The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (11 page)

Which seems to mean:

They are not in heaven

Who fuck wives in Ely

The modern spelling of
fuck
is first recorded in 1535, and this time it’s bishops who are at it. According to a contemporary writer, bishops ‘may fuck their fill and be unmarried’. In between those two there’s a brief reference by the Master of Brasenose College, Oxford to a ‘fuckin Abbot’. So it seems that the rules of celibacy weren’t being taken too seriously in the medieval church.

Some scholars, though, trace the word
fuck
to even earlier roots. The etymologist Carl Buck claimed to have found a man from 1278 who rejoiced in the name
John Le Fucker
, but nobody since has been able to find the reference and some even suspect that Buck made it up as a joke. Also, even if John Le Fucker did ever exist, he was probably really
John Le Fulcher
or
John the Soldier
.

Acronyms are, I’m afraid, mainly myths.
Posh
does not mean
Port Out Starboard Home
and
wog
never stood for
Wily Oriental Gentleman.
There was a famous
cabal
formed of Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale, all conspiring against Charles II. But that was coincidence; the word had already been around for centuries.

But some acronyms do exist, just not where you might expect to find them. There’s one hidden away in
The Sound of Music
that relates straight back to John the Baptist.

John the Baptist and
The Sound of Music

About two thousand years ago a perfectly respectable lady called Elizabeth became pregnant and her husband lost his voice. He stayed silent as a silo until the child was born. The child was called John, and when John grew up he began telling people that they were naughty and chucking them in a river. Now, if you or I tried a stunt like that we’d be brought up by the police pretty sharpish. But John got away with it and, if you can believe it, was considered rather holy for all his attempted drownings. Chaps at the time called him John the Baptist.

Seven hundred years later somebody else lost his voice, or at least had a terribly sore throat. He was an Italian who went by the cumbersome moniker of Paul the Deacon, so he wrote a verse prayer to John the Baptist that ran thus:

Ut queant laxis

resonare fibris

Mira gestorum

famuli tuorum,

Solve polluti

labii reatum,

Sancte Iohannes.

[O let your servants sing your wonders on,

With loosened voice and sinless lips, St John.]

Four hundred years after that, in the fourteenth century, somebody set this little poem to music. He (or maybe she) wrote a pretty, climbing melody, in which each line started a note higher than the last, until with the words
Sancte Iohannes
it dropped again to the bottom.

So the first note was on the syllable
Ut
, the second line began with the
re
in
resonare
on the note above, then
Mi
in
Mira
,
fa
,
So
,
la
…

The problem with
Ut
, though, is that it’s a rather short syllable and difficult for a singer to hold. Try it. So
Ut
got changed to
Do
(perhaps for
Dominus
, but nobody’s sure), and that gave
Do
,
re
,
Mi
,
fa
,
So
,
la
and, by extension,
Si
for
S
ancte
I
ohannes
. Then somebody pointed out that there was already a
So
beginning with S and you couldn’t rightly have two lines beginning with the same letter. So
Si
was changed to
Ti
.

Do re Mi fa So la Ti Do

Which is just a shortening of a hymn to John the Baptist. The shortening technique was invented by a fellow called Guido of Arezzo.

So
Do
is not a deer, a female deer, and
re
is not a drop of golden sun. The Von Trapp family were cruelly deceived.

Poor
Ut
was consigned to history, or nearly. It sort of survives. The lowest note was also known as
gamma
, after the Greek letter. So the lowest note of the scale was once known as
gamma
or
ut
. Then a whole scale came to be known as
gamma-ut
. And that’s why when you go through the whole scale, you still run through the
gamut
. It all comes back to church music, rather like organised crime, which is, of course, crime played on a church organ.

Organic, Organised, Organs

Organic food is food grown in a church organ. Organised crime is crime committed by organists.

Well, etymologically speaking.

Once upon a time, the ancient Greeks had the word
organon
, which meant
something you work with
. An
organon
could be a tool, an implement, a musical instrument or a part of the body. For the moment, let’s stick to the musical sense.

Originally, an
organ
was any musical instrument, and this was still the case when, in the ninth century, people decided that every church should have a
pipe organ
in it, for, as Dryden put it: ‘What human voice can reach the sacred organ’s praise?’

Slowly the
pipe
part of
pipe organ
got dropped and other instruments ceased to be
organs
(except the
mouth organ
, which, if you think about it, sounds a bit rude). And that’s why an organ is now only the musical instrument you have in a church.

Now let’s return to the Greeks, because
organ
continued to mean
a thing you work with
and hence
a part of the body
, as in the old joke: ‘Why did Bach have twenty children? Because he had no stops on his organ.’

A bunch of organs put together make up an
organism
, and things that are produced by organisms are therefore
organic
. In the twentieth century, when artificial fertilisers were strewn upon our not-green-enough fields, we started to distinguish between this method and
organic farming
and thus
organic food
.

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.

Thus an
organisation
: something in which each person, like each
organ
of the body, has a particular task. That shift in meaning happened in the sixteenth century when everybody liked metaphors about the
body politic
. However, crime didn’t get organised until 1929 in Chicago, when Al Capone was running the mob (or
mobile vulgatus
to give it its proper name –
mob
is only a shortening).

Clipping

When a phrase like
mobile vulgatus
or
mobile peasants
gets shortened to
mob
, linguists call it clipping. And there are more clips around than you might think:

Taxi cab
=
Taxi
meter
cab
riolet

Fan
=
Fan
atic

Bus
= Voiture omni
bus

Wilco
=
Will co
mply

Van
= Cara
van

Sleuth
=
Sleuth
hound (a kind of sniffer dog)

Butch
=
Butch
er

Cute
= A
cute

Sperm whale
=
Sperm
aceti
whale

Film buff
=
Buff
alo

Buffalo

How did
buffalo
come to mean
enthusiast
? What’s the connection between the beast and the music
buff
?

To answer that, you first need to know that buffalo aren’t buffalo; and also that
buffalo
is one of the most curious words in the English language.

The ancient Greek word
boubalos
was applied to some sort of African antelope. Then
boubalos
was changed to
buffalo
and applied to various kinds of domesticated oxen. That’s why you still have water buffalo (
Bubalus bubalis
). Any ox in Europe could once be called a buffalo.

Then the same thing happened to buffalos that had happened to turkeys. Explorers arrived in North America, saw some bison, and wrongly assumed that they were the same species as the European ox. Biologically they aren’t related, and to this day scientists will become all tetchy if you call a bison a buffalo, but who cares? The name stuck.

Now, let’s jump back across the Atlantic and take another look at those European oxen. 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.