The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  King Harald had blue teeth. Or perhaps he had black teeth. Nobody’s quite sure, as the meaning of blau has changed over the years. His other great achievement was to unite the warring provinces of Denmark and Norway under a single king (himself).

  In 1996 a fellow called Jim Kardach developed a system that would allow mobile telephones to communicate with computers. After a hard day’s engineering, Kardach relaxed by reading a historical novel called The Longships by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson. It’s a book about Vikings and adventure and raping and pillaging and looting, and it’s set during the reign of Harald Bluetooth.

  Jim Kardach felt he was doing the king’s work. By getting computers to talk to telephones and vice versa he was uniting the warring provinces of technology. So, just for his own amusement, he gave the project the working title of Bluetooth.

  Bluetooth was never meant to be the actual name on the package. Blue teeth aren’t a pleasant image, and it was up to the marketing men at Kardach’s company to come up with something better. The marketing men did come up with something much blander and more saleable: they were going to call the product Pan. Unfortunately, just as the new technology was about to be unveiled, they realised that Pan was already the trademark of another company. So, as time was tight and the product needed to be launched, they reluctantly went with Kardach’s nickname. And that’s why it’s called Bluetooth technology.

  Shell

  The history of company names is strange and accidental and filled with twists and tergiversations. For example, why is the largest energy company in the world called Shell?13

  Well, the truth is that in Victorian England seashells were popular. Really popular. Popular to an extent that just looks weird to us. Victorians collected seashells, painted seashells and made things out of seashells. The devouring dustbin of time thankfully means that most of us have never and will never see a whole imitation bouquet of flowers made of nothing other than painted integuments of mortal molluscs. The word kitsch doesn’t do it justice.

  These seashells had to be supplied by somebody. This is probably the reason that she sold seashells on the sea shore. But the beaches of Britain were not sufficient for the obsessed Victorians, so a lively trade started up importing bigger, shinier shells from all four corners of the Earth.

  One man who cashed in on this importing business was Marcus Samuel, who set up shop in Houndsditch in east London and became a shell merchant. It was therefore perfectly natural that he should call his company Shell.

  Shell did well and soon expanded into the other areas of the curio market: trinkets, brightly coloured pebbles and the like. Marcus Samuel brought his son (also called Marcus) into the family business and sent him off to Japan to buy gaudy trifles.

  It was while on this trip that Marcus Samuel Junior realised that there might just possibly be a little bit of potential profit in, of all things, oil.

  Shell did not remain true to its roots. The seashell business on which the company was founded was dropped.14 Only the name survives, but the Shell logo that stands above all those petrol stations is a mute memorial to what was once the core of the business, and to the fact that oil was only an afterthought.

  13 Shell merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum to form the present Royal Dutch Shell.

  14 In a spirit of scholarly enquiry, I tried to find out exactly when this line was discontinued, but the nice lady at Shell customer services thought I was making fun of her and hung up.

  In a Nutshell

  Shells are strewn all over the beaches of the English language. Artillery, for example, can shell a town, on the basis that the earliest grenades looked a little like nuts in their shells. It’s difficult to get a nut out of its shell, and it’s also difficult to get money out of a debtor. That’s why when you do manage it, you have made him shell out.

  Hamlet said that he ‘could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’, but that’s not the origin of the phrase in a nutshell, which goes back to a deliciously unlikely story recounted by the Latin writer Pliny.

  Pliny was a Roman encyclopaedist who tried to write down pretty much everything he’d ever heard. Some of his writings are an invaluable source of knowledge; others are pretty hard to believe. For example, Pliny claimed that there was a copy of The Iliad so small that it could fit inside a walnut shell. The weirdest thing about that story is that it’s probably true.

  In the early eighteenth century, the Bishop of Avranches in France decided to put Pliny to the test. He took a piece of paper that was 10½ inches by 8½ (this book is about 8 inches by 5), and started copying out The Iliad in the smallest handwriting he could manage. He didn’t copy the whole thing, but he fitted 80 verses onto the first line and therefore worked out that, as The Iliad is 17,000 verses long, it would easily fit onto the piece of paper. He then folded the paper, sent for a walnut, and proved Pliny right, or at least feasible.15

  15 A similar feat was, apparently, achieved in about 1590 by an Englishman called Peter Bales, who did it with the Bible.

  The Iliad

  The story of Troy (also called Ilium, hence Iliad) is magnificently grand. The heroes are more heroic than any that have fought since, the ladies are more beautiful and less chaste than all their successors, and the gods themselves lounge around in the background. Winston Churchill once observed that William Gladstone ‘read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right’.

  However, Homer’s words are not nearly as grand as they ought to be. If Ajax – the giant, musclebound hero of the Greeks – had known that he would end up as a popular cleaning product, he might have committed suicide earlier. Hector, the proud hero of the Trojans who would challenge anyone, even Achilles, to a fight, has ended up as a verb, to hector, meaning little more than to annoy with abusive shouting.

  Hector’s sister, Cassandra, is now a byword for a moaning, doom-mongering party pooper. Even the great Trojan horse is now a rather irritating kind of computer virus, designed to steal your credit card details and Facebook log-in.

  And the phrases? There are very few famous phrases from The Iliad. There are a lot of famous lines about Troy:

  Is this the face that launched a thousand ships

  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

  Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

  But this is from Marlowe, not Homer. In fact, the only phrase that could be ascribed to Homer that most people know comes from William Cullen Bryant’s 1878 translation, where Agamemnon prays that he’ll be able to kill Hector:

  May his fellow warriors, many a one,

  Fall round him to the earth and bite the dust.

  Would Homer be proud that his only memorable line was a middling song by Queen?

  And the most famous phrase from the most famous Homeric hero isn’t Homer’s at all. It wasn’t until more than two millennia after Homer’s death that people started to talk about the Achilles tendon. The myth runs that, because of his mother’s magic, the only part of Achilles’ body that could be wounded was the back of his ankle, hence the expression Achilles’ heel and the medical term Achilles’ tendon.

  The Trojan War, if it happened at all, happened in about 1250 BC. Homer, if he/she existed, probably scribbled his way to immortality in the eighth century before Jesus. Philip Verheyen wasn’t born until 1648 in the unfortunately named Belgian town of Borring, and it was Philip Verheyen who named the Achilles tendon, in the most unfortunate of circumstances.

  Verheyen was a very intelligent boy who started out as a cowherd (like the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary), but became an anatomist. Verheyen was one of the great dissectors, so when his own leg had to be amputated, it was partly a tragedy and partly a temptation.

  Verheyen was an ardent Christian who believed in the physical resurrection of the body. He therefore did no
t want his leg to be buried separately from the rest of him, as this would be a great inconvenience at the Day of Judgement. So he preserved it using chemicals, kept it with him at all times, and after a few years began to very carefully dissect his own leg.

  Carefully cutting up your own body is probably not good for the sanity. Verheyen started writing letters to his own leg, in which he recorded all his new findings. It’s in these letters to a limb that we first find the term chorda Achillis, or Achilles tendon.

  Verheyen went mad before he died. A student of his recounted visiting him in the last year of his life. Verheyen was gazing out of the window of his study. Beside him, on a table, was every last tiny piece of his leg laid out and neatly labelled.

  The Human Body

  The body, by virtue of proximity, is the source of at least a thousand and one words and phrases. There’s barely a part of you left that hasn’t been made into some sort of verb. Most, like heading off, or stomaching criticism, are obvious. Some are less so. Footing the bill, for example, is a strange phrase until you remember basic arithmetic. You compile a bill by writing down the various charges in a column and then working out the total, which you write at the foot of the column. At this point you may find that you are paying through the nose, which seems to be a reference to the pain of a nosebleed.

  There are phrases based on parts of the body that you probably didn’t know you had. The heart strings, for example, upon which people so often play and tug are actual and vital parts of your heart. The medical name for them is the chordae tendineae, and if anyone ever actually pulled on them it would at least cause an arrhythmia and probably kill you.

  There are words that don’t appear to have anything to do with the body but do, like window, which was originally a wind-eye, because, though you can look out through it like an eye, in the days before glass the wind could get in.

  There’s more in your eye than meets the eye. For a start there are apples. Early anatomists thought that the centre of the eye was a solid that appeared to be shaped like an apple, hence the apple of your eye. These days it has an even stranger name. It’s called a pupil. And, yes, that’s the same sort of pupil you have in a school.

  In Latin a little boy was called a pupus and a little girl was called a pupa (which is also where we get pupae for baby insects). When they went to school they became school pupils. Now gaze deeply into somebody’s eyes. Anyone will do. What do you see? You ought to see a tiny reflection of yourself gazing back. This little version of you seems like a child, and that’s why it’s a pupil.

  But the part of your body that has the most words named after it is the hand.

  The Five Fingers

  And there was yet a battle in Gath, where was a man of great stature, that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six toes, four and twenty in number.

  2 Samuel XXI, v. 20

  Human beings count in tens. We say twenty-one, two, three etc. until we get to twenty-nine, thirty. Then we start again with thirty-one, two, three, four until we get to another multiple of ten and the process repeats. The reason we do this is that we have five fingers on each hand, making ten in total. If the three-fingered sloth could count, he would probably do so in groups of six.

  Counting on your fingers is such a natural thing to do that the word digit, which originally just meant finger, now means number as well. This also means that when information is stored in the form of numbers it becomes digital.

  The Old English names for the fingers were much more fun than our own. The index finger was once the towcher, or toucher, because it was used for touching things. We call it the index finger, but not because we use it for running through the index of a book. Both indexes come from the Latin word indicare because an index, whether it’s in a book or on your hand, can indicate or point you in the right direction. It’s the pointing finger.

  The boringly-named middle finger was once called the fool’s finger. The Romans called it digitus infamis (infamous), obscenus (obscene), and impudicus (rude). This is because they invented the habit of sticking the middle finger up at people they didn’t like. The Roman poet Martial once wrote an epigram that went:

  Rideto multum qui te, Sextille, cinaedum

  dixerit et digitum porrigito medium

  Which translates extraordinarily loosely as:

  If you are called a poof don’t pause or linger

  But laugh and show the chap your middle finger.

  The fourth finger has a strange anatomical property that gives it both its ancient and modern names: the leech finger and the ring finger.

  There is a vein that runs directly from the fourth finger to the heart, or at least that’s what doctors used to believe. Nobody is quite sure why, as there isn’t actually any such thing. Yet it was this belief that made the fourth finger vital in medieval medicine. Doctors reasoned that if this finger connected directly to the heart, then it was probably possible to use it as a proxy. You could cure heart disease and treat heart attacks simply by doing things to the fourth finger of the patient’s hand. The medieval word for a doctor was a leech,16 and so this digit used to be known as the leech finger.

  Who would be so silly as to believe anything like that nowadays? Well, anybody who’s married. You see, we put the wedding ring on that finger precisely because of that non-existent vein. If the finger and the heart are that closely connected, then you can trap your lover’s heart simply by encircling the finger in a gold ring. Hence ring finger.

  And the little finger? Well the Old English used to use that for scratching their ears, and so they called it the ear finger.

  16 Contrary to popular belief, this probably has nothing to do with their sticking leeches on their patients.

  Hoax Bodies

  Let us finish our tour of the human body with the Latin word for the whole thing: corpus. It’s pretty obvious how this word gave us corpse and corporal punishment. It’s a lot less obvious how it gave us words for magic and fraud. To explain that we’ll have to go back to a certain supper that took place in Jerusalem in around 33 AD.

  And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.

  Matthew XXVI, v. 26

  Funny chap, Jesus. First, it’s a little strange to assert that a piece of bread is your body. If you or I tried that we wouldn’t be believed. We certainly wouldn’t be allowed to run a bakery. Yet, given that Jesus was the son of God,17 we’ll just have to take him at his word.

  What’s odd is the cannibalistic non-sequitur. If Jesus had said, ‘Take, eat; this is plain old bread and not human flesh’, then the sentence would make sense. As it is, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘This is not bread, this is human flesh. What’s more, it’s my flesh. Now eat it up like good little cannibals.’

  It’s enough to make you curious.

  Christianity’s cannibalism is something so central to Western culture that it often escapes our notice. During the crusades, the Muslims got rather worried about it. Nobody was sure how far the Christian’s cannibalism went, and rumours spread around the Near East of Muslims being cooked and eaten. When the Christians tried to explain that they only ate God, they just seemed to be adding blasphemy to their sins.

  You were meant to take the cannibalism literally, as well. At the time, a Christian could be burnt at the stake for denying the literal truth of transubstantiation. The communion wafer was actually turned into Jesus’ flesh. All that remained of the original wafer were what theologians called the accidentals. The accidentals were those qualities that meant that the wafer still looked, smelled, felt and tasted like a wafer. Other than that it was wholly transformed.

  This change was effected by the priest taking the wafer and saying the magic words: ‘Hoc est corpus meum: this is my body.’

  And then in the sixteenth century P
rotestantism happened. This new form of Christianity asserted, among other things, that the wafer did not turn into Jesus’ flesh but merely represented it.

  Rather than behaving like gentlemen and agreeing to differ, the Protestants and Catholics got into an awful spat about whether the wafer was or wasn’t the Lord’s flesh, and did all sorts of things like burning each other, attaching each other to racks and making jokes at each other’s expense.

  In the court of the Protestant King James I, there was a clown who used to perform comical magic tricks, during which he would intone the cod-magical words: Hocus Pocus. Indeed, the clown called himself His Majesty’s Most Excellent Hocus Pocus, and the phrase caught on. Where did it come from?

  In all probability [says a seventeenth-century sermon] those common juggling words of hocus pocus are nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus, by way of ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church of Rome in their trick of Transubstantiation.

  From the body to cannibalism to religion to magic: corpus has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go. Hocus pocus got shortened to hoax.

  The words of Jesus had been translated, parodied, shortened, and now they meant an outright, barefaced con. And it didn’t stop there. Hoax got changed again: not shortened this time, but lengthened. Hoax became hokum, an American phrase meaning nonsense or rubbish or bunkum. In fact, it probably gained its –kum in order to make it sound more like bunkum.

  Now, does bunkum relate to bunk beds, golfing bunkers, or reedy valleys?

  17 This point has occasionally been disputed by people who will burn for ever in God’s loving torment.