February and Februation

DON PEDRO
Good morrow, Benedick. Why, what's the matter,
That you have such a February face,
So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?
- Much Ado About Nothing

As we are now in February, you may as well know that this is the month of purification; specifically the Roman festival of purification or Februarius was held on the 15th.

Februa was the Latin for purification, and quite possibly derived from an older word for sulphur, making this sulphur-month. This means that February has some rather odd neighbours in the dictionary, such as februate, which means to purge souls by sacrifice or prayer.

Before this new-fangled Roman stuff came in, the Anglo-Saxons had a much apter name for the month. They called it Solmonath, or Mud-Month.

Mind you, the Venerable Bede called it the month of cakes, because apparently that's what pagans gave to their gods for a winter's snack.

The Inky Fool fondling an invisible cow

The Law of the Plinth

A very observant reader has posted on the Dear Dogberry page asking why there aren't more rhymes for plinth. She observes that:

I can't think of anything it rhymes with or even any other word with 'nth' apart from numbers ending in a 'n' when ordering things by position.

Now that's not exactly right, and indeed she corrected herself with labyrinth. There's also hyacinth, labyrinth, absinthe (depending on how you pronounce it) and synth. There are even some weakly stressed words like jacinth (a kind of gem) and Corinth. However, that last example might make you notice that all of these words are late imports. None of them derive from Old English.

Even the OE-derived words that have Nth, such as month and ninth, once didn't. The Old English for ninth was noneth, and for month was monat. Had you been alive a thousand years ago you wouldn't have found any nth words. Or mth words. Or mf words. The Anglo-Saxons had no umph. This is the long arm of the Ingvaeonic Nasal Spirant Law.

Don't worry. Ingvaeonic Nasal Spirant sounds rather intimidating and complex, but it isn't.

Ingvaeonic just means Old English, Old Frisian and Old Saxon. These were old languages spoken in Denmark(ish) and then brought to England.

A Nasal sound is just one that you can't make when holding your nose. Try it. Pinch your nose and say 'tatty'. Easy, isn't it? That's because T isn't a nasal sound. Now try saying 'man'. Weird, ain't it? Now try saying 'Steve McManaman'. As Jesus of Nazareth almost put it: 'Man cannot say God and mammon when holding his nose.'

A spirant is the same as a fricative. It's any sound made by forcing air through a bit of your mouth. So clasp your tongue between your teeth and blow. You should get a Th sound. Put your top teeth on your lower lip and... Ffffff. It's the same for Sssss and shhhh. And, technically, the last sound in Johann Sebastian Bach is also a fricative.

So what's the Ingvaeonic Nasal Spirant Law? It's the Law that says that in the Ingvaeonic languages words never end with a Nasal sound followed by a Spirant. Just doesn't happen. And nobody knows why. The Germans do it all the time. The Germans, for instance, say Uns. The Old Germans said Uns. But for some reason, when Old English was being formed, that N got dropped and so we say Us. The Germans talk about a gans, but we have a goose.

All of which means, that one observant reader was close to discovering a law of first-millennial linguistics all on her own.

I was lounging around on my plinth
And thought, as I sipped an absinthe,
Though some like the guitar
I'd rather by far
Hear the sweet man-made sound of a synth.

The which limerick was necessary so I could post this slightly blue-languaged video.


This song is particularly funny if you live as close to Exmouth Market as I do.

Zugzwang, the devil, and Beowulf

Zugzwang is a chess term. When any move you can make will land you in more trouble, that's a zugzwang. It's from the German for move (zug) and compulsion (zwang). But try saying it aloud. It's glorious. It has a sort of back-and-forth motion to it.

Essentially, zugzwang is the same as being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, except that it implies more options. The misery and melancholy of the zugzwang can extend in every direction.

Incidentally, you may have been wondering why I didn't capitalise the devil in devil and the deep blue sea. The reason is that the phrase has nothing whatsoever to do with his satanic majesty. Like so many phrases it's nautical.

The devil of a ship is, according to Smyth's Sailor's Word-Book (1867),

The seam which margins the waterways on a ship's hull 

Which means that it's a strip on the outside of the ship, just above the waterline. Occasionally, sailors used to be sent down to caulk the devil, which was a very precarious job because you were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

That, in turn reminds me of one of the finest moments in Anglo-Saxon poetry, with which I shall leave you for today. It's from Beowulf and describes the lake where Grendel and his mother live. Here's Seamus Heaney's translation:

A few miles from here
A frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
Above a mere; the overhanging bank
Is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
The water burns. And the mere-bottom
Has never been sounded by the sons of men.
On its bank, the heather-stepper halts:
The hart in flight from pursuing hounds
Will turn to face them with firm-set horns
And die in the wood rather than the dive
Beneath its surface. That is no good place.

Which is classic case of elaphine zugzwang.

Poor bit of a ship.

(Incidentally, I wrote about this song before. Link here.)

The Dream of the Rood

Over on McSweeney's they have a little comedy piece about possible Easter films, including:

Good, Better, Best Friday


Musical comedy about the crucifixion of Christ—but from the point of view of the cross. Think Happy Feet meets Passion of the Christ with a dash of Showboat.

It's a ridiculous idea, it would be like doing a version of the Crucifixion as an Anglo-Saxon warrior-poem—but from the point of view of the cross. Think Beowulf meets Passion of the Christ with a dash of The Book of the Duchess.

That, of course, has already been done. It's called The Dream of the Rood. Here's a taster:

Ealle ic mihte
feondas gefyllan, hwæðre ic fæste stod.
Ongyrede hine þa geong hæleð, (þæt wæs god ælmihtig),
strang ond stiðmod. Gestah he on gealgan heanne,
modig on manigra gesyhðe, þa he wolde mancyn lysan.
Bifode ic þa me se beorn ymbclypte.

And here's a translation:

I might have
felled all the fiends; even so, I stood fast.
He stripped himself then, young hero - that was God almighty -
strong and resolute; he ascended on the high gallows,
brave in the sight of many, when he wanted to ransom mankind.
I trembled when the warrior embraced me;

Rood was the Old English word for cross. Cross is the Celtic version and was only introduced by Irish missionaries in the tenth century. Incidentally, the phrase criss-cross is only a garbling of Christ's cross, which is therefore blasphemous.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some tearful gardening to do.

And I thought my front door was unwieldy.

Carib Cannibals

We shall now have a week of posts on tribes and the tremendous words that they have given to language. (Tribes are probably tribes because there were three (tri) tribes in ancient Rome).

When Christopher Columbus arrived in Cuba he discovered that the natives called themselves Los de Caniba, he then sailed on to Haiti where they told him that they were called Caribes. This is because in the old Caribbean languages Ls, Ns and Rs were pretty much interchangeable (which must have been confusing if you were called Rory and ate lollies).

One word - Caribs - survived as the name of a sea. Canib, with a bal on the end, survived as the designation of the culinary eccentricities found in those tropical climes; for the Caribs were anthropophagi.

So that's the Ns and the Rs dealt with. But what (I hear you cry) of the Ls? Well, dear reader, that was a good question and well asked. Now can you think of a writer who set a play on an island? Can you? Can you think of the name of the savage character in that play? Can you? Well you damned well should, you bookless freak. Caliban in The Tempest.

Ban! Ban! Ca-Caliban!
Got a new master, get a new man.

Yeah, him. So far as anybody can tell Shakespeare took the name from his reading on shipwrecks and exploration that formed the basis of the his last play.

So Caribbean, Cannibal and Caliban all come from one word with an ambiguous consonant in the middle.

Columbus was terribly pleased to hear that they were Canibs, because he assumed that the Canibs were subjects of the Great Khan, and therefore that he had succeeded in reaching Asia through the West. In this the poor chap was mistaken, but it shows the hope and foolishness that etymological speculation may engender.

Now, like Othello, I have spoken...

...of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

Just on the offchance that you're interested, Othello is here alluding to the greatest travel book ever written: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which is a delightful filigree of fibs from the late fourteenth century. What's interesting about the Othello line is that Mandeville had been completely debunked a few years before Othello was written.

Mandeville's Travels was a wonderful medieval fantasy that could not stand up to the cruel siege of truth. There was even a satirical play put on in London about how foolish Mandeville's stories were, just before Othello came out. So Shakespeare is deliberately associating Othello with a foolish, mythical and laughable past.

Mandeville itself was partly based upon the Anglo Saxon Wonders of the East which contains this piece of information, which, like me, is more beautiful than true:

Then there is a certain island in the Red Sea where there is a race of men called by us Donestre. they are shaped like soothsayers from the head down to the navel, and the other part is similar to a man's body. And they know all human languages. When they see a man of a foreign race, they call him and his fellows with the names of known men, and with lying words they deceive him and seize him. and then, after that, they devour all of him, except the head, and then they sit and weep over the head.

The Donestre in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript

Unchanging Words and Roman Wives

Here's a little chart of words that we still understand. The older the word, the bigger it is: the newer, the smaller. If you click doubly on the picture you ought be able to see it more clearly.

The picture was drawn up by a chap called Mark Pagel at the University of Reading, for an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. The underlying principle is, of course, that the more basic a word is, the less it changes. Highfalutin words, like, for example, highfalutin, tend to be much more mutable. The most central words are as unchanging as a tramp's pants.

It is possible to write whole sentences that would have been understood in Anglo-Saxon times, more than a thousand years ago. For example:

Harold is swift. His hand is strong and his word is grim. Late in life he went to his wife in Rome.

However, most Anglo-Saxon sounds to modern ears like utter gobbledygook (a word that was not invented until 1944).

Lots more strange maps here.

The Inky Fool school for the study of ancient languages

Procrastination is the Thief of Meaning

People are liars, always have been always will be. They say they'll do something straight away and then they don't. I am no better than the rest. If I tell you that I'm going to do something Right now, you can be pretty much guaranteed to discover me half an hour later lying in a hammock with a glass of Pimms and a copy of Ulysses open at the first page.

This has linguistic consequences. Do you know what the Anglo-Saxon for immediately is?

Sóna

But so many people over the last millennium have promised to do something sóna that the word has become the modern English soon.

The same has happened to in a minute. Though there is a perfectly precise time mentioned in the phrase I would probably use it to mean anything up to... half an hour? Certainly no more than an hour.

I think I'm a little better with in a second. But it probably still means anything up to five minutes. In fact, I can't say in a second in a second, which means that the phrase is in itself untrue. I might as well say, "I cannot speak."

Listen to the radio or watch the gogglebox and you're as likely as not to hear a phrase like "In a moment we'll be talking to Lord Lucan, but first here's the weather/The Archers/The Ring Cycle."

We are so lazy, so indolent, so idle so incurably languorous that we cannot be trusted with words. Anon, as in I'll see you anon, also meant straightway or in one, now it wanders in unlimited futurity.

So what to do? We need a new and unsullied measurement of time. Where to find it? Why, in the notes to The Cloud of Unknowing of course, where else?

The Cloud of Unknowing is a medieval religious work that says, amongst other things that we should really pull our socks up. When we get to the Pearly Gates (incidentally the Pearly Gates are not up in the air, they are the gates of the New Jerusalem as mentioned in Revelations: the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl) when, as I say, we get to the Pearly Gates we will have to account to St Peter for our whole lives: not just every hour, not just every minute, but every athomus.

An athomus is the smallest unit of time there is, or so theologians reckoned, it is the indivisible moment, like an atom, which etymologically means unsplittable, a derivation that didn't help Hiroshima. The idea of the athomus was taken from St Paul, Corinthians 15v52, which is usually translated as the twinkling of an eye. But, medievals being medieval, it had of course been calculated, though I've never been able to work out how. An athomus is, officially, fifteen ninety-fourths of a second.

So there it is. Now I must be off. It's a lovely sunny day and there's a hammock, a bottle of Pimms and a copy of Ulysses waiting impatiently in the garden. I'll be there in an athomus.

This cloud may be unknowing.

P.S. If any medieval scholars out there can explain to me how the length of an athomus was calculated, I'd love to know.

Harlots, Wenches, Strumpets, Whores And Fun Days Out In Merton

David Blunkett called Nick Clegg a harlot yesterday, and he should know one when he feels one. So a post on lovable women.

Harlots are of uncertain origin (see this article). The word appears to have originally meant vagrant and Chaucer used the word to describe jugglers. There's a story that when Jean Harlow mispronounced Margot Asquith's name, Margot corrected her saying 'The T is silent, as in Harlow', but that may not be true.

Prostitutes are not, as I once fondly imagined, women who stand in for (pro stituo) wives, they are women who stand in front of brothels.

Strumpet rhymes with trumpet and crumpet, that is the main reason for the word [limericks in the comments please, and if you don't like it you can lump it]. Nobody's quite sure where the word comes from, but it may have influenced guitars:

TO STRUM: to have carnal knowledge of a woman, also to play badly on the harpsichord or any other stringed instrument. [Capt. Francis Grose, "A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue," 1796]

Whore is a cutting indictment of the sexism of our language, or rather amusing, depending on you point of view. Once upon a time (approximately 6,000 years ago) people buried each other in pits and loved one another, an action they called *qar. They invaded India and wrote the Kama Sutra. They invaded Italy, became Roman and called each other carus or dear, then they caressed and cherished their dear ones, cherie, and were charitable towards them. Some of the pit-burying lovers invaded Germany and started pronouncing C as H (car to har) so they fucked whores*.

There isn't much good prose in Anglo-Saxon. There are a few wonderful poems. The Wanderer, Seafarer, Ruin, Wife's Lament and  Beowulf are beautiful. Prose-wise Anglo-Saxon's a bunch of crap. Alfric's colloquies are insanely inane. His Preface to Genesis is worse; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle exalts upon plateaus of tedium never dreamt of by wet paint. Therefore, to fill out the prose section of any Anglo-Saxon course people insist upon teaching you Cynewulf and Cyneheard, the only almost interesting part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Basically a chap killed another chap while he was visiting a prostitute. Unfortunately for posterity and teachers of Anglo-Saxon this murder was so bloody exciting that for most of the story the chronicler forgets to mention which one is which. It's all "They said 'Come out" and they said 'No you come out.' Then they came out and they saw them and they killed the them that was they." [I had to do a damned exam on this]

However, to be fair to the chronicler he did say that he [Cynewulf] was : "wīfcȳþþe on Merantūne"

Wif [wife] meant woman and cȳþþe [pronounced coother] meant intimacy.We were instructed to translate wīfcȳþþe on Merantūne as "wenching in Merton". I'm glad that we were. I am glad to have written the word wenching at least once.

Things have changed in Merton. It's just a part of South London. There's no stockade there anymore and I've just discovered that, according to Merton Borough Council's website, the main reason for visiting the place is now the community toilet scheme.

*Before I get beaten to death by an enraged mob of philologists, I should point out that my fixing on the Kurgan pit-burial culture and my use of the word invade are both decisions based on caprice and whimsy.

P.S. I know I mentioned prostitutes last week. I shall try and keep off the sex trade for a while. It's all David Blunkett's fault.
P.P.S. For those of you who like etymology this video is really very funny and fascinating. (Hat-tip to Bradshaw of the Future)

You Pigeoning Pigeon

A brief look at British fauna:

Chicken - Coward
Cow - Unpleasant lady
Dog - Ugly lady
Catty - Unpleasant, complaining
Pussy - Coward (also a specific kind of scarf worn by pupils at Winchester College)
Sheep - One who follows
Sheepish - Subservient
Fox - Pretty young lady
Fox - Decieve
Horse - Heroin
Stag - Engaged drunk
Crow - To boast
Rabbit - Talk constantly
Rat - Traitor
Squirrel - To hoard
Pig - Greedy person

Pigeon - ?

Duck actually derives from the verb to duck meaning to go under water. The Old English word was ened.

The lack of a meaning for pigeon bothers me. I want to go around calling people pigeons. I want to shout: "Stop pigeoning, you bloody pigeon." But I fear that I would be being more meaningless than usual.

Pigeon used to have several meanings: a young girl, a sweetheart, a coward, one who was swindled or possibly a combination of all four. Pigeon milk was "An imaginary article for which children are sent on a fool's errand" (OED). Letters sent by carrier pigeon were called pigeongrams. But these are all obselete so pigeon is now ripe for signification. Suggestions in the comments, please.

This from London Fields by Martin Amis:

At one point as I walked under a tree I felt the warm kiss of a voluptuous dewdrop on my crown. Gratefully I ran a hand through my hair - and what do I find? Birdshit. Pigeonshit. I'm feeling okay for once, I'm feeling medium cool, and a London pigeon goes and takes a dump on my head. It had this effect on me: despair. I swore and stumbled around, bedgraggled, helpless, the diet of a London pigeon being something that really doesn't bear thinking about. I mean what the digestive system of a London pigeon considers as waste...

Incidentally, Pidgin English is so called because pidgin was, apparently, how the Chinese used to pronounce business.

Yet another website posting photographs of pussies

Wlonc ond Wingal

I'm off on to an elaphine party in Lyme Regis where I shall probably become wlonc ond wingal, a lovely Anglo-Saxon phrase meaning "proud and flushed with wine".

Wlonc ond wingal crops up in The Seafarer and in The Ruin, a beautiful poem about the Roman baths at Bath. The Anglo Saxons were very troubled by the huge Roman ruins scattered about their dark and rainy country. They considered them to be the work of giants or enta geweorc. Enta meant giants, so when JRR Tolkein, who was an Anglo Saxon scholar, wanted a name for his giant talking trees in Lord Of The Rings he called them Ents.

Here's a bit from The Ruin and a translation:

Hryre wong gecrong
gebrocen to beorgum, þær iu beorn monig
glædmod ond goldbeorht gleoma gefrætwed,
wlonc ond wingal wighyrstum scan;
seah on sinc, on sylfor, on searogimmas,
on ead, on æht, on eorcanstan,
on þas beorhtan burg bradan rices.

Which means:

The ruin has fallen to the ground
broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior,
joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour,
proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings;
looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones,
at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery,
at this bright castle of a broad kingdom.

And you can read the whole thing with a parallel translation here.

Daily life in Lyme Regis

Journalese in North Korea

I was looking, as is my wont (I just hurled myself at a dictionary and discovered that wont (habit) doesn't relate to want (desire) at all. One comes from the Anglo Saxon gewunian meaning to be accustomed to and the other from the Old Norse vanta meaning to lack)...

As I was saying: I was just looking, as is my wont, at the North Korean News Agency's website. It's almost the only place on the internet where I can get all the facts I need about power stations and "profitable lag" without all the late-capitalist gobbledegook and propaganda that you find in Western "so-called" newspapers.

A lot of doom-mongering nay-sayers will tell you that North Korea has fallen a tad behind the West in areas like "human rights" and "not starving". However, I'm pleased to see that this is not true of its journalism. Glancing at the main page of headlines I saw with indescribable delight:

JAPANESE REACTIONARIES' SABRE RATTLING BLASTED

and

KIM JONG IL'S SONGUN LEADERSHIP EXPLOITS LAUDED

When blasted and lauded have replaced the outmoded and decadent criticised and praised, a "rush ahead towards the victory of building a great prosperous and powerful nation with redoubled courage and full of confidence, with great pride of making revolution as a member of Kim Il Sung's nation under the leadership of the great Workers' Party of Korea" simply cannot be far behind. Indeed, I would imagine that it's almost inevitable.

Intrepid DPRK reporters have even mastered the journalist's passive where you have no idea who is doing the verb (although to be fair it says in the body of the lauded article that the lauder is one Jorge Pereyra who glories in the title of "general secretary of the Extraordinary Congress Communist Party of Argentina").

The next editor of the Sunday Telegraph?

Hat tip to Foam and Skies for reminding me of this.

Bunking and Debunking

It is vital that you know that debunking has nothing to do with bunk beds. It's connected to bunk as a contraction of bunkum or rubbish. Bunkum, as any fule kno, derives from Buncombe County, North Carolina, whose representative in Congress made a particularly stupid speech in 1820 "for Buncombe". It was such an inane oration that the word bunkum, with a K, has now spread around the world. Buncombe, North Carolina, was named after Edward Buncombe who fell down stairs and died. Edward Buncombe must have been a descendant of Richard de Bounecombe of Somerset (1327), whose name meant "dweller in the reed valley" from the Anglo Saxon bune meaning reed and cumb or coomb meaning valley. Coomb relates to cwm in Welsh and is one of the very few words that the Anglo Saxons took from Celtic languages.

The origin of bunk bed is unknown.

All of which is utterly irrelevant to what this post was meant to be about.

Michael Flanders once said, "The purpose of satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth. And our job, as I see it, is to put it back again."

So in the interests of continuing his good work:

Kangaroo does not mean 'I don't understand' in aboriginal. This is a myth.

Yucatan does not mean 'I don't understand' in Mayan. This too is a myth, a deliberate untruth spread by Cortes to discredit a province-naming rival. It means "place of richness" in nahuatl.

However, before you tearfully decide that there is No Fun in etymology anymore, there is in Madagascar a kind of lemur known to science as the indri. Indri, in the native tongue, means Look at that!

The reason, as you have no doubt already guessed (aren't you clever?), is that a naturalist called Pierre Sonnerat was wandering happily through the jungle naming things (like Adam) when his guide shouted "Look at that!"

Out came the notebook and it has been the indri ever since.

This is not, alas, a useful titbit of information for cocktail parties as nobody else will have heard of the indri. But it is useful to know that something from Madagascar is not Madagascan but Malagasy, just as something from Monaco is not Monacan or Monte Carlan but Monegasque. So it's the Monegasque Grand Prix.

Look at that!

Uhtceare

Uhtceare meant 'worry before dawn'. Uht was the time before dawn and ceare meant care. The Anglo Saxons were sorely afflicted by uhtceare, especially the wives.

Drat!