The Macaroni Illusion

I saw a macaronic film last night, which of course relates directly to macaroni cheese, Yankee Doodle's befeathered hat, and a penguin.

The film was La Grande Illusion, which is about French prisoners in Germany in WWI. It therefore shifts between French and German, and, interestingly, when aristocrats wish to talk to each other without the rabble understanding what they're saying, they shift into English. This mixing of languages is called macaronic, because the languages are beaten together in the same way that flour and other ingredients are beaten together to make the great Italian dish macaroni.

So great was the Italian dish of macaroni, that rich C18th travellers would come back to England raving about how delicious macaroni was. They even founded a club called the Macaroni Club at which they could meet, eat macaroni, and discuss how rich and stylish and well-travelled and too-good-for-England they were.

Or maybe they didn't. Though Horatio Walpole did mention in a letter of 1764:

The Maccaroni Club (which is composed of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses).

It's quite possible that he was making the club up, in the way I could dismissively say that people were all members of The Coke and Cocktails Club as a sort of joke.

Anyway, the term caught on and soon any young fop who tried to affect foreign fashions was called a macaroni, which is why when the foolish Yankee Doodle puts a feather in his cap, he called it macaroni.

And finally, there's the question of what you call a foppish penguin. You see, there's a species of penguin that looks as though it spends all its time dying and styling its hair into the most ridiculous fashions, just like a macaronic fop. The species is therefore called the Macaroni Penguin.

So stylish.

Apricate

The Londoners among you, will need only one word on a day like this: apricate, which means to bask in the sun. Londoners rarely get a chance to do this, and even when we do, we are liable to be disturbed by cranks and madmen of the city. This is not a new trend. Aubrey's Brief Lives has this story about Sir Thomas More (1478-1535):

Sir John Danvers's house at Chelsea stands in the very place where was that of the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More, who had but one marble chimney-piece, and that plain.


Where the gate then stood there was in Sir Thomas More's time a gatehouse, according to the old fashion. From the top of this gatehouse, according to the old fashion. From the top of the gatehouse was a most pleasant and delightful prospect as is to be seen. His Lordship was wont to recreate himself in this place to apricate and contemplate, and his little dog with him. It so happened, that a Tom o'Bedlam [madman] got up the stairs when his Lordship was there, and came to him and cried, "Leap Tom, leap!" offering his Lordship violence to have thrown him over the battlements. His Lordship was a little old man, and, in his gown, not able to make resistance; but having the presentness of wit, said, "Let us first throw this little dog over." The Tom o'Bedlam threw the dog down: "Pretty sport!" said the Lord Chancellor: "go down and bring him up again, and try again." Whilst the madman went down fro the dog, his Lordship made fast the door of the stairs, and called for help: otherwise he had lost his life.


Be cautious in your aprications. Nothing changes. Only the dogs are different.

Incidentally, apricate has nothing to do with apricots, which are so called because the ripen early in the summer. The Latin for early is praecox. Add an A and your get A-praecox. This means that they are more closely related to an affliction of hasty gentlemen than to the heat and calor of the day.

Not so fast.

Opportunity Blows

The temple of Portunus

If you're a sailor in a sailboat then you care a lot about winds, and the best sort of winds are those that blow your ship towards the port that's your destination. Or at least, they're the best sort when you're on the open sea.

If you're a sailor who happens to speak Latin, then you will describe these winds as ob portunus, or towards the port, because Portunus was the god of harbours. These ob portunus winds are good and favourable and represent, for the homesick seasick sailor, an opportunity.

By a reverse of this process, you can really pick the wrong moment to ask somebody for something and thus you are im-portuning them.

Etymologically speaking, this has a pleasant side-effect. Port wine is named after Portugal which is named after the Portus Cale. So if you hurl yourself towards an unguarded bottle of port then you have become an opportunist.

When leaving port, you should rely more on the tides than the winds. Wait till high tide, or flood, and then let the retreating waters pull your boat out. To see exactly how the metaphor survives have a look at this passage from Shakespeare.

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

An opportunity

Cuckoos, Cuckolds and Ale

Being a city dweller, the seasons are not measured for me as they were for the rustics who formed much of our language. I do not see the tender daffydilly poking its petals towards the questing vole, or any of the other signs of spring that my forbears noted. In fact, spring to me is the season in which the restaurants start to put their tables outside on the pavement. Instead of swallows, I have crowds of happy smokers loitering outside the pub on the corner. Instead of melting snows, I have the slow disappearance of hats.

I shall therefore, probably, never know the joys of the cuckoo ale, which is described thus in a magazine from 1821:

A singular custom prevails in Shropshire which is, we believe peculiar to that county. As soon as the first cuckoo has been heard, all the labouring classes leave work, if in the middle of the day, and the time is devoted to mirth and jollity, over what is called the cuckoo ale. 


The cuckoos will never, I fear, return to Clerkenwell, although the cuckolds may. As is well known, cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, and therefore if someone else has lain in your bed, you have been cuckooed or cuckolded.

Also, the bone at the base of your spine is called the coccyx because it resembles, supposedly, a cuckoo's beak.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to devote myself to mirth and jollity. The cuckoos may not arrive till April, but the pub tables are out in force.



P.S. I know that Google is being odd about this site having malware. I'm pretty convinced it doesn't. It's still the same old blogspot thing underneath. There's probably just one link somewhere on one post that goes to a site that's no good, but I can't for the life of me work out which one it is.

Soda, Sodium and Pop

It's an odd little reverse of the expected that sodium is actually derived from soda, which was a fifteenth century term for a mysterious alkaline substance. Sodium, was not isolated and named until 1807. Soda itself probably comes from the Arabic suwwad, which is the name of a sort of herb.

The chap who invented, or discovered, sodium, was Sir Humphry Davy, who has great literary significance as he was the subject of the first ever Clerihew, an odd sort of four-line poem that has a man's name as a first line.

Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

He was also the first Englishman to use the word potassium, which is named after potash.

Soda water is first recorded in 1802 as a name for fizzy water with bicarbonate of soda in it. To an Englishman, soda remains just the name for carbonated water, however in America it is a generic name for fizzy drinks. This map shows the Arab word's infiltration of the United States (double click to enlarge):

Rasher

This morning, as I incinerated my breakfast, I was reminded of the etymology of the word rasher, as in a rasher of bacon. There are two theories on the subject. The first rather tedious one is that it's cognate with razor and therefore means a thin strip that has been cut off.

However, the first etymologist to tackle the rasher was John Minsheu (1560-1627). He, in his Ductor in Linguas, gives an explanation that is much more fun, though not necessarily much more true.

A Rasher on the coales, q. rashly or hastily roasted.

This does, at least, tally with my experience.

Every damn morning.

Hob and Nob and Hobnobbing

I have been asked by Twitter whether there is any connection, however tentative and tangential, between hobnobbing and hobbledehoy. The short answer is No, because nobody has any idea where hobbledehoy comes from. However, I did discover the true meaning of hobnobbing, which is much more fun than I expected.

The first record of hob nob is found in Twelfth Night where an angry duellist is described thuslyly:

He is knight, dubbed with unhatched rapier and on carpet consideration; but he is a devil in private brawl: souls and bodies hath he divorced three; and his incensement at this moment is so implacable, that satisfaction can be none but by pangs of death and sepulchre. Hob, nob, is his word; give't or take't.

Hob appears to come from the Old English for have, and nob from have not. However, the meaning of hob nob seems to have shifted slightly to give or take - in this case the knight will either give death or take it, but it is a mortal duel.

However, hob or nob quickly became a much more friendly term when combined with a few drinks. If I fill a festive flask and say, 'Here's to you, dear reader of this ridiculous blog,' and you say 'No, here's to you, dear writer of this ridiculous blog,' then we can be said to have toasted each other hob a nob.

Hob nob became a shortening of such mutually amicable bibosity, so that in 1762 Oliver Goldsmith could have the line:

Hob nob, Doctor, which do you chuse, white or red?

And soon such friendly exchanges became known as hobnobbing.

Anyway, after nearly a week at number one on the Amazon bestsellers list, I can gaze with monumental patience on The Etymologicon's comfortable lapse to second place. I shall go and unearth for myself a beaker of the warm South, pop the cork and drink a toast to all of you, dear readers. I shall hob, whether you nob is up to you.

An Egg Dance

Over on the Dear Dogberry page, a reader has asked why we have the phrase walking on eggshells when walking on eggs would make much more sense. For myself, I can't understand why you would do either. However, upon investigation I've discovered that walking on eggs was the original version of the phrase. The OED records it from 1734, where as the walking on eggshell doesn't pop up until 1860.

A much more amusing variant is a thing called an egg dance, which can be performed at home, but probably not on your best carpet. All you'll need is a bunch of eggs, which you arrange on the floor, and a blindfold, which you put over your eyes. You now dance around trying not to tread upon any eggs however lightly.

Egg dancing gets a mention in a sixteenth century play called The Longer Thou Livest, The More Fool Thou Art.

Upon my one foot prettily can I hop
And dance it trimly about an egg.

And there's a good description of it from 1801:

This performance was common enough about thirty years back, and was well received at Sadler's Wells; where I saw it exhibited, not by simply hopping round a single egg, but in a manner that much increased the difficulty. A number of eggs, I do not precisely recollect how many, but I believe about twelve or fourteen, were placed at certain distances marked upon the stage; the dancer taking his stand, was blind-folded, and a hornpipe being played in the orchestra, he went through all the paces and figures of the dance, passing backwards and forwards between the eggs without touching one of them.

As you can imagine, an egg-dance became a byword for any intricate and difficult task, and makes a lot more sense than walking on either eggs or eggshells.

Scrambled eggs at the Inky Fool offices

P.S. The first part of the Etymologicon was read out by Hugh Dennis on Radio 4 this morning. You can listen to it by following this link.

The Big Chiz

It's a delightful little oddity of the English language that the phrase the big cheese has nothing whatsoever to do with milk products.

The Urdu word for thing is chīz. This meant that back in the days of the British Empire Anglo Indians wouldn't talk about something being the real thing, but the real chīz. Chīz became a term of approbation used for anything that was the pinnacle of its kind, but it wasn't spelled chīz, it was spelled cheese. From there it was a trifling step to making a man a cheese, and then the big man became the big cheese.

That is all for this week (unless the importunate muse comes upon me on Sunday), so do remember that the serialisation of The Etymologicon will begin on Radio 4 at a quarter to ten on Monday.

The opposite of a big cheese

P.S. What's the only cheese that's made backwards?

Edam.

Sorry.

Jornada

A jornada is a Mexican (originally) term for a day's journey without water. If there is no water there is no reason to stop your horses and so a jornada has neither pause nor relief. It's not a word we use much. It's hard to travel for a day in England without it bloody raining, let alone avoiding all rivers. Nonetheless, I think that jornada could usefully be revived to mean a day without an alcoholic drink, or indeed an occasion or ordeal where the wine flows like concrete. Thus "That team-building exercise was a complete jornada. Anyone want to go to the pub?"

A Churl on a Gentleman

For as long as I can remember I have known the old drinker's rhyme:

Beer and wine:
Feeling fine.
Wine and beer:
Oh dear.

There are even equivalents in other languages, although I can't now remember what they are. However, I did find a rather lovely alternative in Brewer's: Don't put a churl on a gentleman.

Churl is an old word for a fool, and before that it meant peasant, and before that, way back in the days of Old Norse when it was spelled karl, it just meant man. That's also where we get the names Carl, Charles, and (oddly given that it means man) Caroline.

Even more oddly, Charlemagne is a variant of Charles/Carl and because of that the Czech word for king is kral, the Polish is krol, and the Lithuanian is karalius. So a churl is, etymologically, both a man and a woman, a peasant and a king.

And, for what it's worth, I've always said:

Beer, wine and whisky:
Feeling frisky.

Would it be churlish to point out that this song is about an eleven year old?

Sacralgia and Kippers

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh has this to say about kippers:

Adam ate some breakfast. No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings.

Now, if you want to make a great smell for your deity what you need is burnt bone, and apparently (I've never sacrificed anyone myself) the best bone to do this with is the os sacrum, the sacred bone. It's at the bottom of your spine and the Romans believed that it was the part that the gods really liked. That's why it's called the sacrum to this very day.

If you have a pain in your sacrum, it's called sacralgia. What I like about this is that, etymologically, sacralgia means sacred pain, but really it means a right pain in the arse. But if you told somebody that they were being a sacralgia, they would never realise.

This makes sacralgia a very useful word.

The Inky Fool regrets his choice of restaurant.

Horse Chestnuts, Radishes and Radicals

I had always assumed that the horse chestnut had something to do with the horse radish, and I'm therefore terribly sad to find that I was, essentially, wrong. I had had a lovely picture in my mind of a proud horse tending his garden.

Horse chestnuts were once used as a medicine for horses, they were believed to cure their coughs. Other horse medicines included horse bane (phellandrium equaticum) which cures horses with palsy, and horse cassia (cassia marginata) which helps with their constipation.

However, horse radishes don't cure a horse of anything at all, they're just big. A horse ant is a big ant. A horse cucumber is a big cucumber. A horse mushroom is a big mushroom. And a horse radish is a great big radish.

Incidentally, radish means root etymologically speaking, from the Latin radix. That's why, if you want to change things from the roots upwards, you are a political radical. This means that, so far as I'm concerned, all radishes are radicals and all radicals are radishes.

Or maybe I'm wrong.

P.S. If you want to hear me on the radio last night, you can follow this link. I start about half an hour in. I haven't listened to it myself, but that's because I have a pathological hatred of my own voice.

Bibosity and Biberage

Bibosity is defined in the OED as capacity for drinking. It appears only to have been used once, in 1823, when a writer in Blackwood's Magazine referred to:

Vast ideas of stupendous bibosity.

A related word is a biberage, which is a drink given in place of a fee. So you get somebody to do you a favour and then buy them a pint. I know a lady who works for a large organisation. Usually she works for one department, but occasionally helps out at another. To keep things simple the second department pays her in champagne. I have seen bottles lined up all along her the front passage of her house. It's a beautiful sight, and all of these bottles are biberages.

The only way to commute

Currants, Sportsmen and Brothels

In Greece there's a little city called Corinth which lies on the narrow isthmus (Greek for neck) that connects the Peloponnese with the mainland. They used to make raisins there.

These raisins were known in Medieval England as raysyn of Curans. And then people got lazy and just called them currants. As a chap pointed out in 1578:

The smal Raysens which are commonly called Corantes, but more rightly Raysens of Corinthe.

Oddly, the S was on the end to make it sound like the Greek Corinth; but then people got the mistaken idea that it was there because the word was plural. So a singular word currant was mistakenly invented.

Corinth was known for its wealth and decadence. From the wealth we get the word Corinthian meaning a rich, amateur sportsman. From the decadence we get the fact that Corinth used to be a slang term for a brothel.

Pot Shots

I was watching the telly yesterday and there was a man in a blue flak jacket talking about snipers taking pot shots. He was concerned about this because he might be killed; I was concerned because I didn't know why pot shots were called that. I suspected that it had something to do with snooker. How wrong I was.

The term goes back to hunting. There are two kinds of hunter: the sportsman who kills merely for the pleasure of ending another animal's life, and the hungry hunter who kills things for the thoroughly base reason that he wants to put them in his cooking pot and eat them. In the eighteenth century this latter was called a pot hunter.

As somebody anonymous put it in an 1825 tract on bull baiting:

There's nothing a regular Shot would be sooner chafed at than being called a Pot-hunter.

What makes pot hunters so despicable is that they kill things at the wrong time of year. They are so hungry that they can't even wait for the glorious twelfth until they start shooting. Instead, they potter around firing pot shots at animals that they intend to eat, this new term popped up in 1839.

From there it was a trifling step to start using the term for any opportunistic bit of gunfire, and then to capricious insult or heckle. And that's how you get to the snipers of Tripoli taking pot shots, presumably with the intention of cannibalism.

Pot-Fury and Ale-Passion

I have very little to say today, except that pot-fury is the excitement brought on by inebriation and ale-passion is an old word meaning hangover. That's passion in its original sense of suffering, as in the passion of Christ. Ale-passion is mentioned in the 1593 Bacchus Bountie in the following context:

Fourthly, came wallowing in a German, borne in Mentz, his name was Gotfrey Grouthead; with him he brought a wallet full of woodcocks heads; the braines thereof, tempered with other sauce, is a passing preseruatiue against the ale-passion, or paine in the pate.

I'm now off to find a bunch of woodcocks.

Do you eat the beak as well?

Merdurinous

Merdurinous means composed of dung and urine, and if you can't find a use for that word, you have too few enemies. Merdurinous is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, which makes it a particularly satisfying word to say or shout. I've tested.

It was coined by Ben Jonson in a poem called The Famous Voyage, which I thoroughly recommend you read. It's a mock epic about two men who take a boat up the Fleet River in London. The Fleet River wasn't exactly a river, it was more of a ditch, and in effect an open sewer and the smelliest stinkiest place in Elizabethan London.

Jonson's poem is about two men who sail up it for a bet, just to see if their noses can take it. There's also an informative little digression of fast food in renaissance London, which shouldn't be read by any cat lovers:

Cats there lay divers had been flayed and roasted
And, after mouldy grown, again were toasted;
Then selling not, a dish was ta'en to mince 'em,
But still, it seemed, the rankness did convince 'em

The Fleet River has now been covered over and filled in, but the name survives. When people refer to the British press as Fleet Street, it's a metonym for the street that was once a river.

Jonson's full poem is here.

The truth about Fleet Street

A Mosquito Canapé

I have recently made several fruitless attempts to capture a mosquito. My aims are not biological but culinary. I want to flavour the little pest with something, put it on a small piece of toast and eat it.

This may seem like simple inter-species revenge, but my concerns are more etymological than entomological. You see, the Greek for mosquito was konops. Guess the word yet?

The Greek for a couch with a mosquito net around it was konopeion? Getting warmer?

The Old French word for a bed curtain was therefore conope. That's where we get canopy from. But can you see the other word?

The modern French, Spanish and Italian words for a couch or sofa is a canapé.

The bit of toast that acts as the couch upon which a morsel of food rests is therefore....

Yes. Canapé. The things you are buffeted with at cocktail parties.

That's why I want to make a mosquito canapé. So my question is this: Do I need psychiatric help or do I just need a better method of catching mosquitos?

Lucky devil.

Hore-Hound

There aren't nearly enough disparaging word for libidinous men. There are plenty for women. Language, in this way, is quite ungentlemanly. However, leafing through Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Domesticum (1736) I came across a wonderful phrase: hore-hound.

Admittedly, hore-hound, as Bailey used it, has nothing to do with sex. In fact, it's just a recipe with an amusing name. Yet with its pleasant alliteration and doggy implications I feel it could be usefully carried over as a modern synonym for a coney-chaser.

In case you were wondering, and I'm sure you weren't, the Hore-Hound recipe goes like this:

The leaves of this being roasted in a cabbage under hot ashes and pounded with some salt will cure the stinging of serpents and biting dogs: they are also good for humours and chaps in the fundament; being apply'd  with some honey they will clease foul ulcers: the decoction of it is good for a cough and difficulty of breathing by its cleansing the lungs and promoting spitting.

So if you find a chap in your fundament, get yourself a hore-hound.

Supply your own caption