Then there are some less familiar words, for those who want to build their vocabulary, or already have one:
A philippic is a bitter tirade, usually condemning a particular individual. The original philippics took place in Athens and were made in denunciation of Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s daddy) by Demosthenes, who argued that the foreign king was taking on too much power. He was right.
Mithridatism means to build up a tolerance to poison by taking gradual amounts of it (usually used metaphorically), a strategy employed by Mithridates the Great. Mithridates aspired to an Alexander-like Hellenic empire, fighting—at times with remarkable success—the greatest Roman generals of his day, including Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey. He failed.
A lucullan feast is over the top in lavish luxury and sumptuousness, like every meal Mithridates’ foe Lucullus ever ate after returning from his great victories in the East. Cicero and Pompey were frequent party crashers.
A cicerone is a learned tour guide, after Cicero, the Roman senator renowned to be the greatest Latin orator of all time, but whose brilliant tongue caused his downfall. In the series of speeches he called the Phillipics (in reference to Demosthenes, thus coining the term), Cicero viciously attacked Mark Antony, the wrong man to piss off at the time. After Cicero’s execution and dismemberment, Antony’s wife stabbed Cicero’s vaunted tongue over and over again with her hairpin, just in case he hadn’t gotten the message.
spoon·er·ism n. Swapping the beginning of words in speech, as in getting it bass ackwards.
You may never have heard the term but you’ve surely made the mistake. Reverend William Archibald Spooner spent more than sixty years at Oxford as a student, teacher, and dean whose error-prone speaking style made for some pretty entertaining lectures.
“The Lord is a shoving leopard,” he supposedly uttered in one class. Among his other alleged flubs are “It is kiss-tomary to cuss the bride,” his telling a wayward student, “You’ve tasted two worms,” and his famous toast, “Let us raise our glasses to our queer old dean!”
Small, pink-faced, and nearsighted, the beloved Spooner was the Mr. Magoo of Oxford, but he could get prickly about his odd fame. “You don’t want a speech,” he said to a group of clamoring students. “You only want me to say one of those . . . things.” Unlike many of the other folks in this volume, Spooner eventually became a good sport about his eponymous fame, even if he maintained he only ever made his trademark mistake once.*
syph·i·lis n. A type of venereal disease.
Syphilus was a New World shepherd descended from the lost race of Atlantis who began losing his copious flock of beasts during a terrible drought. Cursing Apollo, Syphilus smashed the sun god’s temples and started worshipping someone else. Miffed, Apollo struck the shepherd down with a horrendous new affliction.
He first wore buboes dreadful to the sight,
First felt strange pains and sleepless passed the night;
From him the malady received its name,
The neighboring shepherds caught the spreading flame.
Although you might think he’s implying something with that last line about the amorous habits of shepherds, the author of the poem didn’t even know that you caught the disease from sex. Girolamo Fracastoro of Verona was a Renaissance man’s Renaissance man, a highly esteemed Latin poet, dabbler in astronomy (he and Copernicus were pals), and the greatest physician of his day. He had two goals with Syphilis, or the French Disease: one, to explore the nature of a dreaded malady, and two, to blame it all on the French.
Writing sixteen years later, Dottore Fracastoro used his fictional shepherd’s name as the clinical term for the disease in his treatise On Contagion and Contagious Diseases. In this work, Fracastoro theorized that certain types of sickness were spread by tiny “seeds” traveling person-to-person through bodily contact, the air, or a contaminated intermediary. Although often hailed as the father of germ theory, Fracastoro had zero conception of microscopic organisms; rather, he thought these poisonous seeds resulted from a bum planetary alignment of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. Still, his description of how infectious diseases traveled represented an advancement in the field of medicine.
tan·ta·lize v. To tempt with the unattainable.
Tantalus was one of Zeus’s many half-mortal progeny, and his worst-behaved. Invited to Olympus for a feast of the gods, Tantalus embarrassed his dad by stealing nectar and ambrosia from the table and smuggling it back down to the mortal plane to share with his fellow nondeities. This crime cost him big-time in the afterlife. Tantalus was banished to Tartarus, the deepest part of the underworld, and forced to stand in a river up to his chin surrounded by trees full of ripe, low-hanging fruit. If he tried to drink, the water would flow faster and dip, and if he reached for the fruit, wind would draw the branches up out of his grasp.
Forever.
taw·dry adj. Slutty, in a cheap and sordid way.
Once upon a time (the middle of the seventh century), there was a young English princess named Æthelthryth, or, as the Normans would later call her, Audrey. Princess Audrey was widowed after a marriage that, we are told, was never consummated. She took a vow of chastity but her father the king required that Audrey marry again; her new hubby, understandably less than thrilled about her promise to God, bribed the local bishop to make the vow go away. The bishop instead helped Audrey escape, but hubby got wise and gave chase. Divine intervention in the form of a prolonged high tide provided Audrey cover for her getaway, causing her husband to give up and find himself a more ready gal to marry. Becoming a nun, Audrey founded the Abbey of Ely. Many years later, as she lay dying after a life of good works, Audrey developed a red, burning tumor around her neck, which she gladly accepted as just punishment for the many frivolous necklaces she had worn in her youth. As a reward for Audrey’s extreme devotion to not having sex, she was sainted, and her feast day was celebrated with an annual fair held at Ely.
In a show of medieval irony, a certain kind of frilly silk neckerchief was known as the lace of Saint Audrey, or “Taudrey Lace.” This item was a top seller at the Taudrey fair, especially amongst “country wenches” who bought the cheapest and gaudiest varieties, paying little heed to Audrey’s cautionary neck-tumor-for-necklace tale.
As for how Audrey got to be tawdry, similar contractions happen with ’twere, ’tis, and another initial-A saint, Anthony, in the archaic terms tantony bell, tantony crutch, and tantony pig. Saint Anthony was the patron saint of swineherds, and the tantony was the runt of the litter; tantony came figuratively to mean one who follows too close behind, as in, Don’t tantony me!
BANTERS AND BOBBIES
Slang is the most significant divider between the Englishes spoken on the opposing shores of the Atlantic, as well as the main vehicle by which names move into words, so it’s no surprise John Bull’s English has a few anonyponyms obscure to the Yankee ear.
A mackintosh is a raincoat, named after the Scotsman who first successfully marketed the stuff it was made out of. In 1823 Charles Macintosh patented a material made out of India rubber and naphtha, a tar by-product, with the purpose of creating waterproof clothing. A mackintosh is now more commonly called a mac, and in either form it has become slang for a condom.
Titchy means something really small, as in tiny, and derives from Little Tich, the stage name of Harry Relph, a fourish-foot-tall English music-hall comedian famed for his “Big Boot” dance, performed in twenty-eight-inch-long shoes. His nickname “Tich,” however, came from the Tichborne claimant, a man who in 1866 convinced the mother of Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne that he was the son she had lost to the sea twelve years earlier, never mind that he had put on a couple hundred pounds, changed hair color, and mysteriously lost the ability to speak French. The Tichborne scandal filled London papers for a decade, until the claimant—real name Arthur Orton, formerly a butcher from Wagga Wagga, Australia—was convicted of perjury and sentenced to fourteen years’ hard labor. Relph, a pudgy young child at the time of the tri
al, was called Tich for his resemblance to the enormously obese Orton.
In 1829, Home Secretary Robert Peel established the first police force in London—one of the first such groups in the world—and made further history by choosing Scotland Yard as its base of operations. Peel had begun his law-enforcement career in Ireland, where he organized the Royal Irish Constabulary (later muscle for the potato-picking scabs of Charles Boycott), earning him the nickname “Orange Peel.” His foot soldiers were known derisively as peelers, a term adopted by Londoners, who also called the policemen bobbies. Unpopular though they may have been, Bobby’s boys proved hugely effective, helping to launch a political career that saw Peel get elected prime minister twice before coming to grief over the Potato Famine.
While the Irish were starving, the English were getting fat. In 1863, an undertaker and carpenter named William Banting wrote A Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public in which he outlined how he had lost fifty pounds in no time at all while eating an extra meal a day and not exercising. He did this by forsaking carbs and sugar; in other words, he did the Atkins diet a hundred years before Dr. Atkins created it. Banting’s self-published pamphlet swiftly became an international phenomenon, finding a success that eluded his American forebear, Dr. Graham. Unlike the Graham diet, however, no religious angle existed in Banting’s—it was just about getting skinnier. “Do you bant?” became the question everyone asked each other, at least among the bourgeois set. The verb, sadly, is obsolete today even in British English, though not quite obsolete all together.
Tues·day n. The third day of the week, and usually the most boring.
Have you ever wondered how we got the Tues- in Tuesday? When Germanic types adopted the Roman week, they decided to make some changes. Sun-day and Moon-day they translated without prejudice, but for the rest of the week the Teutons wanted their own gods watching over them, and so instead of having the days of Mars, Mercury, Jove, and Venus, they created Tiw’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day, and Frig’s day. (For some unknown reason, the Teutons had no problem with Saturn and let him have his day, which is ironic, since in Romance languages Saturn was the one god’s name not kept; instead, most adopted some form of the Hebrew word sabbath.)
Woden/Wotan and Frig/Fricka will be familiar to lovers of Wagner, as will Thor to aficionados of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; but who on earth was Tiw? Although god of martial glory (which is why he replaced Mars), Tiw had a rather unfortunate incident with Fenrir, an apocalyptically dangerous wolf. Fenrir broke every shackle put upon him, so the gods of Asgard called upon the dwarves of Svartálfaheim to devise a magic ribbon that was thin as silk, light as air, and unbreakable, which the little fellows fabricated from the breath of fish, a woman’s beard, the sound of a cat’s footsteps, and a few of their other favorite things, none of which exist any longer as a result.
“You’d sure look good in this ribbon,” the gods all told Fenrir, but the wolf, sensing a trap, said he’d only try it on if Tiw held his hand hostage in the wolf ’s mouth. Tiw, brave, honest, and not all that smart, did as the wolf requested. Once the ribbon was on, Fenrir was trapped, and the gods all laughed and kept laughing, even when Fenrir bit Tiw’s hand off. In light of his good faith, Tiw was made the god of oaths, treaties, and contracts. He also became known, aptly enough, as the one-handed god.
tup·per·ware n. A reusable plastic storage container.
Pedestrian though they seem today, the idea of plastic food containers was so revolutionary in the late 1940s that inventor Earl Tupper had a heck of a time selling them. His patented “burping seal”—that guarantee of freshness—baffled consumers. Mr. Tupper’s product might never have taken off if not for Brownie Wise, a preternaturally well-named single mother from Detroit who started selling Tupperware at social gatherings and soon was encouraging other women to follow her example. So successful was Wise that in 1951 Tupper pulled his product out of stores and put all sales directly into her hands.
Although today thought of as a quaint relic of the preliberated housewife, the Tupperware party was in fact a progressive step, as all over America (and soon the world) housewives got a taste of entrepreneurship and cold, hard cash. Selling Tupperware was about making money, and more: Wise was a female Norman Vincent Peale who dared women to dream and offered them the “suffrage of success.” She herself took to that freedom with glad alacrity, tooling around in a pink Cadillac and becoming the first woman to appear on the cover of BusinessWeek. Jealous of her fame, Tupper fired her. Shortly thereafter, the inventor divorced his wife, sold his company for sixteen million dollars, gave up his U.S. citizenship for tax purposes, and moved to Costa Rica, where he would die in obscurity.
ves·pas·ian n. A kind of public urinal found on the streets of Latin-speaking countries. Literally, on the streets.
A man like Vespasian might have been remembered for lots of things: the construction of the Colosseum, the putdown of revolts in the Judea, the conquering of new lands in Britain. Instead, the name of this first-century Roman emperor will forever be connected with the Urine Tax.
Coming out the victor in the Year of the Four Emperors (as chaotic a time as its name implies), Vespasian was faced with some serious budget shortfalls. One major untaxed natural resource was urine. Cleaners needed fermented urine—ammonia—in order to keep their customers’ togas a sparkling white, so they posted buckets outside their doors into which passersby could relieve themselves. Knowing a golden revenue stream when he saw one, Vespasian taxed the cleaners on the piss they collected. When the emperor’s son Titus told his father he found the tax repulsive, the old man held out a gold coin for Titus to sniff and said, “Money don’t stink.”
volt·age n. An amount of energy, often figurative.
Born and raised in the idyllic lakeside city of Como, Alessandro Volta began his career as a high school physics teacher with a passion for electricity. His first advances were made in developing the electrophorus, a device that produced a static electric charge, and he also liked to play around with exploding gases (his favorite being methane, which he is credited with “discovering”). Investigating the work of Galvani and his famous frog, Volta rejected his colleague’s theory of animal electricity and countered what he termed “galvanism” with his own theory that electric current was produced by the contact of two different metals. Upon this principle, Volta developed the world’s first battery in 1800. The following year, he demonstrated his invention to Napoleon, who rewarded Volta by making him a count.
Between them, Volta and Galvani did more than anyone else to usher in the age of electricity, and left their mark not only on science and language but also literature: It was after discussing galvanism that Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein.
wimp n. A wuss.
The original wimp was J. Wellington Wimpy, the porkpie-hatted mooch of the Popeye cartoons, whose perennial gambit “I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” never quite succeeded.
E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre, the comic strip in which Popeye first appeared, is remarkable for its contribution to the lexicon. In addition to wimp, Segar is also responsible for the word goon, from his hairy warrior woman Alice the Goon, and probably the vehicle name Jeep, after Olive Oyl’s pet Eugene the Jeep, a magical and resourceful creature from the fourth dimension whose entire vocabulary consisted of the single word “Jeep!”
zep·pe·lin n. A dirigible airship; best when not filled with hydrogen.
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin caught the aviation bug when he was a military observer attached to the Union Army Balloon Corps. The chief mission of President Lincoln’s aeronauts was to provide reconnaissance, but von Zeppelin came away convinced that aircraft could do more, provided they became engine-powered and steer-able. His answer was a motor-powered balloon with a hard shell, called a dirigible (as opposed to a nonrigid airship, or blimp). Von Zeppelin’s first successful flight didn’t come until 1900, but just nine years later the count produced a model that reached speeds of fif
ty miles per hour and would go on to stock the fleet of DELAG, the world’s first commercial airline.
Zeppelins were soon carrying out air-raid missions— another first—but their success in such capacity was short-lived once the getting-bombed-upon Brits realized that dirigibles were just big balloons waiting to be popped by gunfire. The postwar era would prove the golden age of the zeppelin, as airships competed with ocean liners for the transatlantic passenger business, matching them in luxury and, flying at a pleasant low distance above the ground, offering the advantage of sightseeing. Zeppelin routes went as far afield from Germany as Brazil, and the spire of the Empire State Building was designed to moor dirigibles. (The 102nd floor was to be the landing platform, but it didn’t work.)
The death of the zeppelin came with the spectacular 1937 Hindenburg disaster that took place over Lakehurst, New Jersey. The Nazis were using zeppelins for propaganda (much as Goodyear would in later years), but they had no access to helium; only the U.S. possessed the gas in industrial quantities, and they weren’t selling, at least not to Hitler. Some dummkopf decided to fill the eight-hundred-foot-long Hindenburg with the highly flammable gas hydrogen, and the rest, as they say, is history.
* Duns, by the way, is pronounced the same as dunce, its spelling an obsolete convention also seen in ones and twys (once, twice).
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