The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (31 page)

I ascertained by looking down from Wenlock Edge that Hughley Church could not have much of a steeple. But as I had already composed the poem and could not invent another name that sounded so nice, I could only deplore that the church at Hughley should follow the bad example of the church at Brou, which persists in standing on a plain after Matthew Arnold said [in a poem called ‘The Church at Brou’] that it stands among mountains.

A French playwright called Alfred de Vigny once wrote a play set in London about the doomed poet Chatterton. Apparently it’s a rather good play if you’re French, but any Londoner is bound to snigger when Chatterton’s friends set off to hunt wild boar on Primrose Hill, which is a small park in a rather leafy little suburb. However, Primrose Hill adjoins London Zoo, so it would only take a loose railing or two to render de Vigny right, and Londoners endangered.

Under the tutelage of time, nonsense becomes geography. The Greeks believed in a country called
Amazonia
filled with fierce female warriors that never existed. Then, a couple of thousand years later, an explorer called Francisco de Orellana was attacked by angry women during a voyage up a big South American river, so he called it the
Amazon
. Or take the case of the utterly fictional island of
California
.

California

The first description of California was written in Spain in about 1510, which is odd because, at the time, no European had been to the western coast of the Americas. But fiction usually beats fact to the punch.

The description was written by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, and the reason that he was able to write it with such authority was that California was an entirely fictional place.

Montalvo wrote and compiled stories of high and wonderful chivalry. He had knights in gleaming armour, dragons, sorcerers, maidens in distress, and wonderful exotic locations that he populated with fantastic creatures. In his fourth book, the
Exploits of Esplandian
, he invented a strange island that was near to the lost Garden of Eden.
24

Montalvo wrote:

Know that on the right hand from the Indies exists an island called California very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise; and it was populated by black women, without any man existing there, because they lived in the way of the Amazons. They had beautiful and robust bodies, and were brave and very strong. Their island was the strongest of the World, with its cliffs and rocky shores. Their weapons were golden and so were the harnesses of the wild beasts that they were accustomed to domesticate and ride, because there was no other metal in the island than gold.

This gives you some idea of Montalvo’s imagination, and also of why the promise of these strong-bodied, sex-starved ladies might have appealed to the lusty Spanish explorers who were sailing off to the New World. We know that Christopher Columbus’ son owned a copy of Montalvo’s work, and Cortés, the first European to enter the Pacific, referred to it in a letter of 1524. What’s more, the place we now call California was thought to be an island at the time.

Of course, California was never actually an island, but owing to a mistake by an exploratory monk, European map-makers believed that it
was
an island from the sixteenth century up until about 1750. How the explorers got it so wrong is unclear,
25
but as late as 1716 an English geographer was able to write:

California

This Island was formerly esteem’d a peninsula, but now found to be intirely surrounded by Water.

Which is good enough for me, and it was good enough for the Spaniards who were deciding what to name this temperate paradise. The explorers decided to name it after the magical land of ferocious (and attractive) women who had appeared in Montalvo’s chivalric fantasy.

Montalvo called his island
California
because it was ruled by a beautiful queen called
Calafia
. In the
Exploits of Esplandian
, Calafia has been persuaded to bring her army of ferocious (and attractive) women, plus some trained griffins, to fight alongside Muslims and against Christians at the siege of Constantinople. However, Calafia falls in love with Esplandian, is defeated, taken prisoner and converts to Christianity. Then she returns to the island of California with her Spanish husband, and her trained griffins.

There are several theories as to why Montalvo chose the name
Calafia
, but by far the most convincing is that, as she was fighting alongside Muslims, her name was chosen to suggest or echo the title of the Muslim leader: the
Caliph
. So California is really, ultimately, etymologically the last surviving
Caliphate
.

The Caliphate, a sometimes factual and sometimes formal union of all Islamic states, was abolished by the Young Turks of Turkey in 1924. Recently there have been strenuous and violent attempts to revive the Caliphate by Al Qaeda. However, if a troop of crack etymologists could be sent into terrorist strongholds, they could gently explain that the Caliphate never disappeared: it’s alive and well and is, in fact, the most populous state in America.

24
Just to keep you informed, the Garden of Eden, being perfect, was assumed not to have been destroyed in Noah’s flood, but to have been washed far away to some inaccessible place where it could no longer be found.

25
I refer the curious reader to Seymour Schwartz’s
The Mismapping of America
, whose detailed account of the mistake I have tried, and failed, to compress.

The Hash Guys

Even without California complicating the matter, the question of who should be Caliph and what counts as the Caliphate has been a tricky one ever since the Prophet Mohammed died. The first
khalifa
was a fellow called Abu Bakr who had been one of the first converts to Islam. However, after a few years, some folk decided that it shouldn’t have gone to him and that the position should, instead, have been handed down to Mohammed’s son-in-law and thence to his grandson and so on and so forth from one eldest son to the next. These people were called the Shia, and the others were called the Sunni.

However, heredity in principle always leads to dispute in practice, and so in 765 AD, when one of the descendants of Mohammed disinherited his eldest son, Ismail, the Shias themselves split into two. There were those who agreed that Ismail should be passed over and there were those who didn’t. These latter were called the Ismailis.

The Ismailis did rather well for themselves. They managed, in the ninth century, to conquer most of North Africa and they sent out lots of undercover evangelists to the rest of the Islamic world. These evangelists converted people in secret until there was a huge network of secret Ismailis who were, perhaps, going to help to establish an Ismaili Caliphate once and for all.

But they didn’t, because the Sunnis invaded North Africa, burnt all the Ismaili books and converted everybody straight back to the first form of Islam at the point of a scimitar. Now all the Sunnis needed to do was to root out the Ismaili converts in their home territory and everything would be fine and dandy.

So the Ismailis had a hard time of it. They were tracked down and persecuted and fined and put to death and all the other lovely things that mankind likes to do to his neighbour. They couldn’t fight the persecution because, though there were a lot of them, they were scattered about here and there and couldn’t raise an army. Then an Ismaili called Hasan-i Sabbah had a brilliant idea.

He seized one single, solitary castle near the Caspian Sea. It wasn’t a strategically important castle, as it was at the top of a remote mountain at the end of a remote mountain valley in a remote region. But for all these reasons the castle of Alamut was essentially invincible and unattackable. From this base Hasan let it be known that if any Ismailis got persecuted he would respond: not by fighting the soldiers or taking territory or anything like that – he would simply send one of his disciples out to kill the one man, the senior official who had ordered the persecution; and what’s more, the killing would be done with a golden dagger.

And they did. The first chap they killed was the Vizier of the Caliphate himself, and then they picked people off left, right and centre. Two things (other than the gold dagger) made them utterly terrifying. The first was that they would get into their target’s entourage as sleeper agents and were prepared to work for years as stable boy or servant just to get close enough to the victim. You could hire bodyguards, but how did you know the bodyguards weren’t killers themselves? The second was that they were quite prepared to suffer death afterwards, indeed they saw it as a bit of a bonus. They would kill their targets and then kill themselves, confident in the promise of paradise.

Nobody knew what to make of them, but the general opinion was that they were all on hashish. This is almost certainly untrue, but the name stuck. They were the
hash guys
, or in the colloquial Arabic plural, the
hashshashin
.

Religious fervour fades but gold always gleams, and when the Crusaders arrived in the Middle East they made contact with the Syrian branch of the Ismailis, in a second mountain fortress that was run by the Old Man of the Mountain. The Old Man agreed to hire out the services of his disciples to the Christian invaders, who were immensely impressed by their fatal fanaticism and discipline. Stories of the hashshashin got back to Europe, where the Arabic H was dropped and the hash-guys became the
assassins
.

It wasn’t long before
assassin
had been verbed into
assassinate
, and then all you needed was William Shakespeare to invent the word
assassination
for his play
Macbeth
:

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well

It were done quickly: if the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success …

But, etymologically speaking, assassination will always be the
cannabisation
of the victim, or the
marijuanafication
or the
potification
, or whatever synonym you want to use for dope.

Drugs

Dope is a terrible thing, and is particularly bad for racehorses. Drug a racehorse just a little bit and you ruin his performance, which is why it’s absolutely necessary for a betting man to know in advance which horses have been doped and which are clean-living and ready to win. Such a gambler is said to
have the dope on
a race: the inside knowledge of which runner has
gone to pot
.

Pot
itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word
potiguaya
, which means marijuana leaves. And
marijuana
is a Mexification of
Mary Jane
for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember. Another Mexican part of drug language is
reefer
, which comes from
grifo
, a word for a drug addict south of the border.

In fact, the vocabulary of drugs is as exotic as their origins. The assassins would, if they did smoke hashish, have done so through a
hookah
, a small pot through which the intoxicating vapours are allowed to bubble. When American troops took up doing the same thing during the Vietnam War, they took the local Thai word for a hookah,
buang
, and turned it into
bong
.

Of course, the terminology of drugs is a matter of dispute, legend and stoned supposition. Nobody is
utterly
sure whether a joint is something smoked in an opium
joint
, or whether it’s something that’s shared and therefore is
jointly
owned. Nor does anybody have any idea why people from 1920s New Orleans called joints
muggles
, but it sheds an interesting new light on the Harry Potter novels (another of Rowling’s characters is called
Mundungus
, which is an archaic word for low-grade tobacco). Whoever invented the word
spliff
didn’t bother to write down why.