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

by Mark Forsyth

(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.)

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.

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.

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.

Once upon a time, Persia was ruled by shahs. Some shahs were happy shahs. Other shahs were crippled or dead. In Persian that meant that they were shah mat. Shah went into Arabic as, well, shah (ain’t etymology fascinating?). That went into Vulgar Latin as scaccus. That went into vulgar French (all French is vulgar) as eschec with the plural esches, and that went into English as chess, because a game of chess is a game of king, the king being the most important piece on the board. And what happened to shah mat? When the king is crippled, a chess player still says checkmate. Chess is played on a chessboard. Chessboards are kind of useful because you can arrange stuff on them. For example, when Henry II wanted to do his accounts he did them on:

Let’s look at the Proto-Indo-European word neogw, which meant unclothed. In the German languages (of which English is one) neogw became naked. In the Latin languages neogw became nude. But a funny thing happened in Persia to do with cookery. You see, the ancient Persians cooked their meat by burying it in hot ashes. However, they baked their bread uncovered in an oven. They still used the PIE neogw, and therefore called their bread nan. Nan was taken into Hindi as naan, and if you go into an Indian restaurant today you can still buy a lovely, puffy sort of bread called naan, and it’s etymologically naked.

The human body is beautifully and efficiently arranged (at least my body is). Each organ has a particular function. I have a hand to hold a glass, a mouth to drink with, a belly to fill, a liver to deal with the poison and so on and so forth. Heart, head, lungs, liver, kidney and colon: each performs a particular task, and the result, dear reader, is the glory that is I. If you arrange a group of people and give each one a particular job, you are, metaphorically, making them act together like the organs of a body. You are organising them.

They were called buffalo, but the name was often shortened to buff. European buffalo used to get killed and skinned and the leather that resulted was therefore known as buff, or buffe leather. This leather was very useful for polishing, which is why we still buff things until they shine. When something has been properly buffed it looks good, and from that we get the idea that people who spend too much time at the gym running around like crazed gerbils are buff. An odd thing about buff leather is that it’s rather pale and, in fact, looks very like human skin. That’s why naked people are referred to as being in the buff, because it looks as though they are dressed in buff leather.

Medieval Italians were terribly serious fellows. They would wander around solemnly declaring to each other ‘I am your slave’. However, being medieval Italians, what they actually said was Sono vostro schiavo. Then they got lazy and shortened it to schiavo. In the north, where they were lazier still, this got changed to ciao.

But be wary when you say ciao: however dashing and Mediterranean you may think you’re being, you are, etymologically, declaring your own enslavement.

The etymology of alcohol is as unsteady as one would have suspected. For starters the word alcohol is Arabic. This may seem odd, given that Islam is a teetotal religion, but when the Arabs used the word alcohol they didn’t mean the same stuff that we do. Alcohol comes from al (the) kuhul, which was a kind of make-up. Indeed, some ladies still use kohl to line their eyes.

In Latin a little boy was called a pupus and a little girl was called a pupa (which is also where we get pupae for baby insects). When they went to school they became school pupils. Now gaze deeply into somebody’s eyes. Anyone will do. What do you see? You ought to see a tiny reflection of yourself gazing back. This little version of you seems like a child, and that’s why it’s a pupil.

Counting on your fingers is such a natural thing to do that the word digit, which originally just meant finger, now means number as well. This also means that when information is stored in the form of numbers it becomes digital.

Who would be so silly as to believe anything like that nowadays? Well, anybody who’s married. You see, we put the wedding ring on that finger precisely because of that non-existent vein. If the finger and the heart are that closely connected, then you can trap your lover’s heart simply by encircling the finger in a gold ring. Hence ring finger.

People didn’t used to write 1 + 1, they would write the sentence I et I, which is Latin for one and one. To make the plus sign, all they did was drop the e in et and leave the crossed +. By coincidence, ET also gave us &, and you can see how t became & simply by messing around with the typefaces on your word processor. Type an & and then switch the font to Trebuchet and you’ll get , to French Script MT and you’ll get , to Curlz MT and you’ll get , Palatino Linotype and you’ll get and finally, as this book is printed in Minion, you get .

But where the Japanese saw a threatening monster, the French saw what the French always see: sex. A fashion designer called Jacques Heim had just come up with a design for a two-piece bathing costume that he believed would be the world’s smallest swimsuit. He took it to a lingerie shop in Paris where the owner, Louis Réard, proved with a pair of scissors that it could be even more scandalously immodest.

Italian aristocrats of the nineteenth century didn’t eat pizza. It was peasant food, flavoured with that peasant favourite: garlic. However, in the 1880s, European royalty, wary of revolution, were all trying to be nice to the common men whom they ruled. So when King Umberto and Queen Margherita visited Naples, the home of the pizza, a man named Raffaele Esposito decided to make a pizza fit for the lips of the queen. Esposito was the owner of the Pizzeria di Pietro e Basta Così, and he got over the garlic problem by simply not using any garlic, an idea that was previously unheard of. He then decided to make the pizza properly patriotic and Italian by modelling it on the colours of the flag: red, white and green. So he added tomatoes for the red (nobody had done this before), mozzarella for the white, and herbs for the green. He then named it Pizza Margherita and sent it, in June 1889, to the queen.

So necessary is salt to a good meal that we usually put it on the table twice. The Old French used to make do with a salier or salt-box on the table at mealtimes. The English, who are always trying to work out how the French make such delicious food, stole the invention and took it back home.

Women can’t be virtuous. A virtue is that which is proper to a man. The Latin for man was vir, and virtus was the Latin word for manliness. Virtue is basically the same thing as virility. So if a woman were to be virtuous she would become a man-woman, which is a terrible idea. A man-woman might be so bold as to have her own opinions. She might even express them, at which point she would become a virago. To be fair, virago was originally a word for a heroic woman; but that’s still rather sexist, as it implies that heroism is a purely manly quality. In fact, language is irredeemably sexist; but that’s not my fault, it’s the Romans’. Look at their attitude to women in the workplace.

In the Moneta, they produced moneta: literally warnings. The French took the word and dropped the T so that it was already money when it arrived in English. However, our adjective monetary, meaning related to money, keeps the reference to the temple and the angry geese alive and well. It’s only by an accident of propinquity that money is a monster. Perhaps you shouldn’t worry about it at all. Money’s not that bad. You shouldn’t be so frightened. Go on, take out that death-pledge. Sorry: mortgage.

Incidentally, bank comes from an old Italian word for bench, because money-lenders used to sit behind a bench in the marketplace from which they would do their deals. 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.