The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

by Mark Forsyth

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Awestruck? 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.

Whether you’re all ears or obliviously tripping the light fantastic, you’re still quoting Milton.

The word space had been around for centuries, but it was Milton who first applied it to the vast voids between the stars.

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.

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.

the lovely botuliform, which means sausage-shaped

lovely, puffy sort of bread called naan, and it’s etymologically naked. Some bread names are even stranger. Ciabatta is the Italian for slipper, matzoh means sucked out, and pumpernickel means Devil-fart.

The same thing has happened with the phrase fizzle out, which once meant cutting the cheese and was delicately described in one nineteenth-century dictionary as “an escape backwards.” The same dictionary describes a fice as: A small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged [blamed] on their lap-dogs.

Many animals are misnamed. Guinea pigs, for example, aren’t pigs and they aren’t from Guinea. They are found in Guyana in South America, and it takes only a little mispronunciation to move them across the Atlantic. The pig bit is just weird.

If your host cooks you a nice hot dinner, you’re probably welcome. If he gives you yesterday’s leftovers—for example, a cold shoulder of mutton—then he probably wishes you hadn’t come around. It could have been worse, though—he could have made you eat humble pie. Humble pie is made using the umbles or innards of a deer.

The addition of the H to umble is an example of what’s known as folk etymology. Somebody who didn’t know what an umble was saw the words umble pie and got confused. Then they saw that umble pie was a humble dish, assumed that somebody had just missed off the H, and decided to put it back. Thus umble pie becomes humble pie. That’s folk etymology.

Of course, you may dismiss that last theory as poppycock, but if you do, please remember that poppycock comes from the Dutch pappe-cack, meaning soft shit.

Analysis is Greek for release.

if a fellow is of a friendly disposition, it’s because his friendliness is the inevitable consequence of the positions of the planets at the moment of his birth, or rather the distances between the planets, hence disposition. If Jupiter was in the ascendant when you were born, you are of a jovial disposition; and if you’re not jovial but miserable and saturnine that’s a disaster, because a disaster is a dis-astro, or misplaced planet. Disaster is Latin for ill-starred.

Monty Python is, for reasons best known to nobody, rather popular with computer programmers. There’s even a programming language called Python, based on their sketches. This leads us, inevitably, to Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs.

The first command in the joke program was that the computer should print the word SPAM. The second command was to go back to the first command. The result was that the lyrics to the Monty Python song would be printed out as a screenful of SPAM. This would scroll down your screen forever and you couldn’t stop it. By 1990 SPAM had become programmers’ slang for anything unwanted on the internet. When the Monty Python joke was continued on Usenet in the early 1990s the word spam gained wider currency.

Heroin remained a Bayer trademark until the First World War;

During his long and meandering literary career, De Quincey was a master-inventor of words. His opium-fumigated brain was a mint where neologisms were coined at a remarkable rate. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes 159 words to him. Many of these, like passiuncle (a small passion), are forgotten; yet many survive. Without De Quincey we would have no subconscious, no entourages, no incubators, no interconnections. We would be able neither to intuit nor to reposition things. He was phenomenally inventive, earth-shatteringly so. He even came up with the word postnatal, which has allowed people to be depressed ever since.

A champagne bottle has to contain six atmospheres of pressure. Even now the caverns of Moët and Chandon lose every sixtieth bottle to explosion.

That’s why the original rolling stones were not boulders crashing down a hillside. In fact, the sort of rolling stone that gathers no moss is helpfully pinned down in a dictionary of 1611 as a gardening implement used to make your lawn nice and flat. The solicitous gardener who rolls his lawn every weekend will find that his rolling stone gathers no moss. Which means that Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters et al are all referring to diligent gardening. Moreover, one of the most successful bands of the twentieth century belongs in the garden shed.

querimonious (full of complaining and lamentation), spongeous (like a sponge),

The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it’s largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen and a criminally insane American.

The heart strings, for example, upon which people so often play and tug are actual and vital parts of your heart. The medical name for them is the chordae tendineae, and if anyone ever actually pulled on them it would at least cause an arrhythmia and probably kill you.

Balzac once wrote that: This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.

If something is true, it’s the truth. If you rue your actions, you feel ruth. If you don’t rue your actions, you feel no ruth and that makes you ruthless. Ruth survived for quite a long time, and it’s uncertain as to why it died out in the end. Maybe it’s just that there are more ruthless people than ruthful ones.

Hmmmmm. No mention of the Hebrew meaning of Ruth.

If a gem frequently sparks, we say that it sparkles. If a burning log frequently emits cracking noises, then it crackles. That’s because –le is a frequentative suffix.

But the dis in disgruntled is not a negative prefix but an intensive one. If the verb already carries negative connotations (and something that makes you keep grunting is probably no good), then the negative dis just emphasises how bad it is. Disgruntled therefore means almost the same thing as gruntled.

snugging, an archaic word that meant to lie down together in order to keep warm. Repeated incidences of snugging will result in snuggling, and pregnancy.

Ancient Athenian actors used to wear goatskin when they acted in serious plays, which is why the plays came to be known as the songs of the goat, or tragedies.

The zodiac is, of course, the little circular zoo that runs around the sky. It’s a zoo-diac because eleven of the twelve signs are living creatures and seven of them are animals. In fact, when the Greeks named the zodiac all of the signs were living creatures. Libra, the odd one out, was added in by the Romans.

To the delight of beavers everywhere, people discovered in the mid-eighteenth century that you can get exactly the same bowel-liberating effect from an oil produced from the seeds of Ricinus communis, also known as the castor oil plant. So though it’s still called castor oil, it’s no longer obtained from the groin of a beaver.

Legionaries were given a special stipend just to buy themselves salt and make their food bearable; this was called the salarium and it’s where we get the English word salary, which is really just salt-money.

halcyon is another word for the kingfisher,

the answer may come as a shock to cyberpunks, because cyber means controlled—indeed, it comes from the same root as governed.

Meanwhile, punk was an early twentieth-century American term for a homosexual, specifically the young and pliable companion of an elderly and implacable hobo. From there, punk turned into a generalised insult and then was taken as a badge of honour by noisy rockers in the 1970s. However, an etymologist can still look at the term cyberpunk and wonder what these well-governed homosexuals are up to.

If a money-lender failed to make good on one of his arrangements, his bench would be ceremonially broken, and the old Italian for a broken bench was banca-rotta or bankrupt.

So the traders eventually gave up on tobacco and moved to another staple item that everybody knew and valued: deerskins. A deerskin can be slapped over the saddle of a horse, it’s thin and light, and when you’re not spending it you can use it to keep warm. Buckskins soon became the standard unit of barter in North America, and a standard unit of barter is, in effect, money. So it was buckskins, or bucks for short, that were used for trade.