by Mark Forsyth
Bogeys and bugs have always been pretty much interchangeable. Myles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Psalms renders the fifth verse of the 91st Psalm thus:
Thou shalt not need to be afrayed for eny bugges by nights.
Most subsequent Bibles have used the word terrors; Coverdale’s is therefore known as The Bug’s Bible. Then, in the mid-seventeenth century, bug mysteriously started to mean insect. Perhaps this was because insects are terrifying, or perhaps because they used to get into your bed like a bogeyman. The first six-legged bug on record was a bedbug in 1622. Since then, though, the word has expanded to mean any sort of creepy-crawly, including insects that crawl inside machines and mess up the workings.
There’s a story that one of Thomas Edison’s inventions kept going wrong. Edison couldn’t work out why his machine kept breaking down, but break down it did. He checked all the parts and they worked. He checked the design and it was flawless. Then he went back to check the machine one last time and discovered the cause of the problem. A small insect was crawling around over his delicate electronics and messing everything up. This, so the story goes, is the origin of bug in the sense of a technical failing.
This story may not be completely true, but it’s certainly the case that Thomas Edison was the first person to use bug in the technological sense. In 1878 he wrote in a letter that:
It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise – this thing gives out and [it is] then that ‘Bugs’ – as such little faults and difficulties are called – show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.
And in 1889, the Pall Mall Gazette reported that:
Mr Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his phonograph – an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.
So the insect story could be true, or it could simply be that Edison was referring to bogeyman sprites that haunted his machines, working mischief in the mechanism.
Whatever the origin, the word bug caught on, and when your computer crashes due to a software bug, the fault lies with Thomas Edison and the bogeyman.
Von Munchausen’s Computer
New things need new words, but they usually end up with old ones. Computers have been around since at least 1613, when being a computer was a skilled profession practised by mathematicians who worked in observatories adding up numbers.
When Charles Babbage invented the precursor of the modern computer he called it an Analytical Engine, and when his son improved on the design he called it a Mill, on the basis that mills were complicated technical things and that, like his new machine, they took stuff in at one end and spat different stuff out at the other. Then, in 1869, machines that could compute the sum of two numbers began to be called computers, and slowly, as those machines started to do more and more things, the word spread. When the first modern computer was officially christened ENIAC (Electronic Numeral Integrator And Computer) in 1946, it was already too late.
Early computers were simply calculators, hence the name. Then they got software, which had to be loaded up by the user. Then in the fifties a method was invented whereby a computer would install its own software. The idea was that a single piece of code was loaded, which in turn would load up some more pieces of code, which would load more and more until the computer had … but first we must explain about Baron von Munchausen in the marsh.
Baron von Munchausen (1720–97) was a real person who had fought as a soldier in Russia. On his return home he told stories about his exploits that nobody believed. These included riding on a cannonball, taking a brief trip to the moon, and escaping from a marsh by pulling himself out by his own hair. This latter feat is impossible, for the upward force on the Baron’s hair would have been cancelled out by the downward force on his arm. It’s a nice idea, though, and von Munchausen’s preposterous principle was later taken up by Americans, but instead of talking about hair, the Americans started in the late nineteenth century to talk of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.
What’s impossible in physics is possible in computing, and a computer that’s able to load its own programs is, metaphorically, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. In 1953 the process was called a bootstrap. By 1975 people had got bored with the strap, and from then on computers simply booted up.
SPAM (not spam)
In 1937 a new product came on to the American market. It was made primarily of pork and potato starch and was originally called Hormel Spiced Ham because it was made by Geo A. Hormel & Co. However, a vice-president of Hormel had a brother who was an actor and presumably much better with words, and he suggested that it be shortened from Spiced Ham to SPAM. Another story says that SPAM may stand for Shoulder of Pork And Ham. Either way, the Hormel Foods Corporation insists to this day that it should be spelt with capital letters: SPAM, not spam.
Hitler made SPAM a great success. The Second World War caused food shortages in Britain, which caused strict rationing of fresh meat, which caused Britons to turn to tinned meat as it was less tightly rationed. The tinned meat to which the warlike Britons turned was SPAM, and this was shipped from America in gargantuan quantities. After the war, SPAM remained a staple of the British diet, especially in cheap cafés, which is where Monty Python comes in.
In 1970 Monty Python produced the SPAM sketch in which two people are lowered into a nasty café somewhere in Britain, where almost every dish contains SPAM. After a while, a group of Vikings who also happen to be in the café start singing a song to which the only words are:
SPAM
SPAM
SPAM
SPAM
SPAM
SPAM
SPAM
On and on and on ad infinitum et nauseam.
Monty Python is, for reasons best known to nobody, rather popular with computer programmers. There’s even a programming language called Python, based on their sketches. This leads us, inevitably, to Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs.
Multi-User Dungeons are not, as you might have imagined, strange basement rooms in the red light district. Instead they were an early form of internet game that existed in the 1980s. Clever computery fellows would use MUDs to show each other programs that they had written, but the most popular of these programs was a very simple practical joke.
The first command in the joke program was that the computer should print the word SPAM. The second command was to go back to the first command. The result was that the lyrics to the Monty Python song would be printed out as a screenful of SPAM. This would scroll down your screen for ever and you couldn’t stop it.
By 1990 SPAM had become programmers’ slang for anything unwanted on the internet. When the Monty Python joke was continued on Usenet in the early 1990s the word spam gained wider currency. And that’s why, when that Nigerian prince with all the Viagra and the saucy photographs of Britney Spears started sending his emails, they were called spam, or more properly SPAM; for you must remember that SPAM is a proprietary name, just like heroin.
Heroin
Once upon a time, cough medicines all contained morphine. This made people worried. You see, morphine is addictive, which meant that if you had a bad cold and took the cough medicine for too long, you might cure the cough but wind up physically dependent upon the remedy. The poor cougher of a hundred years ago was therefore faced with a choice: keep hacking away, or risk becoming a morphine addict. Many chose the cough.
So in 1898 a German pharmaceutical company called Bayer decided to develop an alternative. They got out their primitive pipettes and rude retorts, and worked out a new chemical: diacetylmorphine, which they marketed as a ‘non-addictive morphine substitute’.
; Like all new products it needed a brand name. Diacetylmorphine was alright if you were a scientist, but it wasn’t going to work at the counter of the drugstore. They needed a name that would sell, a name that would make people say: ‘Yes! I want to buy that product!’
So Bayer’s marketing chaps set to work. They asked the people who had taken diacetylmorphine how it made them feel, and the response was unanimous: it made you feel great. Like a hero. So the marketing chaps decided to call their new product heroin. And guess what? It did sell.
Heroin remained a Bayer trademark until the First World War; but the ‘non-addictive’ part turned out to be a little misguided.
And that’s why heroines are connected to heroin. And it was all because people didn’t want to be in thrall to morphine.
Morphing De Quincey and Shelley
Morpheus, from which morphine derives, was the Greek god of dreams. He was the son of Sleep and the brother of Fantasy, and he lived in a cave near the underworld where he would make dreams and then hang them upon a withered elm until they were ready to use.
Morpheus was the shaper of dreams – his name comes from the Greek morphe meaning shape. This is why, if you are amorphous, it doesn’t mean that you’re fresh out of morphine, but instead that you are shapeless.
Drugs and dreams are an easy association. If you smoke a pipe full of opium you will, like as not, fall asleep and have a pipe dream. The most famous consumer of opium was a nineteenth-century fellow called Thomas De Quincey, who wrote a memoir called Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which contains a wonderful and strange account of his drugged dreams:
I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hated me; Seeva lay in wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris; I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. Thousands of years I lived, and was buried in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
De Quincey’s opium dreams sound a little less than fun, and much of his biography is about his efforts to give up the drug. The book is much more moving than it is honest.
In fact, when De Quincey wrote his Confessions, he was simply out of cash and couldn’t afford a fix. Luckily the book was so successful that he was able to maintain himself in top-drawer narcotics for the rest of his life. This life was surprisingly long. While near-contemporaries like Shelley, Keats and Byron fell out of boats, perished of consumption or died feverishly in Greece, De Quincey, drugged up to the eyeballs and beyond, survived them all by 35 years and died of a fever at the over-ripe age of 74. He had been taking opium for 55 years.
During his long and meandering literary career, De Quincey was a master-inventor of words. His opium-fumigated brain was a mint where neologisms were coined at a remarkable rate. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes 159 words to him. Many of these, like passiuncle (a small passion), are forgotten; yet many survive.
Without De Quincey we would have no subconscious, no entourages, no incubators, no interconnections. We would be able neither to intuit nor to reposition things. He was phenomenally inventive, earth-shatteringly so. He even came up with the word post-natal, which has allowed people to be depressed ever since.
Ante-natal had already been invented by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley wrote an (earth-shatteringly tedious) poem called ‘Prince Athenase’. The story goes like this: basically, there’s a prince and he’s great and stuff, but like every second bloody hero of romantic poetry he’s mysteriously sad. Nobody knows why.
Some said that he was mad, others believed
That memories of an antenatal life
Made this, where now he dwelt, a penal hell
Others believed that Shelley had talent, but needed a damned fine editor. Like De Quincey, when Shelley couldn’t think of a word he just made one up. By the time he drowned at the age of 29 he had already come up with the words spectral, anklet, optimistic (in the sense of a hopeful disposition), and heartless (in the sense of cruel). He invented bloodstain, expatriate, expressionless, interestingly, legionnaire, moonlit, sunlit, pedestrianize (although not in our sense), petty-minded, steam-ship, unattractive, undefeated, unfulfilling, unrecognized, wavelet and white-hot.
He even invented the phrase national anthem.
Star-Spangled Drinking Songs
A spangle is, of course, a little spang: a spang being a small, glittering ornament. Therefore, to be spangled is to be covered in small spangs, a fate that befalls the best of us at times.
The word spangled crops up in a poem by Thomas Moore – not the famous one, you understand, but the nineteenth-century Irish poetaster. He wrote:
As late I sought the spangled bowers
To cull a wreath of matin flowers,
It was one of Moore’s translations from the Greek poet Anacreon, who was an ancient boozer and lover and lyric poet. Anacreon’s poems (anacreontics) are all about getting drunk and making lyrical love in Greek groves. Anacreon was therefore a Good Thing.
Anacreon was, indeed, such a good thing that in the eighteenth century an English gentleman’s club was founded in his memory. It was called the Anacreontic Society and was devoted to ‘wit, harmony and the god of wine’. It was a very musical affair and two members wrote a society drinking song called ‘To Anacreon in Heav’n’. John Stafford Smith wrote the tune and the society’s president, Ralph Tomlinson, wrote the words. The first verse ran thus:
To Anacreon in Heav’n, where he sat in full glee
A few sons of harmony sent a petition,
That he their inspirer and patron would be
When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian
‘Voice, fiddle, and flute,
No longer be mute,
I’ll lend you my name and inspire you to boot,
And, besides, I’ll instruct you like me to intwine
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.’
Bacchus’s vine is, of course, booze, and Venus was the goddess of sex. ‘To Anacreon in Heav’n’ was a good song with a very catchy tune (which you know). Because it was hard to sing, it became an ad hoc test of drunkenness used by the police in the eighteenth century. If you could sing ‘To Anacreon in Heav’n’ in tune you were sober and free to go. This is, if you think about it, an odd fate for a drinking song. It’s also rather unfair on those who can’t sing.
Unfortunately the song was so popular that it was usurped and stolen by a chap called Francis Scott Key, who wrote new words that weren’t about drink, but about being able to see a flag flying after a bombardment.
Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer. During the war of 1812, he was sent to negotiate with the British fleet for the release of certain prisoners. He dined aboard HMS Tonnant, but when the time came for him to leave, the British got worried. Key was now familiar with the British battleships: if he went ashore he could and would pass all this information on to the American forces. This was problematic, as the British were planning to bombard Baltimore first thing in the morning, and if the Americans found out it would spoil the fun. So they insisted that Key remain on board, and he was forced to watch the bombardment from the wrong side (or the right side, if you’re thinking about personal safety).
Bang went the guns, but the American flag at Baltimore remained high and visible amid the smoke. Key decided to write a song about it. He stole the tune from the Anacreontic Society, but wrote new words that went:
O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
And the new title that he gave to an old drinking song takes us straight back to small spangs.
Torpedoes and Turtles
The conflict between the Royal Navy and the revolutionary Americans also gave us the word torpedo, which has nothing and everything to do with being torpid.
The Latin word for tired or numb was torpidus. From this we got the adjective torpid, which is still with us today. And that would be the end of the story were it not for electrical fish.
That there are electric eels is commonly known. But there are also kinds of ray that can produce electricity, in fact they can produce 220 volts of the stuff, which is quite enough to knock you out, and therefore render you torpid.
In English they were once called numb-fish or cramp-fish, but the educated Latin name is Torpediniformes, with the major family being the torpedoes. As Lawrens Andrewe put it in his snappily-titled book of 1520, The noble lyfe & nature of man, Of bestes, serpentys, fowles & fisshes y be moste knowen:
Torpido is a fisshe, but who-so handeleth hym shal be lame & defe of lymmes that he shall fele no thyng.
For a long time, therefore, a torpedo was simply something that rendered you incapable. For example, there was an eighteenth-century dandy called Beau Nash who was awfully witty but had trouble writing well. ‘He used to call a pen his torpedo for whenever he grasped it, it numbed all his faculties.’ This is a shame, as Nash was meant to be the wittiest, most charming man of his day and when he died his wife went to live in a hollow tree near Warminster.7
