The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  salad days,

  When I was green in judgment …

  And the phrase has now taken up residence in the language. We use salad days as a synonym for halcyon days, which by an odd coincidence also means salty days.

  26 The Spanish call theirs salchichón, which clearly shows the link to salsicus.

  Halcyon Days

  People talk nostalgically of the halcyon days. They hanker and pine, and in the midst of their hankering they ask if we shall ever see such halcyon days again.

  We shall.

  The Halcyon Days begin each year on 14 December and last until the 28th, and like the salad days they are, etymologically, very salty. This time the salt is Greek, and so the prefix we’re looking for is hal–, the same hal in fact that you find in the salt-producing chemicals known as halogens.

  Indeed, halcyon and halogen are etymologically almost identical: the one gives birth to salt, the other is a salty conception. That’s because halcyon is another word for the kingfisher, and kingfishers lay their eggs at sea.

  For a full and accurate explanation of all this, we shall have to turn to the Roman poet Ovid who explained it all in his Metamorphoses. Once upon a time there was a boy called Ceyx and a girl called Halcyon who fell madly in love. Unfortunately, Ceyx had to go away to sea and Halcyon would wait for him every day on the beach, gazing at the horizon and longing for her lover’s return.

  Halcyon continued this vigil until she was informed, by the utterly reliable medium of a dream, that Ceyx’s ship had sunk and he had been drowned. At this news she got so upset that she fell ill and died a couple of days later; or, as Chaucer put it in one of his most beautiful couplets:

  Alas! She said for very sorrow

  And died within the thridde morrow.

  Everybody was very upset by the whole business including the gods, who got together and decided that the least they could do for the poor couple was to turn them into birds. So Ceyx and Halcyon were raised from the dead and covered in feathers, and that’s where kingfishers come from.

  Because Halcyon had spent so long gazing out to sea, that’s where she now lays her eggs in a little floating nest; and, just to make sure she’s not disturbed, the gods have arranged that the winds should be light during her nesting season, which lasts through the second half of December. This fortnight of good weather is therefore known as the Halcyon Days.

  Of course, modern biologists scoff at Ovid’s story and dismiss it purely on the basis that it isn’t true. However, poetry is much more important than truth, and, if you don’t believe that, try using the two methods to get laid.

  Dog Days

  The Dog Days, like the Halcyon ones, are a precisely defined part of the year, or at least they were once. The second brightest star in the sky (after the Sun) is Sirius, the Dog Star, so called because it’s the largest star in the Great Dog constellation, Canis Major. However, during the height of summer you can’t see the Dog Star because it rises and sets at the same time as the Sun. The ancient Greeks worked out that this happened from 24 July to 24 August, and they noticed that this was also the most unpleasantly hot time of the year. So they, quite logically, decided that it must be the combined rays of the Sun and the Dog Star that were causing the trouble. They also thought a lot about how to cool down. The ancient Greek writer Hesiod has this advice:

  In the season of wearisome heat, then goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are feeblest, because Sirius parches head and knees and the skin is dry through heat. But at that time let me have a shady rock and wine of Biblis, a clot of curds and milk of drained goats with the flesh of an heifer fed in the woods, that has never calved, and of firstling kids; then also let me drink bright wine, sitting in the shade, when my heart is satisfied with food, and so, turning my head to face the fresh Zephyr, from the everflowing spring which pours down unfouled, thrice pour an offering of water, but make a fourth libation of wine.

  It’s well worthwhile memorising that passage and reciting it to a waiter on the first of the Dog Days. However, you must be careful, as, owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the Dog Days have slowly shifted over the last two thousand years and now begin around 6 July, although it depends on your latitude.

  None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the notion that every dog will have his day, which comes from Hamlet:

  Let Hercules himself do what he may,

  The cat will mew and dog will have his day.

  We call it the Dog Star, the Romans called it Canicula (meaning dog)27 and the Greeks called it Sirius, which meant scorching, because of the heat of the Dog Days. However, the Greeks also sometimes referred to it as Cyon (the Dog), and the star that rises just before Sirius is still called Procyon; and that same Greek word for dog – cyon – also gave the English language the word cynic.

  27 The French still call a heatwave une canicule.

  Cynical Dogs

  The Cynics were a school of ancient Greek philosophy, founded by Antisthenes and made famous by his pupil Diogenes.

  Diogenes was, by any standards, an odd chap. He lived in a barrel in the marketplace in Athens and used to carry a lamp about in broad daylight, explaining that he was trying to find an honest man. His one worldly possession was a mug that he used for drinking. Then one day he saw a peasant scooping water up with his hands and immediately threw his mug away. Accounts of his death vary, but one story is that he held his breath.

  Cynic meant doglike. But why was Diogenes’ school known as the dogs?

  There was a gymnasium near Athens for those who were not of pure Athenian blood. A gymnasium in ancient Greece wasn’t exactly the same thing as a gymnasium today. For starters, it was an open-air affair. It was more of a leafy glade than a building filled with parallel bars and rubber mats. People did do their physical training at the gymnasium, in fact they did it naked. The word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymnazein, meaning to train in the nude, which itself comes from gymnos, meaning naked. But if you could take your mind off the naked boys (which many Greek philosophers found difficult), gymnasiums were also places for socialising and debating and teaching philosophy. Diogenes’ gymnasium was known as the Gymnasium of the White Dog or Cynosarge, because a white dog had once defiled a sacrifice there by running away with a bit of meat.

  Diogenes, not being a native Athenian, was forced to teach in the Dog’s Gymnasium, which is how one hungry and ownerless canine gave his name to a whole philosophical movement. A fun little result of this is that any cynical female is, etymologically speaking, a bitch.

  Greek Education and Fastchild

  If Cynics are dogs, the Stoics were the porch philosophers because their founder Zeno taught in the painted porch or Stoa Poikile of the Great Hall in Athens. If you didn’t like either the Stoics or the Cynics you could go out to a grove that was named after a hero of the Trojan War called Akademos. It was in the grove of Akademeia that Plato taught, and all academies since are named after it, which means that the Police Academy films are all named after a hero of the Trojan War via Plato.

  The Athenians, as you can tell, were jolly philosophical chaps. This was largely because they had a wonderful education system in which the Greek children, or paedos, were taken through the whole cycle, or cyclos, of learning. Their knowledge was therefore en-cyclo-paedic.

  The Romans were so impressed with the way Greek children were taught all these different subjects that they started writing books called encyclopaedias that were meant to contain articles on every topic there was. Then, two thousand years later, the internet was invented.

  The internet works on computers, and computers work on all sorts of different programming languages. These programming languages tend to be rather complicated things that are hard to learn and, even for initiates, slow to use. So in 1994 a chap called Ward Cunningham developed a system of making rel
ated webpages that would be very simple and very fast. Because it was so quick, he called it wikiwikiweb, because wiki is Hawaiian for fast and the reduplication wikiwiki therefore means very fast indeed.

  Soon, though, people decided that wikiwiki was a bit of a mouthful, and so it was colloquially shortened to wiki. That was the state in which Larry Sanger found the word in 2001, when he had the idea of a collaborative, web-based encyclopaedia that would use the wiki system. He took the words wiki and encyclopedia and mashed them together to form Wikipedia, which is now the seventh most visited website in the world. However, few among its 365 million readers know that Wikipedia means Fastchild. Fewer still will have considered the fact that anyone who likes Wikipedia is technically and etymologically a Wikipedophile.

  Cybermen

  These days, if you aren’t wiki or cyber or virtual, you are nothing. You might as well give up and make do with real life, which mankind has been trying for thousands of years without success.

  Cyberspace is out of control and filled with cybersquatters having cybersex with cyberpunks. This would make more sense if anybody actually knew what cyber meant, and the answer may come as a shock to cyberpunks, because cyber means controlled – indeed, it comes from the same root as governed.

  Back in the 1940s there was a man called Norbert Wiener who was studying how animals and machines communicated with and controlled each other. He decided to call his field of study cybernetics after the Greek word for a steersman. A steersman controls the boat that he’s in: in Greek, he cubernans it. From this the Romans got the idea that a governor who steers the ship of state gubernans it. Even though the B has been replaced by a V in the modern governor, things that belong to the governor are still gubernatorial.

  Meanwhile, punk was an early twentieth-century American term for a homosexual, specifically the young and pliable companion of an elderly and implacable hobo. From there, punk turned into a generalised insult and then was taken as a badge of honour by noisy rockers in the 1970s. However, an etymologist can still look at the term cyberpunk and wonder what these well-governed homosexuals are up to.

  Another word that has switched its meaning entirely is virtual. Virtual reality, in case you didn’t know, is reality that isn’t real. It’s virtually real, though that’s not much better than being virtually pregnant. But what really bothers the etymologist is that very few of the things that happen in virtual reality are in the slightest bit virtuous.

  If one thing is virtually another, it’s because it shares the same virtues. Of course, virtues here don’t have to be moral virtues, they can be physical ones. If I’m virtually asleep, then I’m not asleep but possess the same physical virtues as somebody who is. A virtue doesn’t have to be good: a virtuoso torturer isn’t a good man, he’s just good at his job. It’s the sense of virtue that survives in the phrase by virtue of.

  Even though you can now achieve things by virtue of dishonesty, virtue used to be a much better thing. Courage, strength, honesty and generosity all used to be virtues, although few of those survive in virtual reality. In the ancient world, a virtue was anything that was commendable in a person. Well, I say person, but I mean man.

  Women can’t be virtuous. A virtue is that which is proper to a man. The Latin for man was vir, and virtus was the Latin word for manliness. Virtue is basically the same thing as virility.

  So if a woman were to be virtuous she would become a man-woman, which is a terrible idea. A man-woman might be so bold as to have her own opinions. She might even express them, at which point she would become a virago.

  To be fair, virago was originally a word for a heroic woman; but that’s still rather sexist, as it implies that heroism is a purely manly quality. In fact, language is irredeemably sexist; but that’s not my fault, it’s the Romans’. Look at their attitude to women in the workplace.

  Turning Trix

  Meretricious is an odd little word that lots of people get wrong. It sounds a little like merit and, as merit is a good thing, you would take a guess that meretricious means, well, meritable.

  It doesn’t. Meretricious means showy, gaudy and contemptible. However, the meret in meretricious is the same Latin root that you find in merit. The only difference is that it’s women who are doing the meriting.

  When the Romans wanted to point out that somebody was female, they would put a trix on the end on the word. It’s a habit that has largely died out, but you still find it occasionally. A female aviator is sometimes an aviatrix, a female editor can be an editrix, and a lady who is paid to dominate men is a dominatrix.

  There used to be more trixes – a tonstrix was a female hairdresser – but they slowly died out. Back in ancient Rome, though, they didn’t like women having jobs at all. In fact, almost the only women who had jobs in Rome were the women who stood in front of brothels looking for customers. The Latin for standing in front of things is pro-stitutio.

  It was a way of earning a living, almost the only one for a girl, and the Latin for earning was merere. When a man earned a living he merited it, and became meritable. A veteran soldier who had retired to spend his money could proudly call himself emeritus, meaning that he had earned all he needed and retired, which is where we get Emeritus Professors.

  That’s because a soldier was a man. But when a girl earned a living she was a meretrix, and meretrix could mean only one thing: tart. And that’s why meretricious still means tarty.

  Amateur Lovers

  The opposite of meretricious can be found hidden away in the game of tennis, where the true nature of love can also be discovered. But first, a brief note on the word tennis. It’s not called that, you know. The proper term for the game played at Wimbledon is sphairistike.

  The rules of tennis as we know them were set down by a man called Major Walton Clopton Wingfield back in the 1890s. Tennis had been played before, of course – Shakespeare refers to the game several times – but it had always been played by kings and princes in the courtyards of palaces. It wasn’t until the invention of the lawnmower in the nineteenth century that people were able to play on lawns. Major Walton Clopton Wingfield wanted to distinguish his new game from the old tennis, which came from the French word tenez, meaning hold! So he lighted on the name sphairistike, which is ancient Greek for ball-skill.

  Sphairistike became wildly popular, but there was one hitch: nobody knew how the hell to pronounce it. Did it rhyme with pike? Or with piquet? In fact, it rhymed with sticky; but nobody knew that. So rather than make fools of themselves by getting it wrong, people just decided to call it lawn tennis and to hell with Major Walton Clopton Wingfield and his Greek.

  Wingfield did keep the scoring system of the old tennis, though, and it’s there that we may find the true nature of love. You may have heard that love in tennis is a corruption of the French l’oeuf, meaning egg, because an egg looks a bit like a zero. This is a myth.28 Love is nothing because those who do something for the love of it do it for nothing. For example, people either marry for money or connections, or for love. Love therefore became a synonym for nothing, because if you do something purely for love, you get nothing. By 1742 this notion of love being zero had been taken across to games and sports. In fact, the first known reference is to the score in whist.

  Love in tennis is therefore the exact opposite of prostitution. It’s the celebration of the amateur. Amare is the Latin for love, from which we get amiable, amorous and paramour. And if you were doing something for your paramour, you wouldn’t charge for it, would you? As late as 1863, a man could still write that he was ‘not an amateur of melons’, which simply meant that he didn’t like them.

  The distinction between amateur and professional is merely a distinction between those who love what they do, and those who do it because they are paid. Unfortunately this means that all lovers are rather amateurish. They can’t help it, it’s built into the etymology.

  Love is much better than mon
ey. You should be afraid of money – that’s what money means.

  28 It is, though, true in cricket, where a zero was referred to as a duck’s egg, which then got shortened to duck.

  Dirty Money

  Money is a monster, etymologically speaking. It all comes down to the Latin word monere, and even though the connection is accidental it’s probably still significant.

  Monere was Latin for warn, and if you have a pre-monition you are forewarned. In the ancient world they believed that horrible beasts were omens of disasters. The idea was that just before the fall of an emperor or the loss of a great battle, centaurs, griffins and sphinxes would come out of wherever they were hiding and roam around in full view. These unnatural creatures, composed of the parts of other animals, were therefore called warnings, or monsters (monstrum, from monere).

  However, if you need a warning and can’t afford a centaur, geese will do just as well. People still keep guard geese because they kick up a fearsome racket if they spot an intruder and they can also be pretty vicious. You should never say boo to a goose, not unless you’re prepared for a fight. The Romans kept guard geese on the Capitoline Hill. This came in useful when Rome was attacked by the Gauls in 390 BC, so useful in fact that the Romans put up a temple in thanksgiving. But being ungrateful sods they didn’t dedicate it to geese, they dedicated it to Juno, the goddess of warnings, or Juno Moneta.

  Next door to the temple of Juno Moneta was the building where all the Roman coins were produced. In fact, the coins may have been made in part of the temple itself. Nobody is quite sure, and the sources are rather vague. What is certain is that the coin-producing building got named after the temple. It was the Moneta, and though we’ve changed all the vowels, we still call such a building a mint.