The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  Spic (1913) American term for anyone in the slightest bit Hispanic. Derives from ‘No speak English’. Or maybe from spaghetti via spiggoty (1910).

  However, language and history have been cruellest to the Slavs of Eastern Europe. Slavs such as the Bulgars spent many years battling against their neighbours. They weren’t always successful. That there was a Byzantine emperor nicknamed Basil the Bulgar Slayer ought to give you some idea of what happened.

  Basil the Bulgar Slayer once captured 15,000 Bulgars and blinded 99 per cent of them. Every hundredth Bulgar was left with one eye so that he could lead his 99 comrades home. Byzantine historians call this a clever tactic, but to our more modern minds it looks plain damned rude.

  Basically, the Slavs had a hard time of it. When they weren’t being slain by Basil in the south they were being subjugated by the Holy Roman Empire in the north and forced into lives of servitude. So many Slavs were defeated and oppressed that the word Slav itself became interchangeable with forced labourer, and that’s where we got the word slave.

  Now, before the next chapter, which common valediction surrenders you to a life of servitude: adieu, toodle-pip, or ciao?

  Ciao Slave-driver

  The word slave comes from Slav, and though it varies between Western languages the poor Slavs were everybody’s original slave. The Dutch got slaaf, the Germans got Sklav, the Spanish got esclavo and the Italians got schiavo.

  Medieval Italians were terribly serious fellows. They would wander around solemnly declaring to each other ‘I am your slave’. However, being medieval Italians, what they actually said was Sono vostro schiavo.

  Then they got lazy and shortened it to schiavo. In the north, where they were lazier still, this got changed to ciao.

  Then, a few centuries later, the Italians got all energetic and tried to join in the Second World War. British and American troops were sent to tick them off.5 These Allied troops picked up the word ciao and when they got back to their own countries they introduced it into English. It was considered a rather exotic new word. But be wary when you say ciao: however dashing and Mediterranean you may think you’re being, you are, etymologically, declaring your own enslavement.

  Ciao has an exact opposite, in the greeting Hey, man. In the United States, before the Civil War had finally established the idea that slavery isn’t completely compatible with the Land of the Free, slave-owners used to call their slaves boy.

  The Battle of Gettysburg freed the slaves and produced a memorable address, but it didn’t, unfortunately, come with a socio-economic plan or a new language. Slave-owners weren’t allowed to own slaves any more, but they continued to be rather nasty to their ex-slaves and kept calling them boy in a significant sort of way that annoyed the hell out of the manumitted.

  All over America, infuriating white people would address black men with the words ‘Hey, boy’. And it grated. It really grated.

  That’s why, in the 1940s, black Americans started taking the fight the other way and greeting each other with the words ‘Hey, man’. The vocative was not inserted for the purposes of sexual identification, it was a reaction against all those years of being called boy.

  It worked. White people were so confused by ‘Hey, man’ that the sixties happened and everybody, of whatever race, started calling each other man, until the original significance was lost. This is an example of Progress.

  Now, before the next link, are robots Martian slave-owners, Bolivian peasants, or Czech serfs?

  5 This was a Good Thing, as the American troops were issued with rations of bacon and eggs. When an American GI was hungry he would pay a local chef to turn these basics into a pasta dish, and that’s how spaghetti carbonara was invented. (At least, that’s one theory, and there’s certainly no record of carbonara before the Second World War.)

  Robots

  Once upon a time in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which ruled much of central Europe, there were lords and peasants. The lords owned all the land but peasants were granted portions of it to work for themselves. The peasant would then work his own little plot and the lord’s. The bigger the peasant’s plot, the longer he had to work the fields of the lord who had granted it to him.

  This system, abolished by Emperor Josef II in 1848, was called robot.

  The system was abolished, but the word, of course, survived. Seventy-two years later, in 1920, a Czech fellow called Karel Čapek was writing a play. It was a rather spooky, futuristic piece about a factory that produced willing servants out of biological matter. Mr Čapek decided to use the Latin root labor (that gives us labour) and call these manufactured servants labori.

  And that would have been that, were it not for Karel’s brother, Josef, who suggested calling them robots instead. Karel took the suggestion and made the changes. The play was performed under the title RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots and was such a success that the word arrived in English two years later.

  Of course, robot had cropped up in English before, but only in references to European politics that seem rather odd to the modern reader. Take this complaint of 1854 by an Austrian aristocrat who believes that socialism has gone quite mad:

  I can get no labor, as the robot is abolished; and my tenants have now land of their own, which once was mine, to cultivate.

  The English-speaking equivalent of robot was indentured labour, whereby a fellow signed a contract that made him a slave for a limited period. There are no extant records of indentured dentists, which is a shame because they both involve teeth.

  In fact, lots of things involve teeth. Tridents have three teeth; al dente food is cooked for the teeth; and dandelions are lions’ teeth, or dents de lions in French. But I digress. For the moment, we must stick to indentations, which are, etymologically, bite marks.

  Medieval contract law was a sorry affair, largely because very few people could read. This meant that contracts could be signed left, right and centre, but few could tell which one was which. Most of us already have enough trouble finding some important piece of paper that we know we put somewhere safe; imagine how much harder it is for the illiterate.

  There are two solutions to this problem, but as one of them involved learning to read, there was really only one solution, and it involved scissors.

  A contract would be written out by a priest, signed or sealed by both parties (probably with an X) and then cut in half. This would not, though, be a straight cut. Instead, the contract would be cut up in a thoroughly wonky zig-zag. Each party would then keep one half of the contract and, if they ever needed to prove whose it was, they would simply put the two pieces of paper together to show that the indentations matched. Thus indentured servants were indentured until the contract was terminated by a terminator.

  Terminators and Prejudice

  The termination is the end. That’s because the Latin terminus meant boundary or limit, from which we get bus terminals, terms and conditions, fixed-term parliaments and indeed many terms for things (because a term has a limited meaning).

  From that you get the idea of terminating somebody’s employment. Legally speaking, you can do this in one of two ways: you can terminate without prejudice, meaning that you are open to the idea of re-employing the poor chap; or you can terminate with prejudice, meaning that you will never hire the scoundrel again. The latter is for employees who have done something awfully naughty and broken and betrayed your trust.

  The CIA employs agents. If you break the CIA’s trust and reveal their secrets to the Other Side, your employment will be terminated. Indeed, it will be terminated with prejudice. Indeed, the CIA often makes sure that nobody ever employs you again by the simple expedient of creeping up behind you and shooting you in the head. This they jokingly refer to as termination with extreme prejudice.

  The CIA being awfully secret, it’s hard to say exactly when the phrase terminate with extreme prejudice was invented. Th
at it was revealed to the general public at all, was the fault of the US Army Special Forces: the Green Berets.

  In 1969 a Vietnamese fellow called Thai Khac Chuyen was working as an agent or informer for the Green Berets (or possibly the CIA, or both). However, he was also working for the Viet Cong and when the Green Berets discovered this they became a little bit peeved.

  They went (or didn’t go, depending on whom you believe) to the CIA for advice on what to do about Chuyen. The CIA told the Green Berets to let bygones be bygones and to try to see it from the other chap’s point of view, or at least that’s what the CIA claim.

  The Green Berets, on the other hand, say that the CIA told them that Chuyen (or his contract) should be terminated with extreme prejudice.

  Exactly who said what is no longer of interest to Thai Khac Chuyen, as the upshot of the story is that he was shot. Eight Green Berets were arrested over the affair and, in the brouhaha and court martial that followed, the CIA joke about contract law was finally brought out into the open.

  It was this incident that took the innocent word terminate away from contract law and bus depots and got it a part in the movies. First, there was a mention in Apocalypse Now (1979), where the hero is sent off to find Colonel Kurtz and terminate him with extreme prejudice. Soon, terminate was so sturdily established in the public mind as a big, tough, scary synonym for ‘kill’ that in 1984 James Cameron decided to call his big, tough, scary killer-robot The Terminator.

  Terminators and Equators

  If you look up terminator in a dictionary, you’re unlikely to find any reference to death or cyborgs. The first definition will be an astronomical one, because the terminator is the line that divides the illuminated part of a planet from the darker half. So the straight line down the middle of a half-moon is a terminator.

  Astronomy and astrology (which were once the same thing) used to be big business until somebody pointed out that huge and distant balls of hydrogen were unlikely to affect your love life. Horoscopes were sent to skulk at the back of the newspaper with the crosswords and personals. Yet the terminology of astrology survives all over the language. For example, if a fellow is of a friendly disposition, it’s because his friendliness is the inevitable consequence of the positions of the planets at the moment of his birth, or rather the distances between the planets, hence disposition.

  If Jupiter was in the ascendant when you were born, you are of a jovial disposition; and if you’re not jovial but miserable and saturnine that’s a disaster, because a disaster is a dis-astro, or misplaced planet. Disaster is Latin for ill-starred.

  The fault, as Shakespeare put it, is not in our stars; but the language is.

  Culmination, opposition, nadir, depression and aspect are all words that we have purloined from the horoscopes and tele­scopes of antiquity. However, astrology is not the only reason that the heavens take precedence over the Earth. There’s the simpler question of visibility. The North Pole, for example, is very far away, and inconveniently located for public transport, but you can see the pole star from your house (providing you’re in the northern hemisphere). The celestial equator is an imaginary projection of the Earth’s equator out into space, and the stars through which this celestial equator passes shine brightly every night no matter where you are, although to reach the real equator requires a journey. And that’s why the word equator referred to part of the sky two centuries before it referred to part of the globe.

  Equality in Ecuador

  Because the Earth wobbles on its axis, the celestial equator is over the terrestrial equator only twice a year, at the equinoxes when night and day are of equal length. The Sun is a nomad and for the first half of the year it tramps slowly southwards until it gets to a latitude of 23 degrees, at which point it turns around and heads for 23 degrees north, where it turns again.

  The Greek for turn was tropos, which is why a turn of phrase was for them a rhetorical trope. That’s also the reason that the latitude of 23 degrees south is the Tropic of Capricorn and its northern equivalent is the Tropic of Cancer, and everywhere in between is tropical.

  Bang in between the two tropics is the equator that runs like a 25,000-mile belt around the Earth.6 The Spanish for equator is ecuador, so when they found a country through which the ecuador ran, they called it Ecuador.

  The equator is called the equator because it divides the Earth into two equal sections, which therefore have equality. In most circumstances inequality is iniquitous, but sometimes iniquity is necessary. Not everybody can be equal. Take, for example, sport. You have two teams that have equal status, but when they argue you need somebody of higher status to judge between them. This referee is not on a par with them. In Latin he was a non-par and in Old French he was a noumpere, but then something happened to the N and he became an umpire.

  An undignified fate often awaits words that begin with an N. Cooks used to wear a napron. But naprons were more often stained than written down, and so the A was able to craftily steal the N away from napron, and now a cook wears an apron.

  This fickle N is something to ponder next time you’re bitten by a nadder, but I wouldn’t ponder it for too long.

  Sometimes the inconstant N travels the other way. What was once an ewt is now a newt; and an extra name, an eke-name, is now a nickname.

  The Latin par also gave us parity, peer groups, peerless and peers of the realm. It may seem rather odd that aristocrats, who are above everybody else, should be called peers. The reason is that Charlemagne had twelve noble knights who were all equal, and therefore peers. In fact, Charlemagne didn’t have twelve knights, but there was a legend that he did, and that’s quite good enough for spawning a word.

  Par hides all over the place. If you do somebody down and make them feel less important than you, you disparage them; and if you have a girl to live with you as an equal she is an au pair. But the most obvious place that the word par survives is on the golf course, as the score between a birdie and a bogey.

  6 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck says that he will ‘put a girdle round about the earth/In forty minutes’. This means that he must be able to travel at 37,000 miles an hour, or Mach 49.3.

  Bogeys

  Why is a score of one over par called a bogey?

  Any game of golf is played against two opponents. You are competing against the other golfer and you are competing against the ground score, the scratch value, the par – the number of strokes a professional golfer should take to complete the course. Of your two opponents, the ground is usually the harder to beat.

  There was a terribly popular song in Victorian England called ‘The Bogey Man’. It was about the nasty mythical fellow who creeps into the rooms of naughty children and causes all sorts of trouble to all sorts of people. This song was running through the head of Dr Thomas Brown as he played a round of golf in Great Yarmouth one day in 1890.

  The idea of playing against the ground score in golf was quite new at the time. Originally, pars and eagles and birdies were unknown in golf. All you did was to add up your total number of shots, and whoever had the lowest was the winner.

  This was the first time that Dr Brown had played against the ground and he didn’t like it. He preferred to play against an opponent because, as he observed, the ground always seemed to beat him. It was an enemy that followed him around the course but never appeared in person, and in the end Dr Brown decided that his invisible opponent was the Bogey Man, just like in the song. His joke caught on in Great Yarmouth and then spread around the golfing world. The Bogey became a score.

  Lone golfers were therefore playing against the Bogey and the word spread until it meant par for the course. It wasn’t until the 1940s that the word shifted to mean one over par, and nobody is quite sure why.

  Bugbears and Bedbugs

  The previous story has an instructive little postscript. Within a few years, golfers had forgotten the origin
of the word bogey and the par score for a course was blamed on a fictional golfer named Colonel Bogey. A book of golfing cartoons from 1897 contains the line: ‘I, Colonel Bogey, whose score is so uniform, and who generally win …’

  This meant that in 1914, when Kenneth Alford wanted a name for his brand-new marching tune, he called it ‘Colonel Bogey’ and thus bogey returned to the world of song whence it had sprung.

  So who or what was the bogeyman? Bogeymen come in all shapes and sizes. Some are shaped just like bears. They live in the woods and they eat small boys who don’t do as they’re told. These are bogey-bears. However, the bogey-bear has diminished over the years. He has faded from his ursine grandeur, both in threat and in the length of the term. Nowadays a bogey-bear is a mere bugbear, and far from devouring a child whole, he is an insignificant annoyance.

  Likewise, a bugaboo is now scoffed at by everyone except James Bond. James Bond is very careful about bugaboos and usually checks for them under his bed. Well, etymologically he does.

  In the eighteenth century a bugaboo (which is of course a variant bogeyman) became thieves’ slang for a sheriff’s officer, or policeman. Nineteenth-century burglars were therefore scared of bugaboos or bugs for short. But they kept burgling anyway, and burglaries continued all the way into the twentieth century. Indeed, they were so common that people started to set up burglar alarms, and in the 1920s burglars began to call burglar alarms bugs on the basis that they acted like an automated policeman. If a solicitous homeowner had fitted an alarm within his house, the joint was said to be bugged.

  From there it was one small step for the word bug before it was applied to tiny listening devices that could be placed inside telephones or teapots. And that’s why James Bond checks his room for bugs, and that’s also why there could actually be an etymological bogeyman hidden beneath your bed.