The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (30 page)

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In case you were wondering, the quotation reproduced here comes from a 1772 translation. From the fact that it doesn’t even feel the need to mention sandwiches, we can assume that everybody in England now knew the name.

The French Revolution in English Words

When the world changes, language changes. New things need new words, and the new words of a period betray the inventions of the age. The Vietnam War gave American English
bong
,
poontang
, and
credibility gap
.

You can follow the history of the English-speaking world by watching the new words flow by. The forties gave us
genocide
,
quisling
,
crash-landing
,
debrief
and
cold war
. The fifties gave us
countdown
,
cosmonaut
,
sputnik
and
beatnik
. The sixties gave us
fast food
,
jetlag
and
fab
. And so on through
Watergate
,
yuppie
,
Britpop
and
pwned
.

But nothing has ever been as new as the French Revolution, which was essentially a mob of new ideas armed with pitchforks and intent on murder. Every new event, every new idea, had to be rendered for the English-speaking world in new words that were being imported from the French. Each twist, turn, beheading and storming was reported a few days later in Britain and the course of history can be seen in the words that were imported from French.

1789
aristocrat

1790
sans culottes

1792
capitalist
,
regime
,
émigré

1793
disorganised
,
demoralised
(meaning
made immoral
),
guillotine

1795
terrorism
(meaning
government by terror
)

1797
tricolore

And the
tricolore
, as we know, would survive both as a flag and a pizza topping. Moreover, the French contribution to the English language, which had been going on for centuries, would continue for centuries more.

About 30 per cent of English words come from French, though it depends, of course, on how you’re counting. This means that, though English is basically a Germanic language, we are, at least, one third romantic.

Romance Languages

French is a
romance
language, because the French are, by definition,
romantic
.

Once upon a time there was a thing called the Roman empire that was ruled by Romans in Rome. However, the language they spoke was not called Roman; it was called Latin.

The Roman empire was a grand affair. They had lots of great authors, like Virgil and Ovid, who wrote books in Latin. They also had a frighteningly efficient army that spread death and Latin to every part of the known world.

But empires fall and languages change. Six hundred years ago, Chaucer could write ‘al besmotered with his habergeon’, but it’s difficult today to make out what he meant, unless you’ve studied Chaucerian English.

The same thing happened to the Romans and their Latin. There was no sudden break, but little by little their language changed, until nobody in Rome could understand the great Roman authors any more, unless they had studied Latin at school. Slowly, people had to start distinguishing the old Latin from the language that people were speaking on the streets of Rome, which came to be known as
Romanicus
.

The Dark Ages darkened and the difference between Latin and Romanicus grew larger and larger. Latin was preserved in a way. Classical Latin, or something very like it, became the language of the Catholic Church and of academic discourse. If you wanted to write something that would be taken seriously by a pope or a professor you had to do so in Latin. Even as late as 1687, Isaac Newton still needed to call his great work
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
and publish it in Latin.

Yet in the Middle Ages, most people didn’t want to read books about theoretical theology. They wanted stories about knights in shining armour and beautiful damsels in distress. They wanted firebreathing dragons, enchanted mountains and fairylands beyond the oceans. So such stories got written by the bucketful, and they were
romanice scribere
, that is to say they were
written in Romanic
(the –
us
had been dropped by this stage).

Not all versions of Romanic were the same. There was the Romanic that had developed in Rome, another one in France, another in Spain, another in Romania. But
Romanic
became the catch-all term for all these languages and then for all the stories that were written in them.

Then lazy people stopped pronouncing the
i
in
Romanic
and the stories and the languages in which they were written stopped being
Romanic
and started to be
romances
.

And that’s why, to this day, stories of brave, handsome knights and distressed damsels are called
romances
; and when somebody tries to reproduce the atmosphere of such a tale by taking moonlit walks, or lighting candles at dinner, or remembering birthdays, they are being
romantic
or
Roman
.

Peripatetic Peoples

One word that has absolutely nothing to do with
Roman
,
romance
or
Romania
is
Romany
. The people who have for centuries travelled around Europe in caravans have had an awful lot of names, and all of them are insanely inaccurate. The most common name given to them by suspicious house-dwellers is
gypsy
, a name that derives from the utterly false idea that they are from E
gyp
t.

Gypsy
and
Egyptian
used to be completely interchangeable words. Shakespeare, in
Antony and Cleopatra
, refers to Cleopatra’s ‘gypsy lust’ in the very first speech. So where did this idea come from?

The Romany ended up being called Egyptians because of a single event in 1418, when a band of them arrived in Augsburg claiming to be from ‘Little Egypt’. What exactly they meant by this is unclear, but they wanted money and safe conduct, which was given to them by the authorities and then denied them by the people. The Egyptian idea caught on, and a legend grew up that the Roma were cursed to wander the Earth because when Joseph, Mary and Jesus were obliged to escape the wrath of Herod by fleeing to Egypt, a local tribe had denied them food and shelter. The gypsies, it was reasoned, were the descendants of this tribe, condemned to suffer the same fate for all eternity.

In fact, the Roma are not from Egypt but from India. We know this because their language is more closely related to Sanskrit and Hindi than to anything else. The word
Roma
comes from
Rom
, their word for
man
, which derives ultimately from
domba
, a Sanskrit term for a kind of musician.

That hasn’t stopped the legends of their origin spreading, though. The Egyptian mistake has been perpetuated in Hungary, where they were known as
Pharaoh-Nepek
, or
Pharaoh’s people
. But different countries have different legends and names, all of which are untrue. In Scandinavia they were thought to be from Tartary and were called the
Tatars
, in Italy it was Walachia and
Walachians
.

The Spanish believed that the Romany were Flemish Belgians. Why they thought this is something of a mystery. Most of the other European mistakes were at least based on the idea that the Roma had come from somewhere eastern and exotic. Indeed, one theory runs that the Spanish were only joking. Whatever the reasoning, the Spanish started to call both the Roma and their style of music Flemish, or
Flamenco
.

The French thought that they must come from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) and called them
Bohemians
. Then, in 1851, a penniless Parisian writer called Henri Murger came to write about life in the city’s Latin Quarter. He decided that the scorn that most of his fellow artists felt for convention made them social Bohemians. So he called his novel
Scènes de la vie de bohème
. The word caught on. Thackeray used it in
Vanity Fair
, and Puccini took Murger’s book and turned it into an opera called
La Bohème
. And that’s why unconventional and insolvent artists are known to this day as
Bohemians
.

From Bohemia to California (via Primrose Hill)

Bohemia holds a special place in literary geography. The third scene of the third act of Shakespeare’s
The
Winter’s Tale
occurs upon the shores of Bohemia. Indeed, the first line makes sure of it:

Thou art perfect, then, our ship has touched

Upon the deserts of Bohemia?

What is so special about that? Well, let’s jump forward by a century and quote
Tristram Shandy
:

… and there happening throughout the whole kingdom of Bohemia to be no sea-port town whatever—

—How the deuce should there, Trim? cried my uncle Toby; for Bohemia being totally inland, it could have happened no otherwise.

—It might, said Trim, if it had pleased God.

Whether or not it pleased God, the fallacious notion that Bohemia isn’t landlocked pleased Shakespeare, and Bohemia gained in fiction what it never had in fact. Never? Well, almost never. Uncle Toby doesn’t seem to know that Bohemia did get a tiny bit of territory on the coast of the Adriatic for a short period in the late thirteenth century, and again in the early sixteenth.

Shakespeare almost certainly didn’t know that Bohemia had ever been anything other than landlocked. Shakespeare didn’t give a damn about geography. In
The
Tempest
, Prospero is abducted from his palace in Milan and bundled down to the docks under cover of darkness. Seventy-four miles overnight is a good bit of bundling in the days before the Ferrari. Not that that bothered the Bard. He had people sailing from Verona and a sail-maker working in Bergamo, an Italian town that’s over a hundred miles from the nearest port.

Writers these days devote their time to research, Shakespeare devoted his to writing. He set a whole play in Venice, apparently unaware that there were any canals there; at least he never mentions any, and whenever the city pops up he refers to it as a
land
, even though it’s in the sea.

Shakespeare seems never to have consulted a map, and anybody who feels too sniffy about that can, like Cleopatra, go and hang themselves from the top of the pyramids. After all, fiction is only fact minus time. If the polar ice caps keep melting the sea will, eventually, come to Verona, to Milan and finally to Bergamo. Then the Sun will expand and the Earth, in a few billion years’ time, will be a parched and burning rock, and the charred bones of Shakespeare, resting in their grave, will be vindicated because all the canals in Venice will be dry.

The poet A.E. Housman took the same attitude with his poem ‘Hughley Steeple’
.
In a letter to his brother he wrote: