by Mark Forsyth
But to return to the story: in 1776 the Americans were revolting. The British Navy sailed to New York, but so revolting were the Americans that the Brits decided to stay in the channel and blockade the harbour. The Americans didn’t like this, and there was a fellow called Bushnell who invented a submarine with which to attack the blockading British boats in the most unsporting manner.
Bushnell couldn’t decide what to call his new submarine: he seems to have been in two minds between the American Turtle and the Torpedo. In shape it resembled both. Eventually, he decided on the latter.
The idea of the submarine was that it had a ‘magazine or powder’ attached to it that it would screw to the hull of the British flagship. A timer would then be set, giving the submarine a few minutes to get clear, and then there would be a big explosion and the British boat would be blown to smithereens and beyond. This didn’t happen, as the revolting Americans were foiled by the hulls of the British ships, which were copper-bottomed.
But the Americans were not to be deterred. Another inventor called Fulton took up where Bushnell left off (Bushnell for some reason ran away to the South and took on a new identity). Fulton worked to the same general plan, but he gave the name torpedo to the explosive device rather than the submarine itself. He also decided to change it a bit. Rather than the submarine getting right up to the enemy ship, it would instead fire a harpoon at it. The explosive device would be attached to the harpoon by a rope and contain within it a timer. So the submarine would pop up, harpoon the ship, and disappear before the charge went off.
Fulton’s torpedoes didn’t work either. Decades passed of utterly ineffective torpedo inventing and improvement. The torpedo was fitted with a motor and other such gizmos, but nothing was sunk with a vile torpedo until 1878, when a Russian ship torpedoed an Ottoman one.
And that’s how tired and numb came to be a name for something fast and explosive.
Now, before the next story, what’s the connection between Mount Vernon in Virginia, Portobello Road in London, and feeling groggy?
7 Yes, really.
From Mount Vernon to Portobello Road with a Hangover
Relations between the Royal Navy and the Americans were, as we have seen, fraught. However, it was not always thus. The fault lies with George Washington.
But George had an elder half-brother and mentor called Lawrence Washington who had, in fact, been a British soldier. Specifically, he was a marine in the Royal Navy. As a recruit from the British dominions in North America, he served under Admiral Edward Vernon in the Caribbean, and was part of the force that seized a strategically important base called Guantánamo, which has some minor position in modern history.
Lawrence Washington was very attached to Admiral Vernon. So loyal was he that when he went home to the family estate, which had been called Little Hunting Creek Plantation, he decided to rename it Mount Vernon. So Washington’s house was named after a British admiral.
Admiral Vernon’s naming exploits didn’t end there, though. In 1739 Vernon led the British assault on Porto Bello in what is now Panama. He had only six ships, but with lots of derring-do and British pluck etc. etc. he won a startling victory. In fact, so startling was the victory that a patriotic English farmer heard the news, dashed off to the countryside west of London, and built Portobello Farm in honour of the victory’s startlingness. Green’s Lane, which was nearby, soon became known as Portobello Lane and then Portobello Road. And that’s why the London market, now one of the largest antiques markets in the world, is called Portobello Market.
But Admiral Vernon’s naming exploits didn’t end there, either. When the seas were stormy he used to wear a thick coat made out of a coarse material called grogram (from the French gros graine). So his men nicknamed him Old Grog.
British sailors used to have a daily allowance of rum. In 1740, flushed from victory at Porto Bello and perhaps under the pernicious influence of Lawrence Washington, Vernon ordered that the rum be watered down. The resulting mixture, which eventually became standard for the whole navy, was also named after Vernon. It was called grog.
If you drank too much grog you became drunk or groggy, and the meaning has slowly shifted from there to the wages of gin: a hangover.
A Punch of Drinks
The etymology of alcohol is as unsteady as one would have suspected. For starters the word alcohol is Arabic. This may seem odd, given that Islam is a teetotal religion, but when the Arabs used the word alcohol they didn’t mean the same stuff that we do. Alcohol comes from al (the) kuhul, which was a kind of make-up. Indeed, some ladies still use kohl to line their eyes.
As kohl is an extract and a dye, alcohol started to mean the pure essence of anything (there’s a 1661 reference to the alcohol of an ass’s spleen), but it wasn’t until 1672 that somebody at the Royal Society had the bright idea of finding the pure essence of wine. What was it in wine that made you drunk? What was the alcohol of wine? Soon wine-alcohol (or essence of wine) became the only alcohol anybody could remember, and then in 1753 everybody got so drunk that wine-alcohol was shortened to alcohol.
Spirits arrived in the drinks cabinet by almost exactly the same root, but this time from alchemy. In alchemy (there’s the Arabic the again) every chemical was thought to contain vital spirits, little fairies who lived in the substance and made it do funny things. On this basis gunpowder contained fiery spirits, acid contained biting spirits, and things like whisky and vodka contained the best spirits of all, the ones that got you plastered. It’s odd that whisky and vodka get you drunk at all, as, according to their names, they are both water.
Vodka comes from the Russian voda, which means water, and indeed both words come from the same Proto-Indo-European root: wodor.
The word whisky is surprisingly recent. It’s not recorded before 1715, when it leapt into the lexicon with the sterling sentence: ‘Whiskie shall put our brains in a rage.’ Philologists, though, are reasonably agreed that it comes from the Gaelic uisge beatha meaning water of life.
Why the water of life? The Scots hadn’t made the name up, they merely took it from alchemical Latin. Alchemists, who were trying to turn base metal into gold, could find consolation for their failure in the fact that it’s pretty damned easy to distil alcohol, which they called ardent spirits or aqua vitae (water of life).
It wasn’t only drunken Scotsmen who took aqua vitae into their own language. The Scandinavians called their home-brew aquavit, without even bothering to translate, and the French called their brandy eau de vie.
However, the water of life is also a delightful euphemism for urine. This should be drunk in moderation. Morarji Desai, who was Prime Minister of India, used to start every day by drinking the liquor brewed in his own internal distillery, which he always referred to as ‘the water of life’. Desai claimed that Gandhi had taught him the trick, although the Gandhi Institute denies this vehemently and says that Desai’s story is balderdash.
Balderdash used to be a kind of drink as well. Not a very good kind of drink, mind you: it was wine mixed with beer or water or anything else that meant that you could sell it cheap. Balderdash was strange stuff, but not nearly so rum as rum.
Rum was once a thieves’ word meaning good; but like most thieves’ slang the adjective rum got a bad reputation and started to mean queer or a little bit fishy. It’s hard to say which of these uses caused the Caribbean spirit previously known as kill-devil to be nicknamed rumbullion. Or perhaps it was just a variant of rum booze, in reference to rum’s strong and sugary nature. It might even be something to do with the Devon dialect word rumbullion meaning uproar, or it could be the dnuora yaw rehto. Or maybe it was a rum bouillon or strange brew. Either way, rum is first recorded in 1654 and by 1683 people were already making rum punch.
Vodka, whisky, aquavit, balderdash and rum are just enough to make the sort of punch that will knock you out. Only just, mind you, because punch come
s from the Hindi word for five: panch. That’s because, technically, a punch should contain five different ingredients: spirits, water, lemon juice, sugar and spice. That’s also the reason that the area of India that contains five rivers is called the Punjab.
Panch derives from the Sanskrit for five, pancas, which comes from the Proto-Indo-European penkwe, which went into Greek as pent and gave us a pentagon.
But if you want to get properly sloshed you need the queen of drinks: champagne.
The Scampering Champion of the Champagne Campaign
According to legend (the beautiful elder sister of truth), champagne was invented by a Benedictine monk called Dom Pérignon who shouted to his fellow monks: ‘Come quickly, I am tasting the stars.’
This is, of course, balderdash. Making sparkling wine is simple; it’s bottling it that was difficult. If you put fizzy wine in a normal bottle, it can’t take the pressure and explodes. A champagne bottle has to contain six atmospheres of pressure. Even now the caverns of Moët and Chandon lose every sixtieth bottle to explosion. Moreover, it was English glassmakers who perfected the method in order to keep their cider fizzy, and the French simply stole the technology to bottle their bubbly.
Champagne was originally just vin de campagne, or wine from the countryside. It was only in the eighteenth century that it came to refer to wine from the particular region around Épernay, where many of the worst bits of the First World War happened. That Champagne saw some of the worst trench warfare is no coincidence.
The German advance of 1914 started very well. They circumvented the Maginot Line and stormed across northern France with Teutonic efficiency, until they got to the champagne warehouses. There’s something about finding the whole world’s champagne supply that can make even a German commander find reasons for pausing, and the pause was all that the French and British needed. The Allies arrived, everybody dug trenches and the rest is War Poetry.
The German campaign took place during the summer. It had to. When winter arrives, armies generally have to find somewhere warm to hole up and wait for the snows and the gales to pass. Then in the spring they can set out into the campagne again, which is why an army fights a summer campaign: literally on the countryside.
Campagne comes from the Latin word campus, which meant field. The very best soldiers in the field were called the campiones, from which we get champion. So the champion of a champagne campaign would be the same thing three times over.
You can do a lot of things with a field. You can, for example, build a university on it, in which case you have a university campus. But what most campaigning armies do is simply take out their tents and guy-ropes and pitch camp.
Actually, there’s another thing that armies usually do. Armies are mostly composed of men, young men, without any women to keep them company. This means that the soldiers have every reason in the world to try to sneak out of the camp to seek the solace of sex. Creeping out of camp was called excampare by the Romans and escamper by the French, but we call it scampering.
The ladies towards whom these young champions would be scampering were the camp followers, women of more enterprise than virtue, who would follow the soldiers around and rent their affections by the hour.
Camp followers aren’t the classiest of broads (a broad, by the way, is a woman abroad). They tended to wear too much make-up to be truly ladylike, and their dresses were garish and their hair badly dyed. During the First World War, British soldiers started to call such a get-up campy. They also referred to such illicit sexual scamperings as camp. From here the word camp had to make only a short hop before it referred to a man in make-up (and maybe a dress) who had illicit sexual encounters, and that’s why tarty men in make-up are, to this day, camping it up, often with a glass of pink champagne.
Camp, in the sense of battlefield, also wheedled its way into German as Kampf meaning battle. So Hitler’s book Mein Kampf could reasonably be described as rather camp.
Insulting Names
It’s a funny thing, but Hitler wouldn’t have called himself a Nazi. Indeed, he became quite offended when anyone did suggest he was a Nazi. He would have considered himself a National Socialist. Nazi is, and always has been, an insult.
Hitler was head of the catchily-named Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). But, like the Cambridge University Netball Team, he hadn’t thought through the name properly. You see, his opponents realised that you could shorten Nationalsozialistische to Nazi. Why would they do this? Because Nazi was already an (utterly unrelated) term of abuse. It had been for years.
Every culture has a butt for its jokes. Americans have the Polacks, the English have the Irish, and the Irish have people from Cork. The standard butt of German jokes at the beginning of the twentieth century were stupid Bavarian peasants. And just as Irish jokes always involve a man called Paddy, so Bavarian jokes always involved a peasant called Nazi. That’s because Nazi was a shortening of the very common Bavarian name Ignatius.
This meant that Hitler’s opponents had an open goal. He had a party filled with Bavarian hicks and the name of that party could be shortened to the standard joke name for hicks. (Incidentally, hick was formed in exactly the same way as Nazi. Hick was a rural shortening of Richard and became a byword for uneducated famers.)
Imagine if a right-winger from Alabama started a campaign called Red States for the Next America. That’s essentially what Hitler did.
Hitler and his fascists didn’t know what to do about the derogatory nickname Nazi. At first they hated the word. Then, briefly, they tried to reclaim it, in roughly the way that some gay people try to reclaim old insults like queer. But once they got to power they adopted the much simpler approach of persecuting their opponents and forcing them to flee the country.
So refugees started turning up elsewhere complaining about the Nazis, and non-Germans of course assumed that this was the official name of the party. Meanwhile, all the Germans who remained in Germany obediently called them the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, at least when the police were listening. To this day, most of us happily go about believing that the Nazis called themselves Nazis, when in fact they would probably have beaten you up for saying the word.
So it all goes back to the popularity of the name Ignatius. The reason that Ignatius was such a common name in Bavaria is that Bavaria is largely Catholic and therefore very fond of St Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits.
The Jesuits were set up in the seventeenth century to combat the rise of Protestantism, which had become the state religion of England. They soon gained a reputation for being very clever indeed. But as the Jesuits’ cleverness was largely directed against the Protestant English, English Protestants took their name, made an adjective – Jesuitical – and used it to describe something that’s too clever by half, and that uses logical tricks at the expense of common sense.
This is a tad unfair on the poor Jesuits, who have been responsible for the educations of some of the most famous men in history: Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton, Charles de Gaulle, Cardinal Richelieu, Robert Altman, James Joyce, Tom Clancy, Molière, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bing Crosby, Freddie Mercury, René Descartes, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Hitchcock, Elmore Leonard, Spencer Tracy, Voltaire and Georges Lemaître.
And if the last name on that list is unfamiliar, it shouldn’t be. Monsignor Georges Lemaître was one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century. His great idea, proposed in 1927, was the theory of the Primeval Atom, which of course you haven’t heard of.
That’s because the theory of the Primeval Atom, like the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, is a name that never made it. It vanished, usurped by an insult.
The theory of the Primeval Atom asserts that the universe has not been around for eternity, and that instead it started off 13.7 billion years
ago with all matter contained in a single point: the Primeval Atom. This point exploded and expanded, space cooled, galaxies were formed, et cetera et cetera.
Many people disagreed with this theory, including the British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. He thought that the universe had always been around, and decided to undermine Lemaître’s theory by calling it something silly. So he racked his brains and came up with the silliest name he could think of. He called it the Big Bang Theory, because he hoped that Big Bang captured the childishness and simplicity of the idea.
Names are not earned, they are given. Often the givers don’t know what they’re doing. Sometimes, it’s simply a slip of a child’s tongue.
Peter Pan
And sometimes names come out of almost nothing. W.E. Henley (the poet who wrote Invictus and not much else)8 had a daughter named Margaret. Margaret died when she was only five years old, but not before she had met J.M. Barrie. She liked Mr Barrie and tried to call him her friendy, but being only five and horribly ill, all she could make of the word was wendy.
J.M. Barrie then went off and wrote a play about a boy called Peter Pan who takes a girl and her two brothers off to Neverland. He named the heroine Wendy in memory of little Margaret Henley. So he gave her a sort of immortality, for the play was so popular that parents started to name their daughters after the central character. Although, why you would name your daughter after a girl who runs away from home with a strange boy the second the dog’s not looking, is a mystery.
Unfortunately, in Peter Pan, Wendy is shot with an arrow and dies. However, her death isn’t a serious matter, as after a little bit of make-believe she recovers enough to start singing in her sleep. Her song is about how she wants a house, and so Peter and his associates build a tiny cottage around her dormant body. This was, of course, the first Wendy House.
