Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year

by Susie Dent

Ben is one of several Germanic names containing the root bera,

Ben can also be Hebrew for "son of"

a man seen by many as the greatest leader the nation has ever had, and by others as a political maverick with an undeniable gift for eloquence but unforgivably racist beliefs.

This ignores those who still blamed Churchill for the Dardanelles disaster.

Pilish, a language in which the letter counts of sequential words follow the digits of pi. Michael Keith’s 10,000-word composition Not A Wake, for example, begins ‘Now I fall, a tired suburbian in liquid under the trees’,

What happens for zeroes? In other works, Michael Keith uses 10 letter words or punctuation to represent 0.

Einstein put paid to the debate with his twin theories of relativity in the early part of the twentieth century.

Einstein distorted his figures to adjust for ether. Michelson and Morley then proved ether didn't exist and Einstein admitted he should have just gone with what the numbers were saying.

Meanwhile, ‘contrafibularities’ has slipped into the lexicon of at least one lexicographer as a byword for congratulations that are entirely insincere.

Perfectly cromulent word, then.

Henry Irving, for whom Stoker also worked as an assistant and who, it is said, provided the inspiration for Count Dracula.

Irving was clean shaven unlike the moustached Dracula.

displays the familiar Hellenic image of the kneeling Titan carrying the globe on its front cover.

Why is it familiar when it's wrong? Atlas carried the sky not the Earth.

In 1475 the Scottish poet William Dunbar wrote about a young man attempting to enter a girl’s ‘crowdie mowdie’ (an old word for ‘vagina’).

‘30 fucks or fuckings, 14 cunts, 13 balls, 6 each of shit and arse, 4 cocks, and 3 piss’.

It was Charles Dickens who, in A Tale of Two Cities, gives us our first written record of ‘husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil’.

There it is defined as ‘a person addicted to tea-drinking’, and is recorded as a label fondly used of himself by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a noted lover of tea.

The notorious atheist was also, in this sense, a theist!

As the writer Jill Lepore puts it: ‘Claiming a French-speaking king’s short-lived promise to his noblemen as the foundation of English liberty and, later, of American democracy, took a lot of work.’

Ulysses takes place on 16 June, the date upon which, in 1904, Joyce himself had his first outing with Nora Barnacle, the woman who was later to become his wife.

When she gave him a handjob.

As ever, Joyce expressed things far more eloquently, and in his own idiosyncratic style: in the end, what truly matters is that ‘love loves to love love’.

The marital relationship was much more difficult than this suggests. See Brenda Maddox "Nora".

Morse code. In order to give the simplest codes to the letters used most often, he drew up a chart by counting the numbers of letters in sets of printers’ types. This put E at the top of the list, and Z, unsurprisingly, at the bottom – positions that are largely true to this day.

Why is M (two dashes) so simple? It scores 3 in Scrabble but is easier to send in Morse than the more frequently used O.

Samuel Johnson included it in his Dictionary of the English Language where a tarantula is defined as ‘an insect whose bite is only cured by musick’.

A spider is not an insect.

Moreover, some colours were named far earlier than others – beginning with black, white and red, and ending with pink and orange (which was only named after the fruit began to be imported in the Middle Ages).

Which is why the robin's orange chest is described as red.

This they did: on 2 July 1928, Parliament gave women equal voting rights to men,

Note that limited voting rights were granted in 1918 and that voting rights were only granted after the suffragettes had renounced their terrorist campaign.

Its meaning has broadened to describe anything bizarre, crazy, or far-fetched.

Is that why the Muppet was called Gonzo?

Even today, few men are ever described as being ‘hysterical’ (or feisty, frumpy, bossy, emotional, frigid, or high maintenance).

In the sixteenth century, Western Europe was hungry for the luxuries of the Orient

This starts about seeking goods from the Orient and then switches to goods from the Occident with no clear connection - yes, Columbus was seeking a passage to the Orient but most of his successors who headed west weren't.

the BBC has placed ‘bollocks’ in eighth position on its obscenity list, in the – anatomically supremely accurate – place below ‘prick’ and above ‘arsehole’.

‘Call me Ishmael’ is one of the most famous opening lines from literature in the modern age.

But is it the opening line? There are two sections before it.

Melville’s choice of ‘Moby’ was clearly not dissimilar to the name of the actual albino whale that loomed large in the minds of the fearful sailors.

Melville used accounts of the sinking of the whaleship Essex as well.

‘charity’, ‘cherish’, ‘cheer’, and ‘whore’ are all ultimately from an ancient Proto-Indo-European language meaning ‘dear’ or ‘loved’.

a far darker interpretation of the Druids’ use of the mystifying formation.

Druids were much later than the construction of Stonehenge

Oxford’s vast dictionary databases have picked up examples of ‘lack toast intolerance’, of chickens coming home to ‘roast’, of a child being a ‘pre-Madonna’, the act of nipping something ‘in the butt’, and of people following a new fad ‘like lemmings to the slaughter’.

(You might think ‘winging it’ evolved from similar aviation challenges. In fact, it refers to an unprepared actor furiously trying to learn their lines in the wings before going on stage.)

The Sun King, it was said, had been jinxed by the most breathtaking jewel in history.

Louis XIV was the Sun King, not Louis XVI.

When the earlier settlers arrived on American shores,

This assumes the earlier settlers came from Anglophone countries, and ignores the fact that the First Nations had also moved there.

‘Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger – we were strangers once, too. My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.’

Nobel signed his last will and testament on this day in 1895, giving the lion’s share of his fortune to a series of prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace

But not Economics which was set up later as a Nobel Memorial Prize.

King John is said to have fined the City of Gloucester the equivalent of £250,000 in today’s money for failing to deliver his Christmas lamprey pie,

The writer of one lampoon from 1682 describes how the young wife of a much older man ‘swears and fucks and all the while’s so French!’ Henry Fielding whisperingly spoke of ‘certain French novels’, and ‘French’ was for centuries the only description needed for fellatio: a work from 1890 entitled simply Stag Party lists the offerings: ‘Common, old fashioned f—k $1.00 … Tasting (French) $2.50. French fashion with use of patent balls $3.50.’

The concept was greatly popularised by Roald Dahl, an erstwhile RAF pilot whose book The Gremlins, published in 1943, features little creatures prone to causing havoc in planes until

Was the concept of gremlins greatly popularised by Dahl when so few people are aware of the book?

The poet Lucian of Samosata

I've never heard this satirist described as a poet. I can think of dialogues, sketches and a famous novella but not poetry.

‘very strange singing Peace on Earth and off to kill all we can early next morning

The cleverest, perhaps, is Merryneum, because this time straddles Christmas and New Year just as the perineum connects the anus and the genitals.