The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  Bunking and Debunking

  It’s awfully tempting to think that debunking has something to do with bunk beds. One imagines that a false idea is found snoozing under a duvet, is woken up and thrown out of his bunk bed by big, burly reason. This is, alas, nonsense.

  Debunking is the process of getting rid of an idea that is bunk or bunkum. Bunkum, as we all know, is complete and utter nonsense, but it’s also a place in North Carolina. Buncombe County is in the west of the state, a rather pretty and rural area that became a byword for claptrap.

  In 1820 the Congress of the United States was debating the Missouri Question. The Missouri Question was to do with slavery and the answer turned out to be the Missouri Compromise. Towards the end of the debate a Congressman called Felix Walker stood up, cleared his throat, began to speak, and wouldn’t stop.

  He went on and on until people started to get fidgety, and on and on until people started to get annoyed, and on and on until people started to jeer, and on and on until people started to tap him on the shoulder and tell him to stop, and on and on until there was a small crowd round him demanding to know why he wouldn’t stop.

  Felix Walker replied that he was not speaking to Congress, his speech was for the benefit of his constituency back home: he was making ‘a speech for Buncombe’.

  You see, Felix Walker didn’t care about the Missouri Question or the Missouri Compromise: he cared about the press coverage he would get among the voters in his own constituency. It was such an ingenious idea (and such a common practice in all democracies) that the phrase caught on, and speaking to Buncombe soon got shortened to speaking bunkum and then just plain bunkum, which needs to be debunked.

  It’s worthwhile mentioning that though that’s the usual story, there’s an alternative version in which a Congressman wandered in and found Felix Walker addressing an utterly empty chamber. He asked Walker what the hell he was doing and Walker explained that he was speaking to Buncombe (no doubt a copy of the speech would be mailed home). I prefer this version, but it’s less likely to be true. Either way, bunkum remains talk that serves no actual purpose, and is definitely down to the place in North Carolina.

  Poor Buncombe County! Consigned to the dictionary as a byword for nonsense, Edward Buncombe must be turning in his grave.

  Edward Buncombe was a British chap who was born in St Kitt’s but moved to America when he inherited a great big plantation in Carolina. He was one of the first fellows in the area to join the pro-independence movement, and when the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775 he joined the Continental Army and was wounded at the Battle of Germantown. He would probably have recovered were it not that one night he got out of bed and sleepwalked to the top of a flight of stairs, toppled down, and died from his re-opened wounds.

  In his will he left over two thousand acres of plantation, and ten negroes. He was such a hero that a few years later Buncombe County was named in his honour. So really it’s Edward Buncombe whose name is in debunked. Or you can go further.

  Edward Buncombe must, somehow or other, have been a descendant of Richard de Bounecombe who lived in Somerset in the early fourteenth century. Bounecombe itself means reedy (boune) valley (combe). Combe is one of the very few words in Old English that comes from Celtic. Why there are so few is a great mystery, and it all depends on how nasty the Anglo-Saxons were.

  The Anglo-Saxon Mystery

  Once upon a time, two thousand years ago, the British Isles were inhabited by Celts, who, as you might expect, spoke Celtic languages. They also had tattoos. The ancient Greeks called the inhabitants of these foggy islands Prittanoi (from where we get the name Britain), meaning tattooed people, although this may just have been down to the Celtic habit of painting themselves with woad, which the Greeks thought rather odd.

  The important thing for the moment is that Boadicea (died 61 AD) wasn’t English, even though she lived in what is now England. England didn’t exist at the time. Boadicea was a Celtic Briton.

  England started to exist only when the Angles began arriving from Denmark in about 400 AD. They referred to their new country as Angle-land or England. Along with the Angles came the Saxons (from Saxony) and the Jutes (from Jutland) and between them they started to speak Old English.

  Soon they had kings and one of these was called Alfred the Great, who was originally the King of the West Saxons but decided to call himself Rex Angul-Saxonum, or King of the Anglo-Saxons.

  So what happened to the Celts? What happened to all the people who had swanned around the island before, covered in woad?

  The answer is that nobody’s quite sure. There are two arguments: the linguistic one and the historical one.

  Whenever one bunch of people conquers another, they pick up a bit of the conquered people’s language. You can’t help it. Try as you might, the native language is all around you. You may have enslaved the natives, but you still need to be able to order your slaves around. You may not want to learn the language, but there are always new things in a new country that you don’t have any words of your own to describe.

  Take the example of the British in India. The Brits were there only for a couple of hundred years and yet in that time they picked up shampoo, bungalow, juggernaut, mongoose, khaki, chutney, bangle, cushy, pundit, bandana, dinghy etc., etc., etc. And those were only the words that they brought home with them.

  So what words did the Angles and Saxons pick up from the Celts?

  Next to nothing.

  There’s combe, meaning valley, which comes from cym. There’s tor, meaning rock, which comes from torr, the Celtic word for hill. There’s cross, which we seem to have got from Irish missionaries in the tenth century, rather than from the native Celts. And there’s …

  Well, there’s not much else. It depends on how you count things, really, and it’s always possible that words were there but not noted down. The Anglo-Saxons managed to occupy an island for hundreds of years and take almost no words from the people they defeated.

  In fact, linguistically, this doesn’t look like an occupation, it looks like a massacre. On the surface it would appear to be a pretty crazy massacre as well. Of course, massacres are always pretty bad things, but you’d still expect a few more words to have crept into Old English, even if they were only the words for ouch, no and stop it. In English there’s a terrifying absence.

  And the historians say that this is absolute hogwash. Where, they ask quite reasonably, are the bodies? There aren’t any. No mass graves, no accounts of epic battles. No slaughter recorded. Nothing archaeological. Zero. Zilch. Nil.

  So where linguists see a slaughter, archaeologists see peaceful co-existence. It’s all rather odd. Although there’s a third possibility, which is illustrated by a hill in Herefordshire called Pensax, and a town in Essex called Saffron Walden.

  Pensax means hill (pen) of the Saxons, and very importantly the pen there is a Celtic word. So it would seem that, for a while at least, there were Saxons on the hill and Celts down in the valley. The same goes for the charmingly named Dorset village of Sixpenny Handley. Sixpenny is a corruption of Sex Pen and is just Pensax with the elements swapped around.

  Meanwhile, Saffron Walden is obviously a place where they grew saffron, but the Walden is odd. It’s an Anglo-Saxon term meaning, literally, valley of the foreigners, but wealh was a word that was always used to refer to Celts (and, indeed, it gave us the name Wales).

  So, if you work from the place-name evidence you get a third and very odd picture of a country filled with settlements of Anglo-Saxons and Celts living side by side, but never talking. That would mean that they weren’t trading, weren’t marrying, weren’t doing anything at all except naming each other’s settlements, presumably as places to avoid.

  You might theorise that each people understood the other’s language and merely chose to speak their own pure dialect, but it would appear that this wasn’t the case. Again it
comes down to place-names.

  As we have seen, pen was a Celtic word for hill. Yet when the Old English came across a hill called Pen, they decided to name it Pen hul, hul being the Old English word for hill.

  The same process was repeated all across England. Names were doubled up, such as Bredon (hill hill) or the River Esk (river river). This would seem to point to a linguistic exchange that didn’t go much further than finding out a place-name before driving out anybody who knew what the place-name meant.

  It also makes for some very amusing etymologies. Penhul became Pendle and then a few hundred years later somebody again noticed that it was a hill and changed the name to Pendle Hill, which means Hill-Hill Hill. This was not a one-off. Bredon Hill in Worcestershire is also Hill-Hill Hill on exactly the same pattern of Celtic (bre), Old English (don) and modern English (hill).

  We will never know how the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts really got on. Maybe it was a massacre, maybe it was a jolly party. The ages were too dark and history is too forgetful. Nor is it wise to be consumed by sorrow or anger. If you look back far enough everything is stolen and every country invaded. The Celts themselves had conquered the previous people of Britain in around 600 BC, and the Anglo-Saxons were about to get hit by the vicious Vikings, who would bring with them their own language and their own place-names. For example, one Viking found a sedge-covered stream in Yorkshire and decided to name it Sedge-Stream, thus spawning one of the world’s largest corporations.

  The Sedge-strewn Stream and Globalisation

  The Vikings were horrid people to whom history has, for some strange reason, been very indulgent. Whether it was the rape, the killing or the human sacrifice that you objected to, it was probably a bad thing when the Vikings arrived at Lindisfarne in 793 and then began to work their way down the north-east coast of England. They quickly got to Yorkshire, and near what is now Harrogate one of them found a sedge-strewn stream and decided to name it Sedge-Stream. Except of course he didn’t call it that because Sedge-Stream would be English; he called it Sedge-Stream in Old Norse, and the Old Norse for Sedge-Stream is Starbeck.

  Starbeck is now a little suburb on the eastern edge of Harrogate. The stream is still there, although there’s no discernible sedge and it runs quite a bit of its way underground in a pipe next to the railway tracks. The place-name is first recorded in 1817, but, as we’ve seen, it must go back to the Vikings, and we also know that there were people there in the fourteenth century.

  These people had sex (as people almost invariably do) and produced a family. The family were named for the place where they lived, almost. One vowel was changed. The Starbuck family are first recorded living in just the right area in 1379. Since then two things have happened: the Quaker movement was founded and America was discovered.

  The result of this double catastrophe was that among the first settlers of Nantucket Island near Cape Cod was a Quaker family whose name was Starbuck. Exactly how much they quaked is not recorded, but they did become big players in Nantucket’s biggest trade: whaling.

  The Starbuck family took up their harpoons with a vengeance. They were soon the most famous whalers in Nantucket if not the world. In 1823 Valentine Starbuck was chartered by the King and Queen of Hawaii to take them on a trip to England, where the unfortunate royal pair died of measles. Obed Starbuck discovered Starbuck Island in the Pacific and named it in honour of his cousin.18

  A little over twenty years later, a man called Herman Melville began to write a novel about whales and whaling. Specifically he wrote about a ship called the Pequod setting sail from Nantucket to hunt a white whale known as Moby-Dick. Melville had been a whaler himself and had heard of the famous Starbuck whalers of Nantucket, so he decided to call the first mate of the Pequod Starbuck in their honour.

  Moby-Dick wasn’t a very popular novel at first. Most people, especially the British, couldn’t make head or tail of it, though this was largely because the British edition was missing the last chapter. However, in the twentieth century, novels that nobody can make head or tail of became very much the fashion and Moby-Dick was taken up by all and sundry, especially American schoolteachers who have been inflicting its purple prose on children ever since. There was one particular English teacher in Seattle who loved the book: his name was Jerry Baldwin.

  Baldwin and two friends wanted to start a coffee shop. They needed a name and Jerry Baldwin knew exactly where to find the right one – in the pages of Moby-Dick. He told his business partners of his fantastic idea. They were going to call the coffee shop …

  Wait for it …

  Pequod!

  His business partners pointed out (quite rightly) that if you’re planning to open a shop selling potable fluids, you probably don’t want the name to contain the syllable pee. That’s just bad marketing. So Baldwin was overruled and the others started looking for something a little more local. On a map of the area they found an old mining settlement in the Rocky Mountains called Camp Starbo. Baldwin’s two partners decided that Starbo was a great name. But Jerry Baldwin was not to be defeated. He suggested that they compromise with a little alteration to the second syllable that would make the name match the Pequod’s first mate: Starbucks. The three of them agreed, and that Viking’s name for a little stream in Yorkshire became one of the most famous brands in the world.

  The high street might be a different place if Baldwin had remembered that Moby-Dick was based on a real white whale that was said to have fought off over a hundred whaling parties in the Pacific of the early nineteenth century: that whale was called Mocha Dick.

  There are no branches of Starbucks on Starbuck Island, but that’s probably because there are no people there either, and the occasional seal is unlikely to have the cash for a cappuccino.

  18 History is actually rather bewildered as to who named it in honour of whom first.

  Coffee

  Balzac once wrote that:

  This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.

  But Shakespeare never drank coffee. Nor did Julius Caesar, or Socrates. Alexander the Great conquered half the world without even a café latte to perk him up in the morning. The pyramids were designed and constructed without a whiff of a sniff of caffeine. Coffee was introduced to Europe only in 1615.

  The achievements of antiquity are quite enough to cow the modern human, but when you realise that they did it all without caffeine it becomes almost unbearable. The words for coffee arrange themselves beautifully into highly-caffeinated spirals. Let’s start with espressos and consider what they have to do with expressing yourself.

  An espresso is made in a little machine that presses steam outwards (e in Italian) through tightly-packed grains of coffee. It’s exactly the same process by which a cow expresses milk, or a sore expresses pus, and metaphorically it’s the same process by which your thoughts are expressed outwards from your brain through your mouth. Thus self-expression.

  Those actions that have been thought about are premeditated, intentional and deliberate. If, for example, you have done something expressly for a purpose, it’s because you have thought about it.

  How does this connect to express mail? Expressly came to mean for one particular purpose. A letter can be entrusted either to the tender mercies of the national postal system (who will probably lose it, burn it or deliver it back to you a month later with a fine) or it can be given to a paid messenger who has one express job: to deliver that one letter.
This is an express delivery – one where a postman has been hired expressly for the purpose.

  And the same is true of trains. Some trains stop at every station; no village halt or stray cow is too small or too irrelevant to slow you down. All this can be avoided, if rather than taking a stopping train you board one that is bound expressly for one particular destination. Such trains are now known as express trains, and they usually have a little buffet car where you can pay a small fortune for a tiny espresso.

  Cappuccino Monks

  If expressive espressos have a circuitous etymology, it’s as nothing compared to the frothy delights of the cappuccino.

  In 1520, a monk called Matteo Da Bascio decided that his fellow Franciscans were all terrible sybarites who had fallen away from the original calling of St Francis. They did luxurious things like wearing shoes, and Da Bascio decided to start a new order of pure, barefoot Franciscans.

  The Old Franciscans were rather hurt by this and tried to suppress Matteo’s unshod breakaways. He was forced to flee into hiding with the sympathetic Camaldolese monks who wore little hoods called, in Italian, cappuccios. Matteo and his brethren wore the cappuccios themselves, just to blend in, but when his breakaway order got official recognition in 1528 they found that they had become so used to the hoods that they decided to keep them on. His followers were therefore nicknamed the Capuchin Monks.

  The Capuchin Monks spread quickly all over Catholic Europe, and their hoods had become so familiar that when, a century later, explorers in the New World found apes with a dark brown patch on the top of their heads that looked like a little monkey-hood, they decided to call them Capuchin Monkeys.

  What’s particularly beautiful about this name is that, so far as anybody can tell, monkeys are named after monks. You see, most people agreed with Matteo Da Bascio: far from being models of chastity and virtue, medieval monks were all filthy sinners and little better than animals. So what do you call that brown, hairy ape? A monkey.