by Mark Forsyth
The habit of the Capuchin Order was, and is, a pretty sort of creamy brown colour. So when the new, frothy, creamy, chocolate-sprinkled form of coffee was invented in the first half of the twentieth century, it was named after their robes: the cappuccino.
Mind you, most baristas wouldn’t understand you if you ordered a little hood. But then again, most baristas don’t realise that they are really barristers.
Called to the Bar
Barista, the chap who serves you your coffee, is a case of English lending a word to Italian and then taking it straight back again. A barista is nothing more than an Italian barman. The –ist suffix just means practitioner, as in a Marxist evangelist.
A bar, as any good dictionary will tell you, is a rod of wood or iron that can be used to fasten a gate. From this came the idea of a bar as any let or hindrance that can stop you going where you want to; specifically the bar in a pub or tavern is the barrier behind which is stored all the lovely intoxicating liquors that only the barman is allowed to lay his hands on without forking out.
We are all, at times, called to the bar, if only in order to pay the bill. But the bar to which barristers were called was a lot less alcoholic, even though it was in an inn.
Half a millennium ago, all English lawyers were required to train at the Inns of Court in London. These inns were not the pleasant inns that serve beer, they were merely lodging houses for students of the law, because inn, originally, just meant house.
The internal arrangement of the Inns of Court was as Byzantine and incomprehensible as one would expect from a building devoted to the law, but basically there were the Readers, who were clever folk and sat in an Inner Sanctum separated from the rest of the students by a big bar.
The lesser students would sit around reading and studying and dreaming of the great day when they would be called to the bar and allowed to plead a case like a proper lawyer. The situation was complicated by the fact that there used to be outer barristers and inner barristers who had a particular relationship with sheriffs at law, and you would probably have to study for a few years before you understood the bar system even partially, and it wouldn’t do you any good anyway, as just when you thought you’d got a grip on things, the meaning of bar was changed. That’s law for you.
In about 1600 the word bar started to be applied to a wooden railing that ran around every courtroom in England, at which prisoners had to stand while the judge ticked them off or sentenced them or fumbled with his black cap. The defendant’s barrister would stand next to him at the bar and plead his case.
Meanwhile, the prosecuting lawyer would insist that the prisoner was guilty and that he was ready to prove his case. If he insisted this in French he would say Culpable: prest d’averrer nostre bille, but that was a bit of a mouthful so it would be shortened to cul-prit.
Then the defendant’s fate would be handed over to a jury. If the jury couldn’t decide, then they would declare we don’t know, but they would declare it in Latin – and the Latin for we don’t know is ignoramus.
Ignoramus was thus a technical legal term until a writer called George Ruggle used it as the title for a play in 1615, the main character of which was a stupid lawyer called Ignoramus. The usage stuck and now an ignoramus is any old idiot.
This also means that the plural of ignoramus is definitely not ignorami.
Ignorami
Christians are all cretins, etymologically speaking, and cretins are all Christians. If this sounds unfair, it’s because language is much less kind than religion.
The original cretins were deformed and mentally deficient dwarves found only in a few remote valleys in the Alps. These days their condition would be called congenital iodine deficiency syndrome, but the Swiss didn’t know anything about that. All they knew was that, though these people had a problem, they were still human beings and fellow Christians. So they called them Cretins, which means Christians.
They meant this in a nice way. It was like calling them fellow humans, but of course the word got taken up by bullies and, like spastic in modern playgrounds, cretin quickly acquired a derogatory sense. So Christian became a term of abuse.
The first idiots were also Christian, or rather the first Christians were idiots. The word idiot first appears in English in the Wycliffite Bible of 1382. There, in the Book of Deeds (which we would call Acts), it says that:
Forsoth thei seynge the stedfastnesse of Petre and John, founden that thei weren men with oute lettris, and idiotis
A verse that was translated in the King James Version as:
Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men
But in the Latin of Saint Jerome, the passage ran:
videntes autem Petri constantiam et Iohannis conperto quod homines essent sine litteris et idiotae
St Peter and St John were idiots simply because they were laymen. They had no qualifications and were therefore their own men, rather than belonging to some professional class. If they had spoken their own language it would have been an idiom, and if they had been eccentrics with their own way of doing things (which they undoubtedly were) they would have been idiosyncratic.
Neither cretin nor idiot was originally meant to be an insult. One was a compliment and the other a simple description, but people are cruel and are always casting about for new ways to abuse others. As fast as we can think up technical terms and euphemisms like cretin, moron, idiot or spastic, people will take the words and use them to be nasty to others. Consider the poor moron. The term was invented in 1910 by the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded. They took an obscure Greek word, moros, which meant dull or foolish, and used it to refer to those with an IQ of between 50 and 70. The idea was that it would be a word reserved for doctors and diagnosis. Within seven years the word had escaped from medical circles and was being used as an insult.
Incidentally, moron meant dull, but in Greek oxy meant sharp. Many, many chapters ago we saw how oxygen got its name because it generated acids, and the oxy in oxymoron has the same root. So an oxymoron is a sharp softness.
The unkindest twist of the English language is, perhaps, that which happened to John Duns Scotus (1265–1308). He was the greatest theologian and thinker of his day, the Doctor Subtilis, the philosopher of the univocity of being, master of the formal distinction and of the concept of haecceity, the essential property that makes each thing this, and not that.
Duns Scotus had a formidable mind which he used to draw the finest distinctions between different ideas. This was, linguistically, his downfall and destruction.
When Duns Scotus died his many followers and disciples lived on. They pursued and expanded on his astonishingly complicated philosophical system of distinctions and differences. One could almost say that they, like their master, were hair-splitters and pedants.
In fact, people did say they were hair-splitters and pedants. When the Renaissance came along, people suddenly got rather enlightened and humanist and were terribly angry when Duns-men, as they were called, tried to contradict them with an obscure Aristotelian enthymeme. Duns-men became the enemies of progress, the idiots who would turn the clock back and return to the Dark Ages; and Duns started to be spelled dunce.
Thus did the greatest mind of his generation become a synonym for gormless. This is terribly unfair, as Duns Scotus was full of gorm. He was brimming over with the stuff. And if you don’t know what gorm is, that’s because it’s a fossil word.
Fossil-less
Do you have any gorm? It’s an important question, because if you don’t have any gorm it logically follows that you are gormless. Gormless is a fossil. Dinosaurs and trilobites once flourished, now only fossils remain, petrified and scattered. The same has happened to gorm, feck, ruth and reck. They were all once real words. Now they are frozen for ever in –less phrases.
Gorm (spelled
all sorts of ways) was a Scandinavian word meaning sense or understanding. As a twelfth-century monk called Orm put it:
& yunnc birrþ nimenn mikell gom
To þæwenn yunnkerr chilldre
– a sentiment with which we can all, I’m sure, agree. However, poor gorm (or gome) rarely got written down. It was a dialect word used by Yorkshiremen, and most of the literary action was happening in London.
However, in the nineteenth century Emily Brontë wrote a book called Wuthering Heights, in which is the line:
Did I ever look so stupid: so gormless as Joseph calls it?
Joseph is a servant who speaks with a strong Yorkshire accent, and the word gormless is clearly being brought in as an example of one of his dialect terms. Joseph would probably have used the word gorm as well, but Emily Brontë doesn’t mention it. So gormless got into one of the most famous novels ever written, while poor gorm was left to pine away and die on a lonely moor in Yorkshire.
Once upon a time there was the word effect. It was a happy, useful, innocent word until it went to Scotland. Once north of Hadrian’s Wall, the word effect was cruelly robbed of its extremities and became feck.
Indolent, vigourless Scotsmen who had no effect on things were therefore feckless. This time it was not Brontë but Thomas Carlyle, a Scot, who brought the word into common usage. He used feckless to describe the Irish and his wife.
However, it’s hard to see exactly what Carlyle meant by feckless. This is from a letter of 1842:
Poor Allan’s dust was laid in Kensal Green,—far enough from his native Kirkmahoe. M’Diarmid has a well-meant but very feckless Article upon him this week.
In another letter Carlyle wrote that the summer had made his wife feckless, and he even described how living with her in London had turned the couple into ‘a feckless pair of bodies’, ‘a pair of miserable creatures’. Anyway, Carlyle used feckless but he never used the word feck, and so the one word lived and became famous, while the other vanished into a Celtic twilight.
Reckless is far simpler and there’s more poetry in it, which is the important thing. Reck used to mean care (although it’s etymologically far from reckon). As Chaucer put it:
I recke nought what wrong that thou me proffer,
For I can suffer it as a philosopher.
Shakespeare used reck too, yet by his time it already had an archaic feel. In Hamlet, Ophelia chides her brother thus:
Do not as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.
Rede was an archaic and ancient word for advice, and reck was probably already an archaic and ancient word for take notice of. Shakespeare used reckless six times in his complete works, as much as all the other recks, reckeths and reckeds put together. Reck must already have been fading, reckless rushing headlong to the future.
If something is true, it’s the truth. If you rue your actions, you feel ruth. If you don’t rue your actions, you feel no ruth and that makes you ruthless. Ruth survived for quite a long time, and it’s uncertain as to why it died out in the end. Maybe it’s just that there are more ruthless people than ruthful ones.
Language sometimes doesn’t have an explanation. Words rise and die for no reason that an etymologist can discover. History is not immaculate, in fact it is maculate. We might feel more consolate if we could give a span, and even spick, explanation for everything, but to no avail.
And so we come, exorably, to the end of our study of fossil words. We could go on, as the language is brimming with them, but you might become listless and disgruntled. P.G. Wodehouse once remarked of a chap that, ‘if not exactly disgruntled he was far from being gruntled’. So let us continue by seeing exactly how gruntling relates to grunt.
The Frequentative Suffix
If a gem frequently sparks, we say that it sparkles. If a burning log frequently emits cracking noises, then it crackles. That’s because –le is a frequentative suffix.
With this in mind, let’s turn to grunting. To gruntle is to grunt often. If a pig makes one noise it has grunted, if it grunts again you may add the frequentative suffix and call the pig a gruntler. A medieval travel writer called Sir John Mandeville19 described the men who live in the desert near the Garden of Eden thus:
In that desert are many wild men, that are hideous to look on; for they are horned, and they speak not, but gruntle, as swines do.
But the dis in disgruntled is not a negative prefix but an intensive one. If the verb already carries negative connotations (and something that makes you keep grunting is probably no good), then the negative dis just emphasises how bad it is. Disgruntled therefore means almost the same thing as gruntled.
Some frequentatives are a little more surprising. The next time you are being jostled in a crowd, you may reflect that your fate is rather milder than somebody who is repeatedly being attacked by a jousting knight. Medieval lovers used to fond each other, and if they did this too often, they began to fondle. Fondling is a dangerous business, as sooner or later it leads to snugging, an archaic word that meant to lie down together in order to keep warm. Repeated incidences of snugging will result in snuggling, and pregnancy.
Whether you trample, tootle, wrestle or fizzle, you are being frequentative. So here’s a little puzzle (a puzzle being a question that is frequently posed). What are the originals of these frequentatives?
Nuzzle
Bustle
Waddle
Straddle
Swaddle20
Of course, the reason that you can’t get all those immediately is that a frequentative often leaves home and starts to be a word in its own right. Take the Latin pensare, which meant to think and from which we get the words pensive and pansy (a flower given to a loved one to make them think of you). The Romans thought that thinking was nothing more than repeatedly weighing things up. So pensare is a frequentative of pendere, to weigh or hang, from which we get more words than you might think.
19 There never was a Sir John Mandeville, but there is a book by him. That’s how authorship worked in the fourteenth century. Moreover, I have modernised the quotation to make it comprehensible. The gruntle is spelt gruntils in the original.
20 And the answers are: nose, burst, wade, stride and swathe.
Pending
The Latin pendere meant to hang, and its past participle was pensum. In meant not, de meant from, sus meant down …
If you are independent you are not dependent because the only things that are dependent are pendulums and pendants that hang around your neck. Pendants are therefore pending, or indeed impending. They are, at least, suspended, and are therefore left hanging in suspense.
Weighing scales hang in the balance. Scales can weigh out gold for paying pensions, stipends and compensations in pesos (but not pence, which is etymologically unrelated).
All such dispensations must, of course, be weighed up mentally. One must be pensive before being expensive. You must give equal weight to all arguments in order to have either equipoise or poise. If you don’t give equal weight to all things, your scales will hang too much to one side and you will end up with a preponderance and propensity towards your own penchants. Whether these penchants make you perpendicular, I am too polite to ask.
I hope that this section on the pendulous hung together. If it did, it was a compendium. And though there are a few more words from the same root, to include them all would require the appending of an appendix.
An appendix, in either a book or a body, is where you put all the useless crap. However, the bodily tube is more properly known as the vermiform appendix, which makes it sound even less pleasant than it is, because vermiform means wormlike, which
is something to consider next time you eat vermicelli.
Worms and their Turnings
Worms have a hard time. When not being chased about by early birds or being disturbed in their can, they get trodden on. It’s no surprise that Shakespeare records them fighting back against their oppressors:
The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on,
And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.
William Blake, on the other hand, claimed that ‘The cut worm forgives the plow’, which seems extraordinarily unlikely.
Etymologically, it’s hardly surprising that worms turn. Worm comes from the Proto-Indo-European wer, meaning turn, a reference to their bendiness. So a worm turning is not just appropriate, it’s a tautology.
Worms have come a long way down in the world, as the word worm used to mean dragon. Then from a huge firebreathing monster they became mere snakes, and slowly they declined until they became the little things in your garden being chased around by a blackbird (or sliced up by William Blake). However, the dragon-meaning survived for centuries, and as late as 1867 William Morris could still write the wonderful line, ‘Therewith began a fearful battle twixt worm and man’, with a straight face.
The one constant in the etymological journey of the worm is that man doesn’t like worms and worms don’t like men. For a long time it was believed that garden worms could crawl into your ear, and as the Old English wicga could also mean worm, we get the strange modern formation earwig, even though an earwig is technically not a worm but an insect and has nothing to do with the sort of wig you wear on your head.21
There are only two places where worms have turned and maintained some of their former greatness. One is a wormhole, which used to mean exactly what you might expect until 1957 when the word was hijacked by the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, a theoretical connection between two parts of space-time implied, if not necessitated, by the Theory of Relativity.
