The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  In the Moneta, they produced moneta: literally warnings. The French took the word and dropped the T so that it was already money when it arrived in English. However, our adjective monetary, meaning related to money, keeps the reference to the temple and the angry geese alive and well.

  It’s only by an accident of propinquity that money is a monster. Perhaps you shouldn’t worry about it at all. Money’s not that bad. You shouldn’t be so frightened. Go on, take out that death-pledge. Sorry: mortgage.

  Death-pledges

  Anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage will be unsurprised to learn that it is, literally, a death-pledge. However, it’s the sort of thing you would only usually notice if you were taking out a mortgage on a mortuary. Mort is death, and mortal man has nothing else waiting for him. Nothing is certain in this life except death and mortgages.

  The reason a mortgage is called a death-pledge is that it can die in two ways. You can pay off the whole thing, in which case the deal dies and you own your house. However, that happy ending is far from certain in these troubled and impoverished times. The other possibility is that you fail to make a payment, the deal dies, and your house is repossessed. The whole thing was spelt out in mortifying terms in the Institutes and Laws of England in 1628:

  It seemeth that the cause why it is called mortgage is, for that it is doubtful whether the Feoffor will pay at the day limited such summe or not, and if he doth not pay, then the Land which is put in pledge vpon condition for the payment of the money, is taken from him for euer, and so dead to him vpon condition, etc. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the Tenant, etc.

  There are a lot of hidden deaths in English. Many people will have noticed the similarity between the words executive and executioner, but what have the two got in common? Is it that an executioner is just somebody who executes the sentence, just as an undertaker is someone who undertakes to bury you? No. The original legal term for execution was execute to death, from the French exécuter à mort. So you execute the sentence until they die.

  Another hidden mort comes in the word caput. Monks used to remind themselves of their own mortality by contemplating a skull. This was called a death’s head or caput mortuum, and the original owner of a caput mortuum was definitely caput. It’s enough to make you scream blue murder, which is a direct translation of the French phrase mort bleu, which itself is a non-blasphemous form of mort dieu, or death of God.

  The gage in mortgage is much more cheerful. It means pledge and is exactly the same gage that you find when you fall in love and get engaged. It’s also very closely related to waging war.

  Wagering War

  You can’t really wage anything other than war. You can try, but it sounds rather odd. Indeed, the phrase waging war gets stranger the more you look at it. Does it have anything to do with wages, or wage disputes, or maybe freeing the wage slaves? There’s a connection between all these different wages, and indeed to wagers. But you have to go back to the fourteenth century.

  A wage was, originally, a pledge or deposit. Wage is simply a different way of pronouncing the gage in mortgage and engagement.29 A wage was something given in security. From this wage you quite easily get to the modern wager: it’s merely the stake, or deposit, thrown down by a gambler. It’s also reasonably simple to see how money given in security could end up meaning money given as pay. But waging war? That involves trial by combat.

  In medieval law it was considered quite reasonable to settle a legal dispute by duelling to the death. Though somebody had to die in this system and there was no guarantee of justice, lawyers’ fees were at least kept to a minimum.

  A wronged medieval man would throw down his gage/wage (or pledge), and challenge his opponent to trial by combat. In Latin that was vadiare duellum; in French it was gager bataille; in English you waged [pledged yourself to] battle.

  Not war. Battle. It was, after all, a technical legal term for the violent resolution of individual arguments. You wagered your body in mortal combat. However, it’s easy to see how the sense of waging battle extended from the promise of violence to the act of violence.

  In the end, when two countries couldn’t agree, they started waging war against each other. This last shift in meaning could reasonably be described as wage inflation.

  29 The medievals often mixed up their Gs and Ws, which is why another word for guarantee is warranty.

  Strapped for Cash

  Why are people so often strapped for cash?

  Being strapped for cash is actually a good thing. If you’re falling down and you need something to hang on to, a strap is good. If you fall overboard, it’s a good thing if somebody throws you a strap. And if you’ve fallen from the ship of solvency and are drowning in a sea of debt, then you very much want somebody to throw you a strap. Of course, it means that you’re currently in debt, but to be strapped for cash is better than to have no cash at all.

  Oddly, the same metaphor has been invented twice. These days, when a bank is about to go bankrupt, the government throws them a lifeline. This means that the bank survives, although they are still strapped for cash.

  Incidentally, bank comes from an old Italian word for bench, because money-lenders used to sit behind a bench in the marketplace from which they would do their deals. If a money-lender failed to make good on one of his arrangements, his bench would be ceremonially broken, and the old Italian for a broken bench was banca-rotta or bankrupt.

  Fast Bucks and Dead Ones

  So almost every form of money involves death, danger and destruction. A frightened word-lover might start to wish that the stuff had never been invented at all. It is, after all, possible to run a society without any money. America, which is now the land of the fast buck, had no money until European colonists arrived.

  Well, almost. On the coasts of the North-East they used clam shells called wampums that could be threaded together into necklaces, and in Mexico they used coffee beans as a standard by which to barter; but the point, essentially, stands. There were no coins, no notes, no green and folding pictures of presidents.

  This presented a problem to those colonists who wanted to trade. The natives looked on coins and banknotes with a mixture of scorn and confusion. What were they meant to do with that? You couldn’t wear it round your neck, you couldn’t even make a nice cup of coffee from it.

  Early attempts at trading involved tobacco. Tobacco made a lot more sense than coins. With tobacco the peace pipe could be pulled out, and if you combined it with the coffee beans of Mexico you might feel almost civilised. But of course tobacco needs to be weighed out, and it’s rather bulky. The harvests go up and down, causing sudden inflation and deflation, and you need a warehouse to store it in.

  So the traders eventually gave up on tobacco and moved to another staple item that everybody knew and valued: deerskins. A deerskin can be slapped over the saddle of a horse, it’s thin and light, and when you’re not spending it you can use it to keep warm. Buckskins soon became the standard unit of barter in North America, and a standard unit of barter is, in effect, money. So it was buckskins, or bucks for short, that were used for trade.

  With this in mind, let us turn to Conrad Weiser, the first man ever to make a buck. He was born in Germany in 1696, but his family, being Protestant, were forced to flee to Britain in 1709. There they were held in a refugee camp just outside London before being sent to populate the colonies on the Hudson River. In 1712, when Conrad was sixteen, his father took the rather extraordinary step of sending his son to live with the Mohawk tribe for half a year. Conrad learnt the language and the customs of the Iroquois and started an illustrious career as a diplomat for the British among the native tribes of America.

  Despite having fourteen children, Conrad still found the time to negotiate most of the significant treaties between the British and the disgruntled tribes and convince them that their real enemies we
re the French. In 1748 Conrad was sent into Ohio to negotiate with the tribes of the Five Nations. His mission had several purposes. One was to make peace and seek amends after the murder of some colonists. In this he succeeded. The tribal council told him that:

  … what was done we utterly abhor as a thing done by the Evil Spirit himself; we never expected any of our People wou’d ever do so to our Brethren [the British]. We therefore remove our Hatchet which, by the influence of the Evil Spirit, was struck into your Body, and we desire that our Brethren the Gov. of New York & Onas may use their utmost endeavours that the thing may be buried in the bottomless Pit.

  … which is one of the earliest references to burying the hatchet. The next item on the agenda, though, was rather more tricky. It involved rum. Specifically, it involved a request that the British would stop selling rum to the Ohio Indians. To this Weiner replied that:

  … you never agree about it—one will have it, the other won’t (tho’ very few), a third says we will have it cheaper; this last we believe is spoken from your Hearts (here they Laughed). Your Brethren, therefore, have order’d that every cask of Whiskey shall be sold to You for 5 Bucks in your Town, & if a Trader offers to sell Whiskey to You and will not let you have it at that Price, you may take it from him & drink it for nothing.

  And that is the very first reference to a buck as a unit of American currency. The deal was then finalised with a belt of wampum.

  This was good news for American trade, but bad news for American deer. However, it was all about to get much worse for the American buck. Not content with their skins, the Americans were about to make a phrase out of their horns.

  The Buck Stops Here

  You might assume that passing the buck has something to do with passing a dollar to the person next to you. This is not so. After all, passing a dollar would hardly shift responsibility to someone. The only thing that these two bucks have in common is a dead deer.

  Not, of course, that you pass a whole animal. That would be ridiculous. The phrase to pass the buck simply involves another part of the buck’s corpse.

  Deer don’t have a good time in language. Their entrails are put into pies and their skins are used in lieu of currency; one of the few parts of the buck deer that remains is the horn. Waste not, want not.

  A buck’s horn makes a very pleasant-looking knife handle, and a knife has many uses. You can cut up venison with a knife, or you can skin another deer and make a fast buck. You can also use a knife to mark the dealer in a game of poker by stabbing it into the table in front of whoever currently has responsibility for handing round the cards.

  This isn’t done much by people who value their furniture, but in the Wild West life and woodwork were cheap, and the first reference to passing the buck comes from the diary of a ‘border ruffian’ during the fight for Kansas in 1856. On approaching a place called Buck Creek, he says that ‘we remembered how gladly would we “pass” the Buck as at “poker”’.

  This is odd because the dealer usually has a slight advantage in poker. However, among the border ruffians of the Wild West the dealer probably stood a good chance of being shot, as, if you suspect there’s cheating going on, the dealer is the first chap you should murder.

  So bucks were passed without cease until the 1940s when they finally stopped in a prison in El Reno, Oklahoma. The prison governor had decided that all responsibility ended with him. He dealt, and the prisoners received. So he had a sign put up in his office saying that ‘THE BUCK STOPS HERE’.

  Of course, the buck didn’t really stop there. The prison governor had to answer to the state government and then to the federal government and then to the President, with whom the buck would grind to a final and undeniable halt. This point was not lost upon an aide to Harry S. Truman who visited the prison and saw the sign. He liked it so much that he had a replica made. He gave it to President Truman, who put it up in his office and made the phrase famous.

  So are all bucks really deer? Almost.

  Back to Howth Castle and Environs

  So the humble buck-deer is the source of all things buck, with one exception. Buckwheat, which looks like it should be the wheat that bucks eat, has nothing whatsoever to do with deer.

  The leaves of buckwheat look very similar to the leaves of a beech tree. The German for beech is Buche and so buckwheat is really beechwheat.

  Beech trees were important to the ancient Germans. Beechwood is soft, so soft that it’s easy to carve things in it, and that’s exactly what the Germans used to do. Beech, buche or bok, as it was called in Old High German, was the standard material for writing on. Even when wood was finally overtaken by the newfangled invention of parchment, the Germans kept the name, and so did the English. Bok became boc became book.

  This is a book. The glorious insanities of the English language mean that you can do all sorts of odd and demeaning things to a book. You can cook it. You can bring a criminal to it, or, if the criminal refuses to be brought, you can throw it at him. You may even take a leaf out of it, the price of lavatory paper being what it is. But there is one thing that you can never do to a book like this. Try as and how you might, you cannot turn up for it. Because a turn-up for the books [continued on page 1]

  Quizzes

  In Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (often erroneously referred to as Alice Through the Looking Glass), Humpty Dumpty tells Alice: ‘There’s glory for you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said.

  Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’

  ‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.

  ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’

  ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

  However, as the greatest joy a human being can achieve in this sorrowful world is to get one up on his or her fellow man or woman by correcting their English, and as I have spent far too long consulting dictionaries, here’s a list of some common English words and what the dictionaries say they actually mean:

  Burgeon – To bud

  Blueprint – The absolutely final plans that are sent to the factory

  Backlash – The small period of inactivity when a system of cogs is reversed

  Celibate – Unmarried

  Compendium – Brief summary

  Condone – Forgive

  Coruscate – To glow intermittently

  Decimate – To reduce by 10 per cent

  Enormity – Crime

  Effete – Exhausted

  Fulsome – Over the top

  Jejune – Unsatisfying

  Noisome – Annoying

  Nauseous – Causing nausea

  Pleasantry – Joke

  Pristine – Unchanged

  Refute – To utterly disprove

  Restive – Refusing to move (obviously)

  Scurrilous – Obscene

  Swathe – The area of grass cut with one stroke of a scythe

  As you will have learnt from the preceding stroll through the English language, it’s almost impossible to guess where a word has come from or where it’s going to go to. So here, just to puzzle­ you, are a series of quizzes in which you have to guess where a word has come from or where it’s going to go to.

  We shall start with some names of famous people. Except that I haven’t given you the names, I’ve given you the etymological meaning. So, for example, if I were to write God of war and man of peace, the answer would be me, Mark Forsyth, because Mark comes from Mars, the Roman god of battles, and Forsyth is Gaelic for man of peace. Got that? Go
od. Let us begin. (Answers below.)

  Politicians of the last hundred years

  Blessed, handsome and crooked (US President)

  Courageous cabbage (European politician)

  Noble wolf who lives in a hut (Second World War)

  God loved the ugly-face (US President)

  Blessed one from Mosul (Second World War)

  Music

  God loves a mud-caked, travelling wolf (composer; clue: wolves)

  My little French lady (female pop star; clue: my lady)

  Loud war in the vegetable garden (composer; clue: he wouldn’t have heard it anyway)

  Tattooed javelin-thrower (female pop star; clue: another word for javelins)

  The dwarf in the priest’s garden (male rock star; clue: middle­ name Aaron)

  Glamour

  Victorious goatherd (actress; clue: baby goat)

  Christmas councillor (actress; clue: odd name as she’s Israeli)

  Cruel twin (actor; clue: a kind of missile)

  The moon at the ford of blood (supermodel; clue: ----ford)

  He who listens among the cows (TV; clue: cow---)

  Writers

  Little Richard’s husband (nineteenth-century novelist)

  Good Christian (twentieth-century novelist)

  Virile wonder (seventeenth-century poet)

  Pants-maker in a peaceful land (fourteenth-century poet)

  Tiny foreign snake (twentieth-century novelist)

  And the answers are:

  Politicians of the last hundred years

  Blessed, handsome and crooked = Barack Hussein Obama