The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (27 page)

Some frequentatives are a little more surprising. The next time you are being
jostled
in a crowd, you may reflect that your fate is rather milder than somebody who is repeatedly being attacked by a
jousting
knight. Medieval lovers used to
fond
each other, and if they did this too often, they began to
fondle
. Fondling is a dangerous business, as sooner or later it leads to
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.

Whether you
trample
,
tootle
,
wrestle
or
fizzle
, you are being frequentative. So here’s a little puzzle (a
puzzle
being a question that is frequently
posed
). What are the originals of these frequentatives?

Nuzzle

Bustle

Waddle

Straddle

Swaddle
20

Of course, the reason that you can’t get all those immediately is that a frequentative often leaves home and starts to be a word in its own right. Take the Latin
pensare
, which meant
to think
and from which we get the words
pensive
and
pansy
(a flower given to a loved one to make them think of you). The Romans thought that thinking was nothing more than
repeatedly
weighing things up
. So
pensare
is a frequentative of
pendere
,
to weigh or hang
, from which we get more words than you might think.

19
There never was a Sir John Mandeville, but there is a book by him. That’s how authorship worked in the fourteenth century. Moreover, I have modernised the quotation to make it comprehensible. The
gruntle
is spelt
gruntils
in the original.

20
And the answers are:
nose
,
burst
,
wade
,
stride
and
swathe
.

Pending

The Latin
pendere
meant
to
hang
, and its past participle was
pensum
.
In
meant
not
,
de
meant
from
,
sus
meant
down
…

If you are inde
pendent
you are not de
pendent
because the only things that are de
pendent
are
pend
ulums and
pendants
that
hang
around your neck.
Pend
ants are therefore
pend
ing, or indeed im
pend
ing. They are, at least, sus
pended
, and are therefore left hanging in
sus
pense
.

Weighing scales
hang
in the balance. Scales can weigh out gold for paying
pens
ions, sti
pend
s and com
pens
ations in
pes
os (but not
pence
, which is etymologically unrelated).

All such dis
pens
ations must, of course, be weighed up mentally. One must be
pens
ive before being ex
pens
ive. You must give equal weight to all arguments in order to have either equi
pois
e or
poise
. If you don’t give equal weight to all things, your scales will hang too much to one side and you will end up with a pre
pond
erance and pro
pens
ity towards your own
pen
chants. Whether these
pen
chants make you per
pend
icular, I am too polite to ask.

I hope that this section on the
pend
ulous hung together. If it did, it was a com
pend
ium. And though there are a few more words from the same root, to include them all would require the ap
pend
ing of an ap
pend
ix.

An appendix, in either a book or a body, is where you put all the useless crap. However, the bodily tube is more properly known as the
vermiform appendix
, which makes it sound even less pleasant than it is, because
vermiform
means
wormlike
, which is something to consider next time you eat
vermicelli
.

Worms and their Turnings

Worms have a hard time. When not being chased about by early birds or being disturbed in their can, they get trodden on. It’s no surprise that Shakespeare records them fighting back against their oppressors:

The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on,

And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.

William Blake, on the other hand, claimed that ‘The cut worm forgives the plow’, which seems extraordinarily unlikely.

Etymologically, it’s hardly surprising that worms turn.
Worm
comes from the Proto-Indo-European
wer
, meaning
turn
, a reference to their bendiness. So a
worm turning
is not just appropriate, it’s a tautology.

Worms have come a long way down in the world, as the word
worm
used to mean
dragon
. Then from a huge firebreathing monster they became mere
snakes
, and slowly they declined until they became the little things in your garden being chased around by a blackbird (or sliced up by William Blake). However, the
dragon
-meaning survived for centuries, and as late as 1867 William Morris could still write the wonderful line, ‘Therewith began a fearful battle twixt worm and man’, with a straight face.

The one constant in the etymological journey of the worm is that man doesn’t like worms and worms don’t like men. For a long time it was believed that garden worms could crawl into your ear, and as the Old English
wicga
could also mean worm, we get the strange modern formation
earwig
, even though an earwig is technically not a worm but an insect and has nothing to do with the sort of wig you wear on your head.
21

There are only two places where worms have turned and maintained some of their former greatness. One is a
wormhole
, which used to mean exactly what you might expect until 1957 when the word was hijacked by the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, a theoretical connection between two parts of space-time implied, if not necessitated, by the Theory of Relativity.

The other is the fearsome crocodile, whose name comes from the Greek
kroke-drilos
, which means
pebble-worm
. Pebbles also play a crucial part in
calculus
, which means
pebble
.

21
Although people do wear wigs in odd places. Seventeenth-century prostitutes used to shave their economic areas in order to get rid of lice, and then wear a special pubic wig called a
merkin
. And while we’re on the subject of earwigs, ear-hair grows from a place medically known as the
tragus
because
tragos
was Greek for goat, and ear-hair resembles a goat’s beard. Ancient Athenian actors used to wear goatskin when they acted in serious plays, which is why the plays came to be known
the songs of the goat
, or
tragedies
.

Mathematics

Mathematics is an abstract discipline of such austere beauty that it’s often surprising to find that its words and symbols have dull, concrete origins.
Calculus
is a formidable word that loses some of its grandeur when you realise that a
calculus
is just a little pebble, because the Romans did their maths by counting up stones.

Oddly, an abacus, which you might reasonably have expected to mean
little pebbles
, comes ultimately from the Hebrew word
abaq
meaning
dust
. You see, the Greeks, who adopted the word, didn’t use pebbles; instead they used a board covered with sand, on which they could write out their calculations. When they wanted to start on a new sum, they simply shook the board and it became clear, like a classical Etch A Sketch.

Average
has an even more mundane explanation. It comes from the Old French
avarie
, which meant
damage done to a ship
. Ships were often co-owned and when one was damaged and the bill came in for repairs, each owner was expected to pay the
average
.

A
line
is only a thread from a piece of
linen
, a
trapezium
is only a
table
, and a
circle
is only a
circus
. But the best of the mathematical etymologies are in the signs.

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
.