The Etymologicon E-Book

Mark Forsyth

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 335

Beschreibung

'Witty and erudite ... stuffed with the kind of arcane information that nobody strictly needs to know, but which is a pleasure to learn nonetheless.' Nick Duerden, Independent. 'Particularly good ... Forsyth takes words and draws us into their, and our, murky history.' William Leith, Evening Standard. The Etymologicon is an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language. What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces? Mark Forsyth's riotous celebration of the idiosyncratic and sometimes absurd connections between words is a classic of its kind: a mine of fascinating information and a must-read for word-lovers everywhere. 'Highly recommended' Spectator.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Etymologicon

‘This year’s must-have stocking filler – the angel on the top of the tree, the satsuma in the sock, the threepenny bit in the plum pudding, the essential addition to the library in the smallest room is Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon’

Ian Sansom, Guardian

‘I’m hooked on Forsyth’s book … Crikey, but this is addictive’

Matthew Parris, The Times

‘Kudos should go to Mark Forsyth, author of The Etymologicon … Clearly a man who knows his onions, Mr Forsyth must have worked 19 to the dozen, spotting red herrings and unravelling inkhorn terms, to bestow this boon … a work of the first water, to coin a phrase.’

Daily Telegraph

‘The Etymologicon contains fascinating facts’

Daily Mail

‘I really love books about words, and this is a particularly good one … Forsyth takes words and draws us into their, and our, murky history.’

William Leith, Evening Standard

‘One of the books of the year. It is too enjoyable for words.’

Henry Coningsby, Waterstones Watford

‘This witty book liberates etymology from the dusty pages of the dictionary and brings it alive’

Good Book Guide

‘Forsyth is the ancient mariner of all wordsmiths, spinning a never-ending story of unexpected coinages and devious linkages, sexy, learned and satisfyingly obscure’

Christina Hardyment, The Times (review of the audiobook)

Previously published in the UK in 2011 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2011 by Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-1-84831-319-4 (ePub format)

Text copyright © 2011 Mark Forsyth

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

Contents

Endorsements

Title page

Copyright

About the author

Dedication

Quotation

Author’s note

Preface

The Etymologicon

A Turn-up for the Books

A Game of Chicken

Hydrogentlemanly

The Old and New Testicle

Parenthetical Codpieces

Suffering for my Underwear

Pans

Miltonic Meanders

Bloody Typical Semantic Shifts

The Proof of the Pudding

Sausage Poison in Your Face

Bows and Arrows and Cats

Black and White

Hat Cheque Point Charlie

Sex and Bread

Concealed Farts

Wool

Turkey

Insulting Foods

Folk Etymology

Butterflies of the World

Psychoanalysis and the Release of the Butterfly

The Villains of the Language

Two Executioners and a Doctor

Thomas Crapper

Mythical Acronyms

John the Baptist and The Sound of Music

Organic, Organised, Organs

Clipping

Buffalo

Antanaclasis

China

Coincidences and Patterns

Frankly, My Dear Frankfurter

Beastly Foreigners

Pejoratives

Ciao Slave-driver

Robots

Terminators and Prejudice

Terminators and Equators

Equality in Ecuador

Bogeys

Bugbears and Bedbugs

Von Munchausen’s Computer

SPAM (not spam)

Heroin

Morphing De Quincey and Shelley

Star-Spangled Drinking Songs

Torpedoes and Turtles

From Mount Vernon to Portobello Road with a Hangover

A Punch of Drinks

The Scampering Champion of the Champagne Campaign

Insulting Names

Peter Pan

Herbaceous Communication

Papa Was a Saxum Volutum

Flying Peters

Venezuela and Venus and Venice

What News on the Rialto?

Magazines

Dick Snary

Autopeotomy

Water Closets for Russia

Fat Gunhilda

Queen Gunhilda and the Gadgets

Shell

In a Nutshell

The Iliad

The Human Body

The Five Fingers

Hoax Bodies

Bunking and Debunking

The Anglo-Saxon Mystery

The Sedge-strewn Stream and Globalisation

Coffee

Cappuccino Monks

Called to the Bar

Ignorami

Fossil-less

The Frequentative Suffix

Pending

Worms and their Turnings

Mathematics

Stellafied and Oily Beavers

Beards

Islands

Sandwich Islands

The French Revolution in English Words

Romance Languages

Peripatetic Peoples

From Bohemia to California (via Primrose Hill)

California

The Hash Guys

Drugs

Pleasing Psalms

Biblical Errors

Salt

Halcyon Days

Dog Days

Cynical Dogs

Greek Education and Fastchild

Cybermen

Turning Trix

Amateur Lovers

Dirty Money

Death-pledges

Wagering War

Strapped for Cash

Fast Bucks and Dead Ones

The Buck Stops Here

Back to Howth Castle and Environs

Quizzes

The Cream of the Sources

The Etymologicon audio book

Elements of Eloquence

The Horologicon

About the author

Mark Forsyth is a writer whose books have made him one of the UK’s best-known commentators on words and the English language. The Etymologicon was a Sunday Times #1 Bestseller and BBC Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’, as was his second book The Horologicon. Mark’s latest book is The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase. He writes the Inky Fool blog and has contributed articles to the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Spectator, New York Times and Wall Street Journal among others. He lives in Clerkenwell, London.

For John Goldsmith,

With thanks.

The author would like to thank everybody involved with the production of this book, but especially Jane Seeber and Andrea Coleman for their advice, suggestions, corrections, clarifications and other gentle upbraidings.

… they who are so exact for the letter shall be dealt with by the Lexicon, and theEtymologicontoo if they please …

JOHN MILTON

This book is the papery child of the Inky Fool blog, which was started in 2009. Though most of the material is new some of it has been adapted from its computerised parent. The blog is available at http://blog.inkyfool.com/ which is a part of the grander whole www.inkyfool.com.

Preface

(or that which is said – fatus – before)

Occasionally people make the mistake of asking me where a word comes from. They never make this mistake twice. I am naturally a stern and silent fellow; even forbidding. But there’s something about etymology and where words come from that overcomes my inbuilt taciturnity. A chap once asked me where the word biscuit came from. He was eating one at the time and had been struck by curiosity.

I explained to him that a biscuit is cooked twice, or in French bi-cuit, and he thanked me for that. So I added that the bi in biscuit is the same bi that you get in bicycle and bisexual, to which he nodded. And then, just because it occurred to me, I told him that the word bisexual wasn’t invented until the 1890s and that it was coined by a psychiatrist called Richard von Krafft-Ebing and did he know that Ebing also invented the word masochism?

He told me firmly that he didn’t.

Did he know about Mr Masoch, after whom masochism was named? He was a novelist and …

The fellow told me that he didn’t know about Mr Masoch, that he didn’t want to know about Mr Masoch, and that his one ambition in life was to eat his biscuit in peace.

But it was too late. The metaphorical floodgates had opened and the horse had bolted. You see there are a lot of other words named after novelists, like Kafkaesque and Retifism …

It was at this point that he made a dash for the door, but I was too quick for him. My blood was up and there was always something more to say. There always is, you know. There’s always an extra connection, another link that joins two words that most of mankind quite blithely believe to be separate, which is why that fellow didn’t escape until a couple of hours later when he managed to climb out of the window while I was drawing a diagram to explain what the name Philip has to do with a hippopotamus.

It was after an incident such as this that my friends and family decided something must be done. They gathered for a confabulation and, having established that secure psychiatric care was beyond their means, they turned in despair to the publishing industry, which has a long history of picking up where social work leaves off.

So, a publisher was found somewhere near the Caledonian Road and a plan was hatched. I would start with a single word and then connect it to another word and then to another word and so on and so forth until I was exhausted and could do no more.

A book would therefore have a twofold benefit. First it would rid me of my demons and perhaps save some innocent conversationalist from my clutches. Second, unlike me, a book could be left snugly on the bedside table or beside the lavatory: opened at will and closed at will.

So a book it was, which set me thinking …

The Etymologicon

A Turn-up for the Books

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 has nothing, directly, to do with the ink-glue-and-paper affair that this is (that is, unless you’re terribly modern and using a Kindle or somesuch). It’s a turn-up for the bookmakers.

Any child who sees the bookmaker’s facing the bookshop across the High Street will draw the seemingly logical conclusion. And a bookmaker was, once, simply somebody who stuck books together. Indeed, the term bookmaker used to be used to describe the kind of writer who just pumps out one shelf-filler after another with no regard for the exhaustion of the reading public. Thomas More observed in 1533 that ‘of newe booke makers there are now moe then ynough’. Luckily for the book trade, More was beheaded a couple of years later.

The modern sense of the bookmaker as a man who takes bets originated on the racecourses of Victorian Britain. The bookmaker would accept bets from anyone who wanted to lay them, and note them all down in a big betting book. Meanwhile, a turn-up was just a happy chance. A dictionary of slang from 1873 thoughtfully gives us this definition:

Turn up an unexpected slice of luck. Among sporting men bookmakers are said to have a turn up when an unbacked horse wins.

So, which horses are unbacked? Those with the best (i.e. longest) odds. Almost nobody backs a horse at 1,000/1.

This may seem a rather counterintuitive answer. Odds of a thousand to one are enough to tempt even a saint to stake his halo, but that’s because saints don’t know anything about gambling and horseflesh. Thousand to one shots never, ever come in. Every experienced gambler knows that a race is very often won by the favourite, which will of course have short odds. Indeed, punters want to back a horse that’s so far ahead of the field he merely needs to be shooed over the line. Such a horse is a shoo-in.

So you pick the favourite, and you back it. Nobody but a fool backs a horse that’s unlikely to win. So when such an unfancied nag romps over the finish line, it’s a turn-up for the books, because the bookies won’t have to pay out.

Not that the bookmakers need much luck. They always win. There will always be many more bankrupt gamblers than bookies. You’re much better off in a zero-sum game, where the players pool their money and the winner takes all. Pooling your money began in France, and has nothing whatsoever to do with swimming pools, and a lot to do with chickens and genetics.

A Game of Chicken

Gambling in medieval France was a simple business. All you needed were some friends, a pot, and a chicken. In fact, you didn’t need friends – you could do this with your enemies – but the pot and the chicken were essential.

First, each person puts an equal amount of money in the pot. Nobody should on any account make a joke about a poultry sum. Shoo the chicken away to a reasonable distance. What’s a reasonable distance? About a stone’s throw.

Next, pick up a stone.

Now, you all take turns hurling stones at that poor bird, which will squawk and flap and run about. The first person to hit the chicken wins all the money in the pot. You then agree never to mention any of this to an animal rights campaigner.

That’s how the French played a game of chicken. The French, though, being French, called it a game of poule, which is French for chicken. And the chap who had won all the money had therefore won the jeu depoule.

The term got transferred to other things. At card games, the pot of money in the middle of the table came to be known as the poule. English gamblers picked the term up and brought it back with them in the seventeenth century. They changed the spelling to pool, but they still had a pool of money in the middle of the table.

It should be noted that this pool of money has absolutely nothing to do with a body of water. Swimming pools, rock pools and Liverpools are utterly different things.

Back to gambling. When billiards became a popular sport, people started to gamble on it, and this variation was known as pool, hence shooting pool. Then, finally, that poor French chicken broke free from the world of gambling and soared majestically out into the clear air beyond.

On the basis that gamblers pooled their money, people started to pool their resources and even pool their cars in a car pool. Then they pooled their typists in a typing pool. Le chicken was free! And then he grew bigger than any of us, because, since the phrase was invented in 1941, we have all become part of the gene pool, which, etymologically, means that we are all little bits of chicken.

Hydrogentlemanly

The gene of gene pool comes all the way from the ancient Greek word genos, which means birth. It’s the root that you find in generation, regeneration and degeneration; and along with its Latin cousin genus it’s scattered generously throughout the English language, often in places where you wouldn’t expect it.

Take generous: the word originally meant well-born, and because it was obvious that well-bred people were magnanimous and peasants were stingy, it came to mean munificent. Indeed, the well-bred gentleman established such a reputation for himself that the word gentle, meaning soft, was named after him. In fact, some gentlemen became so refined that the gin in gingerly is probably just another gen lurking in our language. Gingerly certainly has nothing to do with ginger.

Genos is hidden away in the very air that you breathe. The chemists of the late eighteenth century had an awful lot of trouble with the gases that make up the air. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and the rest all look exactly alike; they are transparent, they are effectively weightless. The only real difference anybody could find between them was their effects: what we now call oxygen makes things burn, while nitrogen puts them out.

Scientists spent a lot of time separating the different kinds of air and then had to decide what to call them all. Oxygen was called flammable air for a while, but it didn’t catch on. It just didn’t have the right scientific ring to it. We all know that scientific words need an obscure classical origin to make them sound impressive to those who wouldn’t know an idiopathic craniofacial erythema1 if it hit them in the face.

Eventually, a Frenchman named Lavoisier decided that the sort of air that produced water when it was burnt should be called the water-producer. Being a scientist, he of course dressed this up in Greek, and the Greek for water producer is hydro-gen. The bit of air that made things acidic he decided to call the acid-maker or oxy-gen, and the one that produced nitre then got called nitro-gen.

(Argon, the other major gas in air, wasn’t known about at the time, because it’s an inert gas and doesn’t produce anything at all. That’s why it’s called argon. Argon is Greek for lazy.)

Most of the productive and reproductive things in the world have gen hidden somewhere in their names. All words are not homogenous and sometimes they are engendered in odd ways. For example, a group of things that reproduce is a genus and if you’re talking about a whole genus then you’re speaking in general and if you’re in general command of the troops you’re a general and a general can order his troops to commit genocide, which, etymologically, would be suicide.

Of course, a general won’t commit genocide himself; he’ll probably assign the job to his privates, and privates is a euphemism for gonads, which comes from exactly the same root, for reasons that should be too obvious to need explaining.

1 That’s a blush to you and me.

The Old and New Testicle

Gonads are testicles and testicles shouldn’t really have anything to do with the Old and New Testaments, but they do.

The Testaments of the Bible testify to God’s truth. This is because the Latin for witness was testis. From that one root, testis, English has inherited protest (bear witness for), detest (bear witness against), contest (bear witness competitively), and testicle. What are testicles doing there? They are testifying to a man’s virility. Do you want to prove that you’re a real man? Well, your testicles will testify in your favour.

That’s the usual explanation, anyway. There’s another, more interesting theory that in bygone days witnesses used to swear to things with their hands on their balls, or even on other people’s balls. In the Book of Genesis, Abraham makes his servant swear not to marry his son to a Canaanite girl. The King James Version has this translation:

I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: And I will make thee swear by the LORD, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth

Now, that may be the correct translation, but the Hebrew doesn’t say thigh, it says yarek, which means, approximately, soft bits. Nobody knows how oaths were sworn in the ancient world, but many scholars believe that people didn’t put their hands on their hearts or their thighs, but on the testicles of the man to whom they were swearing, which would make the connection between testis and testes rather more direct.

Testicles. Bollocks. Balls. Nuts. Cullions. Cojones. Goolies. Tallywags. Twiddle-diddles. Bawbles, trinkets, spermaria. There are a hundred words for the danglers and they get everywhere. It’s enough to make a respectable fellow blush. Do you enjoy the taste of avocado? So did I, until the terrible day when I realised that I was eating Aztec balls. You see, the Aztecs noticed the avocado’s shape and decided that it resembled nothing so much as a big, green bollock. So they called it an ahuakatl, their word for testicle. When the Spanish arrived they misheard this slightly and called it aguacate, and the English changed this slightly to avocado. To remember that I used to like avocados with a touch of walnut oil only adds to my shame.

Even if you flee to an ivory tower and sit there wearing an orchid and a scowl, it still means that you have a testicle in your buttonhole, because that’s what an orchid’s root resembles, and orchis was the Greek for testicle. Indeed, the green-winged orchid used to rejoice in the name Fool’s Ballocks. The technical term for somebody who has a lot of balls is a polyorchid.

And it’s very possible that this orb on which we all live comes from the same root as orchid, in which case we are whirling around the Sun on a giant testis, six billion trillion tons of gonad or cod, which is where cod-philosophy, codswallop and codpiece come from.

There are two codpieces at the top right of your computer keyboard, and how they got there is a rather odd story.

Parenthetical Codpieces

Your computer keyboard contains two pictures of codpieces, and it’s all the fault of the ancient Gauls, the original inhabitants of France. Gauls spoke Gaulish until Julius Caesar came and cut them all into three parts. One of the Gaulish words that the Gauls used to speak was braca meaning trousers. The Romans didn’t have a word for trousers because they all wore togas, and that’s why the Gaulish term survived.

From braca came the early French brague meaning trousers, and when they wanted a word for a codpiece they decided to call it a braguette or little trousers. This is not to be confused with baguette, meaning stick. In fact a Frenchman might brag that his baguette was too big for his braguette, but then Frenchmen will claim anything. They’re braggarts (literally one who shows off his codpiece).

Braguettes were much more important in the olden days, especially in armour. On the medieval battlefield, with arrows flying hither and thither, a knight knew where he wanted the most protection. Henry VIII’s codpiece, for example, was a gargantuan combination of efficiency and obscenity. It was big enough and shiny enough to frighten any enemy into disorganised retreat. It bulged out from the royal groin and stretched up to a metal plate that protected the royal belly.

And that is significant. What do you call the bit of stone that bulges out from a pillar to support a balcony or a roof? Until the sixteenth century nobody had been certain what to call them; but one day somebody must have been gazing at a cathedral wall and, in a moment of sudden clarity, realised that the architectural supports looked like nothing so much as Henry VIII’s groin.

And so such architectural structures came to be known as braggets, and that brings us to Pocahontas.

Pocahontas was a princess of the Powhatan tribe, which lived in Virginia. Of course, the Powhatan tribe didn’t know they lived in Virginia. They thought they lived in Tenakomakah, and so the English thoughtfully came with guns to explain their mistake. But the Powhatan tribe were obstinate and went so far as to take one of the Englishmen prisoner. They were planning to kill him until Pocahontas intervened with her father and Captain John Smith was freed. The story goes that she had fallen madly in love with him and that they had a passionate affair, but as Pocahontas was only ten years old at the time, we should probably move swiftly on.

Of course, it may not have happened exactly that way. The story has been improved beyond repair. But there definitely was a Pocahontas and there definitely was a Captain John Smith, and they seem to have been rather fond of each other. Then he had an accident with one of his guns and had to return to England. The cruel colonists told Pocahontas that John Smith was dead, and she pined away in tears thinking that he was lost for ever. In fact, he wasn’t dead, he was writing a dictionary.

The Sea-Man’s Grammar and Dictionary: Explaining all the Difficult Terms of Navigation hit the bookstands in 1627. It had all sorts of nautical jargon for the aspiring sailor to learn. But, for our story, the important thing is that Captain Smith spelt braggets as brackets, and the spelling stuck.

The original architectural device was called a bragget/bracket, because it looked like a codpiece. But what about a double bracket, which connects two horizontals to a vertical? An architectural double bracket looks like this: [

Look around you: there’s probably one on the nearest bookshelf. And just as a physical bracket got its name because it resembled a codpiece, so the punctuation bracket got its name because it resembled the structural component.

In 1711 a man called William Whiston published a book called Primitive Christianity Revived. The book often quotes from Greek sources and when it does, it gives both Whiston’s translation and the original in what he was the first man to call [brackets].

And that’s why, if you look at the top right-hand corner of your computer keyboard, you will see two little codpieces [] lingering obscenely beside the letter P for pants.

Suffering for my Underwear

Once upon a time there was a chap who probably didn’t exist and who probably wasn’t called Pantaleon. Legend has it that he was personal physician to Emperor Maximianus. When the emperor discovered that his doctor was a Christian he got terribly upset and decreed that the doctor should die.

The execution went badly. They tried to burn him alive, but the fire went out. They threw him into molten lead but it turned out to be cold. They lashed a stone to him and chucked him into the sea, but the stone floated. They threw him to wild beasts, which were tamed. They tried to hang him and the rope broke. They tried to chop his head off but the sword bent and he forgave the executioner.

This last kindness was what earned the doctor the name Pantaleon, which means All-Compassionate.

In the end they got Pantaleon’s head off and he died, thus becoming one of the megalomartyrs (the great martyrs) of Greece. By the tenth century Saint Pantaleon had become the patron saint of Venice. Pantalon therefore became a popular Venetian name and the Venetians themselves were often called the Pantaloni.

Then, in the sixteenth century, came the Commedia Dell’Arte: short comic plays performed by travelling troupes and always involving the same stock characters like Harlequin and Scaramouch.

In these plays Pantalone was the stereotypical Venetian. He was a merchant and a miser and a lustful old man, and he wore one-piece breeches, like Venetians did. These long breeches therefore became known as pantaloons. Pantaloons were shortened to pants and the English (though not the Americans) called their underwear underpants. Underpants were again shortened to pants, which is what I am now wearing.

Pants are all-compassionate. Pants are saints. This means that my underwear is named after an early Christian martyr.

Pans

So pants and panties come from Saint Pantaleon and your undies are all-compassionate and your small-clothes are martyred.

St Pantaleon was therefore a linguistic relation of St Pancras (who held everything) and Pandora, who was given everything in a box that she really shouldn’t have opened.

Pan is one of those elements that gets everywhere. It’s panpresent. For example, when a film camera pans across from one face to another, that pan comes from the same Greek word that you’ll find in your underpants. Cinematic panning is short for the Panoramic Camera, which was patented back in 1868 and so called because a panorama is where you see everything.

A panacea cures absolutely everything, which is useful if you’re in the middle of a pandemic, which is one up from an epidemic. An epidemic is only among the people, whereas a pandemic means all the peoples of the world are infected.

Pan also gives you all sorts of terribly useful words that for some reason loiter in dark and musty corners of the dictionary. Pantophobia, for example, is the granddaddy of all phobias as it means a morbid fear of absolutely everything. Pantophobia is the inevitable outcome of pandiabolism – the belief that the Devil runs the world – and, in its milder forms, is a panpathy, or one of those feelings that everybody has now and then.

However, not all pans mean all. It’s one of the great problems of etymology that there are no hard and fast rules: nothing is panapplicable. The pans and pots in your kitchen have nothing whatsoever to do with panoramas and pan-Africanism. Panic is not a fear of everything; it is, in fact, the terror that the Greek god Pan, who rules the forests, is able to induce in anybody who takes a walk in the woods after dark. And the Greek god Pan is not panipotent. Nobody knows where his name comes from – all we’re sure of is that he played the pan-pipes.

Back in 27 BC the Roman general Marcus Agrippa built a big temple on the edge of Rome and, in a fit of indecision, decided to dedicate it to all the gods at once. Six hundred years later the building was still standing and the Pope decided to turn it into a Christian church dedicated to St Mary and the Martyrs. Fourteen hundred years after that it’s still standing and still has its original roof. Technically it’s now called the Church of Saint Mary, but the tourists still call it the Pantheon, or All the Gods.

The exact opposite of the Pantheon is Pandemonium, the place of all the demons. These days pandemonium is just a word we use to mean that everything is a bit chaotic, but originally it was a particular palace in Hell. It was one of the hundreds of English words that were invented by John Milton.

Miltonic Meanders

A boring commentary in ten books of meandering verse on the first chapter of Genesis …

… is how Voltaire described Paradise Lost, the great epic poem by John Milton. Voltaire was wrong, of course. Paradise Lost is mainly about Adam and Eve, and that pomavorous couple don’t actually appear until the second chapter of the book of Genesis.

Paradise Lost is about the fall of Satan from Heaven and the fall of humanity from the Garden of Eden into the Land of Nod, and is generally speaking a downhill poem. However, it’s still the greatest epic in English, an achievement that’s largely due to its being almost the only epic in English that anybody has ever bothered writing, and certainly the only one that anyone has ever bothered reading. It’s also the origin of Pandemonium.

In Milton’s poem, when Satan is thrown out of Heaven and into Hell, the first thing he decides to do is to get a roof over his head. So he summons all the other fallen angels and gets them to build a huge and hideous palace. And just as the Pantheon is the temple of All the Gods, so Satan decides to name his new pied-à-terreAll the Demons or Pandemonium, and that’s how the word was invented.

Of course, since then pandemonium has come to mean anywhere that’s a bit noisy, but it all goes back to Milton’s idea, and his fondness for inventing language.

Milton adored inventing words. When he couldn’t find the right term he just made one up: impassive, obtrusive, jubilant, loquacious, unconvincing, Satanic, persona, fragrance, beleaguered, sensuous, undesirable, disregard, damp, criticise, irresponsible, lovelorn, exhilarating, sectarian, unaccountable, incidental and cooking. All Milton’s. When it came to inventive wording, Milton actually invented the word wording.

Awe-struck? He invented that one too, along with stunning and terrific.

And, because he was a Puritan, he invented words for all the fun things of which he disapproved. Without dear old Milton we would have no debauchery, no depravity, no extravagance, in fact nothing enjoyable at all.

Poor preachers! People always take their condemnations as suggestions. One man’s abomination is another’s good idea. This is the law of unintended consequences, and yes, Milton invented the word unintended. He probably didn’t intend or imagine that one of his obscurer words would end up as the title for this book. Etymologicon, meaning a book containing etymologies, first crops up in his essay on Nullities in Marriage.

Whether you’re all ears or obliviously tripping the light fantastic, you’re still quoting Milton. ‘[T]rip it as ye go, / On the light fantastic toe’ is from his poem L’Allegro, ‘In a light fantastic round’ and ‘all ear’ are from his play Comus. When a tennis player has an advantage, that’s Milton’s too, or at least he invented advantage in its sporting sense. When allHell breaks loose, that’s Paradise Lost, because when Satan escapes from Hell a curious angel asks him:

Wherefore with thee

Came not all Hell broke loose?

We rely on Milton. For example, he invented space travel, or at least made it linguistically possible. The word space had been around for centuries, but it was Milton who first applied it to the vast voids between the stars. Satan comforts his fallen angels by telling them that though they have been banned from Heaven,

Space may produce new worlds

And that’s why we don’t have outer distance or void stations or expanse ships. Because of Milton we have 2001: A Space Odyssey and David Bowie’s song ‘Space Oddity’. Indeed, if there were any justice in pop music John Milton would be raking in the royalties from Jeff Beck’s ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’, because Milton invented silver linings:2

Was I deceived or did a sable cloud

Turn forth her silver lining on the night?

This chapter is becoming rather quotationist, which is one of Milton’s words that didn’t catch on. So let us proceed to pastures new (‘At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue,/Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new’). Let us forget about the silver linings and concentrate on the clouds.

2 He’d also be making a little less from Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’.

Bloody Typical Semantic Shifts

Do you know the difference between the clouds and the sky? If you do, you’re lucky, because if you live in England, the two are pretty much synonymous. The clouds aren’t lined with silver. The weather is just miserable. It always has been and it always will be.

Our word sky comes from the Viking word for cloud, but in England there’s simply no difference between the two concepts, and so the word changed its meaning because of the awful weather.

If there’s one thing that etymology proves conclusively, it’s that the world is a wretched place. We may dream of better things, but the word dream comes from the Anglo-Saxon for happiness. There’s a moral in that.

It has always rained, happiness has always been a dream, and people have always been lazy. I should know, I’m lazy myself. Ask me to do something like the washing up or a tax return and I’ll reply that I’ll do it in five minutes.

Five minutes usually means never.

If the task that I have been assigned is absolutely essential for my survival then I might say that I’ll do it in a minute. That usually means within an hour, but I’m not guaranteeing anything.

Do not condemn me. Remember that a moment is the smallest conceivable amount of time. Now, turn on the radio or the television and wait. Soon enough an announcer will come on and say that ‘In a moment we’ll be showing’ this, that or the other, ‘but first the news and weather’.

There’s an old pop song by The Smiths called ‘How Soon is Now?’ The writers of the song must have been even lazier than I am, because the answer is available in any etymological dictionary. Soon was the Anglo-Saxon word for now.

It’s just that after a thousand years of people saying ‘I’ll do that soon’, soon has ended up meaning what it does today.

These days, now has to have a right stuck on the front or it doesn’t mean a thing. The same happened to the word anon (not the shortening for anonymous, but the synonym for soon). It derives from the Old English phrase on an, which meant on one or instantly. But humans don’t do things instantly, we just promise to. And the word instantly will, of course, go the way of its siblings.

And people are nasty, condemnatory creatures. The way people overstate the faults of others is, frankly, demonic. There’s a lovely bit in King Lear where the Duke of Gloucester is having his eyes gouged out by Regan and responds by calling her a ‘naughty lady’.

Naughty used to be a much more serious word than it is now, but it has been overused and lost its power. So many stern parents have called their children naughty that the power has slowly drained from the word. If you were naughty it used to mean that you were a no-human. It comes from exactly the same root as nought or nothing. Now it just means that you’re mischievous.

Every weakness of human nature comes out in the history of etymology. Probably the most damning word is probably. Two thousand years ago the Romans had the word probabilis. If something was probabilis then it could be proved by experiment, because the two words come from the same root: probare.

But probabilis got overused. People are always more certain of things than they really should be, and that applied to the Romans just as much as to us. Roman lawyers would claim that their case was probabilis, when it wasn’t. Roman astrologers would say that their predictions were probabilis when they weren’t. And absolutely any sane Roman would tell you that it was probabilis that the Sun went round the Earth. So by the time poor probably first turned up in English in 1387 it was already a poor, exhausted word whose best days were behind it, and only meant likely.

Now, if probable comes from the same root as prove, can you guess why the proof of the pudding is in the eating?

The Proof of the Pudding

As we’ve seen, both probable and prove come from a single Latin root: probare. But while probable has, through overuse, come to mean only likely, prove has prospered and its meaning has grown stronger than it ever used to be. However, you can still see its humble origins in a few phrases that don’t seem to make sense any more.

Why would an exception prove the rule? And why do you have a proofreader? What happens on a proving ground that is so very definitive? And what kind of rigorous philosopher would require proof of a pudding?

The answer to all of these can be found in that old Latin root: probare. Despite what was said in the last section, probare didn’t exactly mean prove in our modern English sense, but it meant something very close. What the Romans did to their theories was to test them. Sometimes a theory would be tried and tested and found to work; other times a theory would be tried and tested and found wanting.

That’s the same thing that happens to a book when it’s sent to the proofreader. What the proofreader gets is a proof copy, which he pores over trying to fnid misspellings and unnecessary apostrophe’s.

That’s also why an exception really does prove a rule. The exception is what puts a rule to the test. That test may destroy it, or the rule may be tested and survive, but either way the theory has been proved.

Similarly, when a new weapon is taken to the proving ground, it’s not just to make sure that it exists. The proving ground is a place where a weapon can be tested to make sure that it’s as deadly as had been hoped.

All of which should explain why the test of a good dessert and the proof of a pudding is in the eating. It’s the old sense of prove.

Mind you, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to prove