Things we think we know

There are some words or phrases in English that everybody both knows the meaning of and how they came about. However, while we may know the meaning, being correct about the true origin is quite a different matter.

Here are a few examples:

Posh – rich, well-off, upper class, exclusive, smart.

The story is that in the nineteenth century the more affluent travellers on the P&O ships sailed out to India from the UK on the port side and home on the starboard. Their tickets were therefore stamped P.O.S.H. However, etymologists think the more likely origin of the word is from the Romany for ‘half’ which became a slang term for ‘money.’

This didn’t stop P&O liking the story so much that it started to use the (false) posh derivation in its own publicity.

Bikini – two piece swim-wear for women.

This small garment was named, as we all know, after the two piece atoll of that name in the Pacific. Actually the Bikini Atoll is made up of over 30 small coral islands, not just two. However, in 1946 two atom bombs were tested in the area and the swimwear designer, in an extreme lapse of good taste, named his new creation after these because ‘of the explosive affect the suit would have on men.’ Later he felt obliged to insist he named it after the whole atoll after all.

Okay /OK – fine, yes, not bad.

OK is said to derive from a fad in nineteenth century America, for both abbreviating and misspelling common phrases – in this case ‘all correct.’ This might actually be true, though its popularity grew in the presidential election of 1840 as the nickname for the candidate, Martin Van Buren, was Old Kinderhook (OK – get it?). The candidate went on to be the eighth American president, and ‘okay’ is now perhaps the most universally understood term of assent / approval.

But it might just have come from the American-Indian word for ‘yes’ –‘okeh.’

Finally here’s a phrase / acronym that is also understood worldwide.

S.O.S. – HELP!

OK, we all know this means ‘Save Our Souls.’ Or, if not that – ‘Save Our Ships.’ Lots of us could tap out the Morse code for the phrase too.  The original Morse code was CQD (seek you, danger), but in 1908 SOS was chosen because the code – three dots, three dashes, three dots – was easier to remember and transmit. So, in fact, SOS isn’t either a phrase or an acronym; it is simply three letters.

This blog is a version of the one first appearing in 2016

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As Easy As ABC.

We tend to think the alphabet has been around forever. We tend to think its application is universal. In fact we are wrong on both counts.

The alphabet as we know it (20 plus symbols representing sounds) has been in existence for about 4,000 years. It emerged first in Egypt, where before that thousands of hieroglyphics representing individual things was the main means of written correspondence. Progress was slow and most of the development took place in ancient Rome and Greece. The word alphabet is in fact made up of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet – alpha & beta. By about this time most of the written works in the Western world were alphabet based, and have continued to be so. But many languages still defy this logic – Chinese for example – and remain successful means of communication.

For many of us filing things alphabetically comes as second nature, but even after the use of the alphabet in reading and writing became commonplace, this has not always been the case, and there were several means of filing systematically competing with each other. The famous library in Alexandria, for example, filed scrolls according to subject matter; the author of a bibliography of famous people in eleventh century Baghdad, listed them in order of importance; monks in the middle ages in Europe also filed their subject matter in order of importance – starting with God, down through the angels, and ending with more mundane matters like diseases. Only during the Renaissance, with the introduction of more bureaucratic professions like Law and medicine, and the invention of the printing press, did a passion for keeping things in alphabetical order start to catch on. Even so, it has never been universal. Address books and telephone directories may now be alphabetical, as are rows in the theatre and cinema. And some of us may file our books at home alphabetically. But most libraries use the Dewey Decimal System to catalogue their stock: a system which expands, some might say rather imaginatively, on a plain alphabetical order.

Now in the age of the Internet, alphabetical rigour is again on the wane with Google algorithms working to a different logic. It seems we are moving back to where we started, with the alphabet being just one of several tools for listing things.

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The Language of Cyberspace.

We all know how the Internet has changed our access to knowledge (two clicks on the laptop rather than a trudge to the local library), and our access to readers (how else would you be aware of this post?). We also know that language constantly evolves – and has done so since the start of time, or at least since the beginning of speech.

Always, in both speech and writing, there have been two styles: informal for communicating with friends, formal for oration and essays. What the Internet has done in recent years is speed up the pace of evolution and added a third dimension – cyberspeak.

Take, for example, the keymash – in this context  a random bashing of the keys (e.g. afshjkf) to signify intense emotion, often anger or irritation. WRITING IN UPPER CASE can also indicate anger or excitement, or at least the desire to emphasise a point. READER I MARRIED HIM. Now, if you want emphasis without seeming overwrought, people use asterisks – *fancy that.*

The exclamation mark, whose use is frowned upon in more literary pieces, has had a renaissance on Twitter etc. and is often used in quantity to indicate lashings of care and affection. Don’t work too hard!!!!!!!!!!!

A previously underused key on the keyboard is the hashtag, but now is a regular feature in cyberspeak, maybe to give emphasis to an emotion #feelingsad; or to flag up an allegiance with like-minded souls #(add your own political/religious/sporting group.

And then of course there’s lol which I thought meant ‘lots of love,’ or ‘laugh out loud,’ but now seems to be added as a sweetener to anything the writer might feel is a bit harsh. Diet not going too well then, lol?

We can leave aside the use of abbreviations, some of which are fairly easy to work out – c u l8er, though others are pretty incomprehensible to those of us of a certain age (perhaps just as well). But people have used abbreviations down the ages – it appeals to our innate laziness. Emojis, however, are a different matter. They are new and brash and swarm busily throughout cyberspeak like worker ants. Some people can complete a whole tweet or Facebook post using smiley (or angry) faces, thumbs up (or down), and various fruits.

All this probably exasperates literary pedants, though for most of us it seems pretty harmless, if occasionally a bit irritating. But, on the darker side, cyberspace has become the breeding ground for a particularly virulent strain of hate speech and angry pile-ons against people who have, in someone’s opinion, strayed into ‘wrong think.’ How the Internet is giving succour to this behaviour is a matter of concern and ongoing research. I may do a blog on this one day, though should perhaps look into getting a lawyer and bodyguard lined up first.

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Who’d be an Assassin?

President Trump is reported to be displeased when people refer to the recent killing of the Iranian military chief as an assassination. I’m not surprised; after all an assassin, both in history and popular fiction, is usually the baddy (a revolutionary or a hired hand) who murders a goody (a Tsar, say, or an arch duke).

But is the assassin always the bad guy? Certainly my dictionary describes one as ‘a murderer, especially one who kills a prominent political figure.’ The noun, apparently comes from the Latin assassinus (singular), which in turn came from the Arabic hashshashin (plural). So far so good. But the singular of hashshashin is hashshash, which means one who eats hashish / cannabis.

It’s a bit odd to think the noun assassin is derived from the word for the taker of a well-known hallucinatory drug, but there is another meaning which may explain the link. During the eleventh to thirteenth century the Assassins were a secret sect of Muslim fanatics in Persia and Syria who went around murdering their victims – usually Christian Crusaders.

In 1256 the Assassins were wiped out – not by the Crusaders, but by marauding Mongols from central Asia. Maybe they were all stoned at the time, but in any event it seems the Mongols were more effective killers than the Assassins. However the Mongolian expertise as killers hasn’t lived on in their name.

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Origins of the word ‘taxi’.

Taxi is a word in regular use that is understood across the globe. When abroad, we may have trouble ordering a pint, finding out where the nearest public convenience is, or when the next bus will arrive; but we can usually recognise a taxi when we see one. A good thing too, with Christmas on the way and the party season in full flow.

The word, taxi, is commonly regarded as an abbreviation of taxicab. Various dictionaries will explain that the word derives from the Latin word, taxa, meaning charge, assessment or tax; and taxare, meaning to assess or to tax.  Fast forward to the nineteenth century, when a German entrepreneur named Friedrich Bruhn and associates invented a device, originally referred to as a ‘taxameter,’ that could be put into cabs to monitor various aspects of any journey undertaken, including cost.

It wasn’t long before ‘taximeters’ were being fitted into cabs used commercially. Originally these were horse drawn cabs, but the devise was proving useful, and the idea was transferred to the new-fangled motorised taxicabs that soon became known as taxis. Which all sounds very rational, and an illustration of how useful words get adopted, adapted, and abbreviated.

But Robert Winston, in his book, Bad Ideas? about how some of our creative ideas for improving life don’t always work out as planned, puts forward another suggestion and gives the credit to Italy. According to him, there was a Lombard family called Tassis. In around 1450, Ruggiero de Tassis, devised a courier system between Bergamo and Verona. This proved very successful and, throughout the rest of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth century, his descendants expanded the system across large chunks of Europe. It was, in Winston’s version, a small step from ‘tassis’ to ‘taxi.’ And taxis, as you know, whilst we usually associate them with couriering people from A to B, are still sometimes used to ferry goods about

So, when you hail a taxi in Thailand, England, America, France, Spain, wherever …, climb in and watch the meter ticking over as you speed (or crawl) towards your destination, should you be mindful of the German inventiveness that is monitoring what you will owe at the end of your journey? Or the Italian development of convenient transport tailored, to the customer’s needs?

(This is a repeat post from my blog in May 2017)

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Define me a Woman!

I have written before about language being a living, and constantly evolving, entity. New words come into common usage, old ones fall out of favour. If they didn’t we would still be talking like Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or the chap who wrote Beowulf, or simply sitting round the camp-fire going ‘ugg’ to each other and gesticulating.

That said, however evolved the language we currently use is, it is still important to know what words meant in the past if we want to understand past writers, and the historical context of their work. Not all past use of words seems appropriate to the modern ear, and we may not choose to use them. But to deny they exist is to deny the simple truth of my opening statement. I also find the original meanings of words, and their evolution, fascinating.

Which brings me to a recent furore about the definition of the word woman. In most dictionaries a woman is defined as an ‘adult female human.’ Some dictionaries go further and give examples of how the word is used, and list known synonyms. Recently a petition was raised to get the Oxford University Press to remove some of the synonyms for woman from its dictionary of English, because many of the terms were derogatory, or sexist, or both – well it’s hard to argue that wench, bitch, mare, bird, et al, portray the twenty-first century woman in a positive light!

The OUP’s head of lexical content (a woman) hit back, saying that the role of a dictionary is to reflect rather than dictate language, so changes are only made on that basis. She added, “If there is evidence of an offensive or derogatory word or meaning … it will not be excluded solely on the grounds that it is offensive or derogatory. Part of the descriptive process is to make a word’s offensive status clear.”

After all, as well as words that seemed acceptable at one time and now don’t, other words, like gay, have travelled in the opposite direction recently.

I did not sign the petition, although I was asked to. I agree with the OUP defence. Many others who refused to sign, and who went further and wrote to the OUP with their objections, also wrote to object to the follow up demand in the petition. This was that the entry for woman should be expanded to include new definitions, such as lesbian woman and transwoman. The point of those who objected was that lesbians ARE women, not a subset of the sex. Lesbian is a separate word – the commonly understood noun for a woman attracted to members of her own sex. The word should (and does) appear under ‘L’ in the dictionary. Trans, on the other hand, is a prefix, meaning on the other side. Attached to the noun woman it denotes a man who identifies as a woman (as opposed to transman – a woman who identifies as a man). These two, relatively new, word coinages have a growing traction that warrants their inclusion in a dictionary. Though maybe best listed in the ‘T’ section to avoid arguments over which, if either, is the additional definition of an adult female human.

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Bellwether – A Sign 0f Things to come?

There has been a dispute in my daily paper about the use of the word bellwether. A reader complained that the word was regularly being used as a synonym for barometer, an indicator of change so to speak. For example, the way a particular town votes in a bye-election is seen as an indication – a bellwether – of how the whole country would vote in a general election. But this was not what he understood the word to mean.

The original meaning of bellwether was a lead sheep, usually a castrated ram with a bell round its neck, that other sheep would follow, making the shepherd’s life a bit easier. The word comes from middle English belle (bell) and wether (castrated ram). Even by the thirteenth century, though, the word was being used to denote a leader, initiative taker, trendsetter etc. and not just a special member of the flock. Hundreds of years later, my city, Coventry, was seen as the bellwether for pedestrianised shopping centres. Other towns and cities soon followed (learning from the mistakes the Coventry town planners made as they did so). You could describe Mary Quant, the fashion icon, as the bellwether for the popularity of the miniskirt in the 60s.

My Collins dictionary, bought in the 1980s, supports the newspaper reader’s assertion. It has just two definitions of bellwether: a lead sheep wearing a bell, or a leader. However, a more modern edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary includes the definition of the bellwether as an indicator of the way a situation is about to change. These days I rarely see the word used in any other context. It just shows that language is a living entity that constantly adapts and evolves in meaning. All of us, including the newspaper reader who complained about wrong usage, need to try and keep up. It’s probably also time I bought myself a more up to date Collins dictionary.

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No Such Thing as an Irish Leprechaun?!

Leprechauns are quintessentially Irish. Those impish little fellows, clad in green, creating mischief and hiding pots of gold at the end of rainbows pop up throughout Irish folklore. There is even a derivation of the word in the dictionary of medieval Irish that was first compiled in 1913. The word was originally spelt lupracan, which itself was derived from the old Irish for small – lu, and body – corp. This all seemed to make perfect sense.

Unfortunately for Irish sensitivities, recent research by linguists from Cambridge and Queens (Belfast) universities, have found a different derivation. Worse, the leprechaun isn’t even Irish in origin! Luprecan, they have discovered, comes from the Latin luperci, the term given to the priests who oversaw the Lupercalia. This was a festival in which scantily clad Roman youths ran along whipping women with goat-leather thongs. The festival has died out, which sounds like a good thing, but the leprechaun myth, minus any roman associations, remains alive and well in Ireland. You can still find plenty of Irish men who have engaged in conversation with one or more of the little fellows on the way home from the pub.

However, the revised etymology for the word is now in the latest version of the dictionary of medieval Irish. How the irish feel about the leprechaun’s change of nationality is not recorded.

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What is an ‘Easy Rider’?

Peter Fonda died last week so, not unnaturally, most newspapers carried articles about him and his most iconic film Easy Rider. Both he and his co-star explained that they chose the title because ‘an easy rider is a person that is not a pimp, but lives off a woman,’ (Hopper). Fonda went further, saying it was a comment on the state of America at the end of the 1960s. The film was hugely popular, but not with the Hollywood moguls, and Fonda struggled to find films and roles that would bring him equal fame. But were they right about the meaning of easy rider?

Originally the term meant an expert horse rider, or horse that was easy to ride. (Transfer this to a motorbike and the film title seems apt for Fonda, a skilled motorcyclist, if not for Hopper). By the 1900s the term had become slang for a free-loader (again could be relevant to the film), or a woman with a liberal, not to say generous, approach to sex. A decade or so later, during the Depression, the term was applied to the slow moving freight trains that criss-crossed America. These were magnets for hobos and bums (slang terms from the era) who lived and travelled on these trains. One such train company was the Colorado Central, abbreviated to CC. The hobos were sometimes referred to as CC riders. It wasn’t a big step, the story goes, to start referring to them as easy riders, especially as the term had already acquired some pretty down-market connotations. (The film also deals with a lengthy trip across America, albeit by road, not train.)

Easy rider developed a slightly different meaning during the Second World War, when some American soldiers serving abroad unofficially employed local youths to do mundane tasks for them, such as cleaning their boots. They were said to be getting an easy ride. Later, some of these ‘easy riders’ started employing local women for domestic help, which often extended to sexual services.

Getting nearer to the production of the film and the term went mildly up market with the arrival of hippies and free love in the 1960s. Many of the more liberated young women intended to enjoy this era of free love and equality, but ended up with all the domestic chores and child care responsibilities – giving their hippie lovers an easy ride. However it seems the term easy rider was coined as the term for the women who put up with this state of affairs, not the men who took advantage of it. It wasn’t long before it went down-market again to become a term for a gullible prostitute who provided sexual services for a pittance – maybe a few cigarettes or a small amount of drugs. More recently the term has evolved again, according to Merriam-Webster, and is used to describe a hanger-on or a pimp.

After the success of the film, easy rider also became intrinsically associated with motor bikes, in particular, the Harley-Davidson. Ironic really, as the one thing Peter Honda’s bike in the film was noted for was being difficult to ride. So difficult that Hopper never managed to make riding such a model look easy, and ended up doing the film on a bike with more modestly raked handlebars.

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Pet names and Hypocorisms

You might not have heard the term hypocorism before, but I suspect you’ve committed a few when writing. And quite a few more when speaking. The word is Greek in origin, but the practice goes back thousands of years and can be found in all the Indo – European languages.

The hypocoristic principle is basically to take a single syllable word, double the consonants and add an open vowel. You can see this at work in family and pet names:

Grandmother – Gran – Granny

Mother – Mum/Mom – Mummy /Mommy

Father – Dad – Daddy.

Sarah – Sal – Sally

Thomas – Tom – Tommy

Ann – Nan – Nanny.

This last one is interesting as in the nineteenth century Ann was used as a pet name for a female goat, now known as a nanny goat. But the origins of nanny go back much further and has links beyond the English speaking countries. Nonna is aunt in ancient Greek and nanni is Indian for grandmother. And now we have nanny as an alternative to granny, as well as for a child minder (a granny substitute?)

We also use hypocorisms as euphemisms without thinking, especially if we do not want to seem crude (or rude), or when talking to infants:

Bottom – bot – botty

Stomach – tum – tummy.

If you are feeling coy you may prefer to talk about your ‘doodda’ (use your imagination) and people will usually know what you mean from the context. Whether they appreciate your hypocoristic skills in using such a term is another matter!

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