The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  But the name Sandwich didn’t stick, and Cook died before his sponsor could even hear of the attempt. The poor Earl of Sandwich has had to make do with the South Sandwich Islands (an uninhabited chain of rocks near the South Pole), Montague Island (an uninhabited island near Alaska), and every sandwich shop, sandwich-maker, and sandwich filling in the entire world. And he managed that latter feat without ever going near a breadknife.

  The Earl of Sandwich was a gambler, and not just any sort of gambler. He was an addict who lost money hand over fist over hand over fist. Even by the British standards of the time he was considered a bit odd, and the British were famous for gambling. The first and only account of the origin of the world’s favourite snack comes from a French book of 1765 about what terrible gamblers the English are. It runs thus:

  The English, who are profound thinkers, violent in their desires, and who carry all their passions to excess, are altogether extravagant in the art of gaming: several rich noblemen are said to have ruined themselves by it: others devote their whole time to it, at the expense of their repose and health. A minister of state passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming table, so absorbed in play, that, during the whole time, he had no subsistence but a bit of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he eat without ever quitting the game. The new dish grew highly in vogue, during my residence in London: it was called by the name of the minister who invented it.

  The author didn’t mention the name of the minister, because he was a Frenchman writing for a French audience in French;23 so there would be no point in his explaining the origin of an English word. It’s therefore a delicious twist in the tale that sandwich is now one of the few English words that everybody in France knows too.

  There’s a myth that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich. He did not. He had servants and chefs to actually make his food for him. Sandwich simply made sandwiches cool. People have almost certainly been stuffing things between two slices of bread since the stuff was invented around the end of the last ice age. What the Earl of Sandwich did was to take a humble little snack that you wouldn’t think twice about, and give it associations of aristocracy, power, wealth, luxury and 24-hour gambling.

  Great men and women do not busy themselves in the kitchen hoping to achieve the immortality that can be conferred by a recipe book. They simply wait until a food is named after them. Take Margherita Maria Teresa Giovanna, Queen of Italy and wife of Umberto I. She never climbed Mount Stanley, but Mount Stanley’s highest peak still bears her name. She certainly never cooked any pizzas: they were made for her, and they had to be fit for a queen.

  Italian aristocrats of the nineteenth century didn’t eat pizza. It was peasant food, flavoured with that peasant favourite: garlic. However, in the 1880s, European royalty, wary of revolution, were all trying to be nice to the common men whom they ruled. So when King Umberto and Queen Margherita visited Naples, the home of the pizza, a man named Raffaele Esposito decided to make a pizza fit for the lips of the queen.

  Esposito was the owner of the Pizzeria di Pietro e Basta Così, and he got over the garlic problem by simply not using any garlic, an idea that was previously unheard of. He then decided to make the pizza properly patriotic and Italian by modelling it on the colours of the flag: red, white and green. So he added tomatoes for the red (nobody had done this before), mozzarella for the white, and herbs for the green. He then named it Pizza Margherita and sent it, in June 1889, to the queen.

  To be honest, Queen Margherita probably didn’t deign to eat the first margherita, but she did have one of her servants write a note saying thank you. Thus has her name become immortal, and a coded version of the Italian flag is on the menu of every pizza restaurant in the world.

  The Italian flag consists of three vertical stripes. This design is based on le Tricolore, the flag of the French Revolution.

  23 In case you were wondering, the quotation reproduced here comes from a 1772 translation. From the fact that it doesn’t even feel the need to mention sandwiches, we can assume that everybody in England now knew the name.

  The French Revolution in English Words

  When the world changes, language changes. New things need new words, and the new words of a period betray the inventions of the age. The Vietnam War gave American English bong, poontang, and credibility gap.

  You can follow the history of the English-speaking world by watching the new words flow by. The forties gave us genocide, quisling, crash-landing, debrief and cold war. The fifties gave us countdown, cosmonaut, sputnik and beatnik. The sixties gave us fast food, jetlag and fab. And so on through Watergate, yuppie, Britpop and pwned.

  But nothing has ever been as new as the French Revolution, which was essentially a mob of new ideas armed with pitchforks and intent on murder. Every new event, every new idea, had to be rendered for the English-speaking world in new words that were being imported from the French. Each twist, turn, beheading and storming was reported a few days later in Britain and the course of history can be seen in the words that were imported from French.

  1789 aristocrat

  1790 sans culottes

  1792 capitalist, regime, émigré

  1793 disorganised, demoralised (meaning made immoral), guillotine

  1795 terrorism (meaning government by terror)

  1797 tricolore

  And the tricolore, as we know, would survive both as a flag and a pizza topping. Moreover, the French contribution to the English language, which had been going on for centuries, would continue for centuries more.

  About 30 per cent of English words come from French, though it depends, of course, on how you’re counting. This means that, though English is basically a Germanic language, we are, at least, one third romantic.

  Romance Languages

  French is a romance language, because the French are, by definition, romantic.

  Once upon a time there was a thing called the Roman empire that was ruled by Romans in Rome. However, the language they spoke was not called Roman; it was called Latin.

  The Roman empire was a grand affair. They had lots of great authors, like Virgil and Ovid, who wrote books in Latin. They also had a frighteningly efficient army that spread death and Latin to every part of the known world.

  But empires fall and languages change. Six hundred years ago, Chaucer could write ‘al besmotered with his habergeon’, but it’s difficult today to make out what he meant, unless you’ve studied Chaucerian English.

  The same thing happened to the Romans and their Latin. There was no sudden break, but little by little their language changed, until nobody in Rome could understand the great Roman authors any more, unless they had studied Latin at school. Slowly, people had to start distinguishing the old Latin from the language that people were speaking on the streets of Rome, which came to be known as Romanicus.

  The Dark Ages darkened and the difference between Latin and Romanicus grew larger and larger. Latin was preserved in a way. Classical Latin, or something very like it, became the language of the Catholic Church and of academic discourse. If you wanted to write something that would be taken seriously by a pope or a professor you had to do so in Latin. Even as late as 1687, Isaac Newton still needed to call his great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica and publish it in Latin.

  Yet in the Middle Ages, most people didn’t want to read books about theoretical theology. They wanted stories about knights in shining armour and beautiful damsels in distress. They wanted fire-breathing dragons, enchanted mountains and fairylands beyond the oceans. So such stories got written by the bucketful, and they were romanice scribere, that is to say they were written in Romanic (the –us had been dropped by this stage).

  Not all versions of Romanic were the same. There was the Romanic that had developed in Rome, another one in France, another in Spain, another in Romania. But Romanic became the catch-all term
for all these languages and then for all the stories that were written in them.

  Then lazy people stopped pronouncing the i in Romanic and the stories and the languages in which they were written stopped being Romanic and started to be romances.

  And that’s why, to this day, stories of brave, handsome knights and distressed damsels are called romances; and when somebody tries to reproduce the atmosphere of such a tale by taking moonlit walks, or lighting candles at dinner, or remembering birthdays, they are being romantic or Roman.

  Peripatetic Peoples

  One word that has absolutely nothing to do with Roman, romance or Romania is Romany. The people who have for centuries travelled around Europe in caravans have had an awful lot of names, and all of them are insanely inaccurate. The most common name given to them by suspicious house-dwellers is gypsy, a name that derives from the utterly false idea that they are from Egypt.

  Gypsy and Egyptian used to be completely interchangeable words. Shakespeare, in Antony and Cleopatra, refers to Cleopatra’s ‘gypsy lust’ in the very first speech. So where did this idea come from?

  The Romany ended up being called Egyptians because of a single event in 1418, when a band of them arrived in Augsburg claiming to be from ‘Little Egypt’. What exactly they meant by this is unclear, but they wanted money and safe conduct, which was given to them by the authorities and then denied them by the people. The Egyptian idea caught on, and a legend grew up that the Roma were cursed to wander the Earth because when Joseph, Mary and Jesus were obliged to escape the wrath of Herod by fleeing to Egypt, a local tribe had denied them food and shelter. The gypsies, it was reasoned, were the descendants of this tribe, condemned to suffer the same fate for all eternity.

  In fact, the Roma are not from Egypt but from India. We know this because their language is more closely related to Sanskrit and Hindi than to anything else. The word Roma comes from Rom, their word for man, which derives ultimately from domba, a Sanskrit term for a kind of musician.

  That hasn’t stopped the legends of their origin spreading, though. The Egyptian mistake has been perpetuated in Hungary, where they were known as Pharaoh-Nepek, or Pharaoh’s people. But different countries have different legends and names, all of which are untrue. In Scandinavia they were thought to be from Tartary and were called the Tatars, in Italy it was Walachia and Walachians.

  The Spanish believed that the Romany were Flemish Belgians. Why they thought this is something of a mystery. Most of the other European mistakes were at least based on the idea that the Roma had come from somewhere eastern and exotic. Indeed, one theory runs that the Spanish were only joking. Whatever the reasoning, the Spanish started to call both the Roma and their style of music Flemish, or Flamenco.

  The French thought that they must come from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) and called them Bohemians. Then, in 1851, a penniless Parisian writer called Henri Murger came to write about life in the city’s Latin Quarter. He decided that the scorn that most of his fellow artists felt for convention made them social Bohemians. So he called his novel Scènes de la vie de bohème. The word caught on. Thackeray used it in Vanity Fair, and Puccini took Murger’s book and turned it into an opera called La Bohème. And that’s why unconventional and insolvent artists are known to this day as Bohemians.

  From Bohemia to California (via Primrose Hill)

  Bohemia holds a special place in literary geography. The third scene of the third act of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale occurs upon the shores of Bohemia. Indeed, the first line makes sure of it:

  Thou art perfect, then, our ship has touched

  Upon the deserts of Bohemia?

  What is so special about that? Well, let’s jump forward by a century and quote Tristram Shandy:

  … and there happening throughout the whole kingdom of Bohemia to be no sea-port town whatever—

  —How the deuce should there, Trim? cried my uncle Toby; for Bohemia being totally inland, it could have happened no otherwise.

  —It might, said Trim, if it had pleased God.

  Whether or not it pleased God, the fallacious notion that Bohemia isn’t landlocked pleased Shakespeare, and Bohemia gained in fiction what it never had in fact. Never? Well, almost never. Uncle Toby doesn’t seem to know that Bohemia did get a tiny bit of territory on the coast of the Adriatic for a short period in the late thirteenth century, and again in the early sixteenth.

  Shakespeare almost certainly didn’t know that Bohemia had ever been anything other than landlocked. Shakespeare didn’t give a damn about geography. In The Tempest, Prospero is abducted from his palace in Milan and bundled down to the docks under cover of darkness. Seventy-four miles overnight is a good bit of bundling in the days before the Ferrari. Not that that bothered the Bard. He had people sailing from Verona and a sail-maker working in Bergamo, an Italian town that’s over a hundred miles from the nearest port.

  Writers these days devote their time to research, Shakespeare devoted his to writing. He set a whole play in Venice, apparently unaware that there were any canals there; at least he never mentions any, and whenever the city pops up he refers to it as a land, even though it’s in the sea.

  Shakespeare seems never to have consulted a map, and anybody who feels too sniffy about that can, like Cleopatra, go and hang themselves from the top of the pyramids. After all, fiction is only fact minus time. If the polar ice caps keep melting the sea will, eventually, come to Verona, to Milan and finally to Bergamo. Then the Sun will expand and the Earth, in a few billion years’ time, will be a parched and burning rock, and the charred bones of Shakespeare, resting in their grave, will be vindicated because all the canals in Venice will be dry.

  The poet A.E. Housman took the same attitude with his poem ‘Hughley Steeple’. In a letter to his brother he wrote:

  I ascertained by looking down from Wenlock Edge that Hughley Church could not have much of a steeple. But as I had already composed the poem and could not invent another name that sounded so nice, I could only deplore that the church at Hughley should follow the bad example of the church at Brou, which persists in standing on a plain after Matthew Arnold said [in a poem called ‘The Church at Brou’] that it stands among mountains.

  A French playwright called Alfred de Vigny once wrote a play set in London about the doomed poet Chatterton. Apparently it’s a rather good play if you’re French, but any Londoner is bound to snigger when Chatterton’s friends set off to hunt wild boar on Primrose Hill, which is a small park in a rather leafy little suburb. However, Primrose Hill adjoins London Zoo, so it would only take a loose railing or two to render de Vigny right, and Londoners endangered.

  Under the tutelage of time, nonsense becomes geography. The Greeks believed in a country called Amazonia filled with fierce female warriors that never existed. Then, a couple of thousand years later, an explorer called Francisco de Orellana was attacked by angry women during a voyage up a big South American river, so he called it the Amazon. Or take the case of the utterly fictional island of California.

  California

  The first description of California was written in Spain in about 1510, which is odd because, at the time, no European had been to the western coast of the Americas. But fiction usually beats fact to the punch.

  The description was written by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, and the reason that he was able to write it with such authority was that California was an entirely fictional place.

  Montalvo wrote and compiled stories of high and wonderful chivalry. He had knights in gleaming armour, dragons, sorcerers, maidens in distress, and wonderful exotic locations that he populated with fantastic creatures. In his fourth book, the Exploits of Esplandian, he invented a strange island that was near to the lost Garden of Eden.24

  Montalvo wrote:

  Know that on the right hand from the Indies exists an island called California very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise; a
nd it was populated by black women, without any man existing there, because they lived in the way of the Amazons. They had beautiful and robust bodies, and were brave and very strong. Their island was the strongest of the World, with its cliffs and rocky shores. Their weapons were golden and so were the harnesses of the wild beasts that they were accustomed to domesticate and ride, because there was no other metal in the island than gold.

  This gives you some idea of Montalvo’s imagination, and also of why the promise of these strong-bodied, sex-starved ladies might have appealed to the lusty Spanish explorers who were sailing off to the New World. We know that Christopher Columbus’ son owned a copy of Montalvo’s work, and Cortés, the first European to enter the Pacific, referred to it in a letter of 1524. What’s more, the place we now call California was thought to be an island at the time.

  Of course, California was never actually an island, but owing to a mistake by an exploratory monk, European map-makers believed that it was an island from the sixteenth century up until about 1750. How the explorers got it so wrong is unclear,25 but as late as 1716 an English geographer was able to write:

  California

  This Island was formerly esteem’d a peninsula, but now found to be intirely surrounded by Water.

  Which is good enough for me, and it was good enough for the Spaniards who were deciding what to name this temperate paradise. The explorers decided to name it after the magical land of ferocious (and attractive) women who had appeared in Montalvo’s chivalric fantasy.

  Montalvo called his island California because it was ruled by a beautiful queen called Calafia. In the Exploits of Esplandian, Calafia has been persuaded to bring her army of ferocious (and attractive) women, plus some trained griffins, to fight alongside Muslims and against Christians at the siege of Constantinople. However, Calafia falls in love with Esplandian, is defeated, taken prisoner and converts to Christianity. Then she returns to the island of California with her Spanish husband, and her trained griffins.