to 1801 and a poem by a fellow called J. Churchill. Churchill’s poem tells a story (which it claims is based on fact) about a subaltern in the army who feels the call of nature. He runs to the outhouse only to find that a major is already there, and as the major outranks him, he’s forced to wait. The subaltern feels himself beginning to give way and his misery is compounded when a captain turns up and pulls rank:

  Just adding (for some only mind number ONE)4

  ‘I, I shall go in, when the major has done:’

  The Sub, who was, now, a most terrible plight, in;

  And, not quite aware of priority S---ING,

  Squeez’d awhile; ‘Well!’ says he, ‘then, the best friends MUST PART;’

  Crap! Crap! ’twas a moist one! a right Brewer’s ****!

  And, finding it vain, to be stopping the lake;

  ‘Zounds!’ says he, ‘then, here goes man! I’ve brew’d; so, I’ll bake.’

  That beautiful poem was written 35 years before Thomas Crapper was born, and half a century before he started plumbing. So crap is certainly not named after Crapper. Perhaps it was a case of nominative determinism. If you’re unfortunate enough to be called Crapper, what are you going to do except work with it?

  However, if Crapper didn’t cause crap, he associated himself with it closely. All of his lavatories had Thomas Crapper & Co. written on them in florid writing and these lavatories were installed all over Britain. But in America, nobody had ever heard of either Crapper the man, or crap the word.

  There isn’t an American reference to crap all through the nineteenth century. In fact, there’s nothing before the First World War. Then, in 1917, America declared war on Germany and sent 2.8 million men across the Atlantic, where they would have been exposed to the ubiquitous Thomas Crapper & Co. on every second lavatory.

  It’s only after the First World War that crap, crapper, crapping around and crapping about appear in the United States. So it would seem that though the English word crap doesn’t come from the man, the American one does. Crapper didn’t invent it, but he spread the word.

  4 This is also the first-ever reference to number one in a lavatorial context. Most authorities have it down as a twentieth-century term.

  Mythical Acronyms

  Can y
ou take another chapter on the same subject? Good, because we have something to clear up: shit and fuck, or more precisely, SHIT and FUCK.

  You might have heard the story that both these words are acronyms. This is absolute twaddle.

  The story goes that manure gives off methane. So far, so true. But then the story continues that when manure is transported on a ship, it needs to be stored right at the top of the boat to stop the methane building up to explosive levels in the cargo hold. So the words Store High In Transit used to be stamped on bags of manure before they were loaded onto a boat. Store High In Transit then got shortened to its initials – S.H.I.T. – and that was the start of shit.

  It’s an ingenious explanation and whoever thought it up at least deserves credit for imagination. Unfortunately it’s absolute manure. Shit can be traced back to the Old English verb scitan (which meant exactly what it does today), and further back to Proto-Germanic skit (the Germans still say scheisse), and all the way to the Proto-Indo-European word (c. 4000 BC) skhei, which meant to separate or divide, presumably on the basis that you separated yourself from your faeces. Shed (as in shed your skin) comes from the same root, and so does schism.

  An odd little aspect of this etymology is that when Proto-Indo-European arrived in the Italian peninsula they used skhei to mean separate or distinguish. If you could tell two things apart then you knew them, and so the Latin word for know became scire. From that you got the Latin word scientia, which meant knowledge, and from that we got the word science. This means that science is, etymologically, shit. It also means that knowing your shit, etymologically, means that you’re good at physics and chemistry.

  Also, as conscience comes from the same root, the phrase I don’t give a shit is thoroughly appropriate.

  The other acronymic myth that we need to stamp out is that fuck is a legal term. The commonly believed myth runs that once upon a time, when sex could land you in jail, people could be taken to court and charged For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. Nothing of the sort is true and there has never been such a term in English law.

  The first recorded fuckers were actually monks. There was a monastery in the English city of Ely, and in an anonymous fifteenth-century poem somebody mentioned that the monks might have acquired some dirty habits. The poem is in a strange combination of Latin and English, but the lines with which we are concerned run thus:

  Non sunt in celi

  Qui fuccant wivys in Heli

  Which seems to mean:

  They are not in heaven

  Who fuck wives in Ely

  The modern spelling of fuck is first recorded in 1535, and this time it’s bishops who are at it. According to a contemporary writer, bishops ‘may fuck their fill and be unmarried’. In between those two there’s a brief reference by the Master of Brasenose College, Oxford to a ‘fuckin Abbot’. So it seems that the rules of celibacy weren’t being taken too seriously in the medieval church.

  Some scholars, though, trace the word fuck to even earlier roots. The etymologist Carl Buck claimed to have found a man from 1278 who rejoiced in the name John Le Fucker, but nobody since has been able to find the reference and some even suspect that Buck made it up as a joke. Also, even if John Le Fucker did ever exist, he was probably really John Le Fulcher or John the Soldier.

  Acronyms are, I’m afraid, mainly myths. Posh does not mean Port Out Starboard Home and wog never stood for Wily Oriental Gentleman. There was a famous cabal formed of Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale, all conspiring against Charles II. But that was coincidence; the word had already been around for centuries.

  But some acronyms do exist, just not where you might expect to find them. There’s one hidden away in The Sound of Music that relates straight back to John the Baptist.

  John the Baptist and The Sound of Music

  About two thousand years ago a perfectly respectable lady called Elizabeth became pregnant and her husband lost his voice. He stayed silent as a silo until the child was born. The child was called John, and when John grew up he began telling people that they were naughty and chucking them in a river. Now, if you or I tried a stunt like that we’d be brought up by the police pretty sharpish. But John got away with it and, if you can believe it, was considered rather holy for all his attempted drownings. Chaps at the time called him John the Baptist.

  Seven hundred years later somebody else lost his voice, or at least had a terribly sore throat. He was an Italian who went by the cumbersome moniker of Paul the Deacon, so he wrote a verse prayer to John the Baptist that ran thus:

  Ut queant laxis

  resonare fibris

  Mira gestorum

  famuli tuorum,

  Solve polluti

  labii reatum,

  Sancte Iohannes.

  [O let your servants sing your wonders on,

  With loosened voice and sinless lips, St John.]

  Four hundred years after that, in the fourteenth century, somebody set this little poem to music. He (or maybe she) wrote a pretty, climbing melody, in which each line started a note higher than the last, until with the words Sancte Iohannes it dropped again to the bottom.

  So the first note was on the syllable Ut, the second line began with the re in resonare on the note above, then Mi in Mira, fa, So, la …

  The problem with Ut, though, is that it’s a rather short syllable and difficult for a singer to hold. Try it. So Ut got changed to Do (perhaps for Dominus, but nobody’s sure), and that gave Do, re, Mi, fa, So, la and, by extension, Si for Sancte Iohannes. Then somebody pointed out that there was already a So beginning with S and you couldn’t rightly have two lines beginning with the same letter. So Si was changed to Ti.

  Do re Mi fa So la Ti Do

  Which is just a shortening of a hymn to John the Baptist. The shortening technique was invented by a fellow called Guido of Arezzo.

  So Do is not a deer, a female deer, and re is not a drop of golden sun. The Von Trapp family were cruelly deceived.

  Poor Ut was consigned to history, or nearly. It sort of survives. The lowest note was also known as gamma, after the Greek letter. So the lowest note of the scale was once known as gamma or ut. Then a whole scale came to be known as gamma-ut. And that’s why when you go through the whole scale, you still run through the gamut. It all comes back to church music, rather like organised crime, which is, of course, crime played on a church organ.

  Organic, Organised, Organs

  Organic food is food grown in a church organ. Organised crime is crime committed by organists.

  Well, etymologically speaking.

  Once upon a time, the ancient Greeks had the word organon, which meant something you work with. An organon could be a tool, an implement, a musical instrument or a part of the body. For the moment, let’s stick to the musical sense.

  Originally, an organ was any musical instrument, and this was still the case when, in the ninth century, people decided that every church should have a pipe organ in it, for, as Dryden put it: ‘What human voice can reach the sacred organ’s praise?’

  Slowly the pipe part of pipe organ got dropped and other instruments ceased to be organs (except the mouth organ, which, if you think about it, sounds a bit rude). And that’s why an organ is now only the musical instrument you have in a church.

  Now let’s return to the Greeks, because organ continued to mean a thing you work with and hence a part of the body, as in the old joke: ‘Why did Bach have twenty children? Because he had no stops on his organ.’

  A bunch of organs put together make up an organism, and things that are produced by organisms are therefore organic. In the twentieth century, when artificial fertilisers were strewn upon our not-green-enough fields, we started to distinguish between this method and organic farming and thus organic food.

  The human body is beautifully and efficiently arranged (at least my bo
dy is). Each organ has a particular function. I have a hand to hold a glass, a mouth to drink with, a belly to fill, a liver to deal with the poison and so on and so forth. Heart, head, lungs, liver, kidney and colon: each performs a particular task, and the result, dear reader, is the glory that is I.

  If you arrange a group of people and give each one a particular job, you are, metaphorically, making them act together like the organs of a body. You are organising them.

  Thus an organisation: something in which each person, like each organ of the body, has a particular task. That shift in meaning happened in the sixteenth century when everybody liked metaphors about the body politic. However, crime didn’t get organised until 1929 in Chicago, when Al Capone was running the mob (or mobile vulgatus to give it its proper name – mob is only a shortening).

  Clipping

  When a phrase like mobile vulgatus or mobile peasants gets shortened to mob, linguists call it clipping. And there are more clips around than you might think:

  Taxi cab = Taximeter cabriolet

  Fan = Fanatic

  Bus = Voiture omnibus

  Wilco = Will comply

  Van = Caravan

  Sleuth = Sleuthhound (a kind of sniffer dog)

  Butch = Butcher

  Cute = Acute

  Sperm whale = Spermaceti whale

  Film buff = Buffalo

  Buffalo

  How did buffalo come to mean enthusiast? What’s the connection between the beast and the music buff?

  To answer that, you first need to know that buffalo aren’t buffalo; and also that buffalo is one of the most curious words in the English language.