The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (33 page)

The Romans would have used a
salt-salter
to season their vegetables and make
herba salata
, which we have since shortened to
salad
. This brings us to a strangely salty coincidence involving the good old days. In
Antony and Cleopatra
the Egyptian queen talks of her

salad days,

When I was green in judgment …

And the phrase has now taken up residence in the language. We use
salad days
as a synonym for
halcyon days
, which by an odd coincidence also means
salty days
.

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The Spanish call theirs
salchichón
, which clearly shows the link to
salsicus
.

Halcyon Days

People talk nostalgically of the halcyon days. They hanker and pine, and in the midst of their hankering they ask if we shall ever see such halcyon days again.

We shall.

The Halcyon Days begin each year on 14 December and last until the 28th, and like the salad days they are, etymologically, very salty. This time the salt is Greek, and so the prefix we’re looking for is
hal
–, the same
hal
in fact that you find in the salt-producing chemicals known as
halo
gens.

Indeed, halcyon and halogen are etymologically almost identical: the one gives birth to salt, the other is a salty conception. That’s because
halcyon
is another word for the kingfisher, and kingfishers lay their eggs at sea.

For a full and accurate explanation of all this, we shall have to turn to the Roman poet Ovid who explained it all in his
Metamorphoses
. Once upon a time there was a boy called Ceyx and a girl called Halcyon who fell madly in love. Unfortunately, Ceyx had to go away to sea and Halcyon would wait for him every day on the beach, gazing at the horizon and longing for her lover’s return.

Halcyon continued this vigil until she was informed, by the utterly reliable medium of a dream, that Ceyx’s ship had sunk and he had been drowned. At this news she got so upset that she fell ill and died a couple of days later; or, as Chaucer put it in one of his most beautiful couplets:

Alas! She said for very sorrow

And died within the thridde morrow.

Everybody was very upset by the whole business including the gods, who got together and decided that the least they could do for the poor couple was to turn them into birds. So Ceyx and Halcyon were raised from the dead and covered in feathers, and that’s where kingfishers come from.

Because Halcyon had spent so long gazing out to sea, that’s where she now lays her eggs in a little floating nest; and, just to make sure she’s not disturbed, the gods have arranged that the winds should be light during her nesting season, which lasts through the second half of December. This fortnight of good weather is therefore known as the Halcyon Days.

Of course, modern biologists scoff at Ovid’s story and dismiss it purely on the basis that it isn’t true. However, poetry is much more important than truth, and, if you don’t believe that, try using the two methods to get laid.

Dog Days

The Dog Days, like the Halcyon ones, are a precisely defined part of the year, or at least they were once. The second brightest star in the sky (after the Sun) is Sirius, the Dog Star, so called because it’s the largest star in the Great Dog constellation, Canis Major. However, during the height of summer you can’t see the Dog Star because it rises and sets at the same time as the Sun. The ancient Greeks worked out that this happened from 24 July to 24 August, and they noticed that this was also the most unpleasantly hot time of the year. So they, quite logically, decided that it must be the combined rays of the Sun and the Dog Star that were causing the trouble. They also thought a lot about how to cool down. The ancient Greek writer Hesiod has this advice:

In the season of wearisome heat, then goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are feeblest, because Sirius parches head and knees and the skin is dry through heat. But at that time let me have a shady rock and wine of Biblis, a clot of curds and milk of drained goats with the flesh of an heifer fed in the woods, that has never calved, and of firstling kids; then also let me drink bright wine, sitting in the shade, when my heart is satisfied with food, and so, turning my head to face the fresh Zephyr, from the everflowing spring which pours down unfouled, thrice pour an offering of water, but make a fourth libation of wine.

It’s well worthwhile memorising that passage and reciting it to a waiter on the first of the Dog Days. However, you must be careful, as, owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the Dog Days have slowly shifted over the last two thousand years and now begin around 6 July, although it depends on your latitude.

None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the notion that every dog will have his day, which comes from
Hamlet
:

Let Hercules himself do what he may,

The cat will mew and dog will have his day.

We call it the Dog Star, the Romans called it
Canicula
(meaning
dog
)
27
and the Greeks called it
Sirius
, which meant
scorching
, because of the heat of the Dog Days. However, the Greeks also sometimes referred to it as
Cyon
(the Dog), and the star that rises just before Sirius is still called
Procyon
; and that same Greek word for dog –
cyon
– also gave the English language the word
cynic
.

27
The French still call a heatwave
une canicule
.

Cynical Dogs

The Cynics were a school of ancient Greek philosophy, founded by Antisthenes and made famous by his pupil Diogenes.

Diogenes was, by any standards, an odd chap. He lived in a barrel in the marketplace in Athens and used to carry a lamp about in broad daylight, explaining that he was trying to find an honest man. His one worldly possession was a mug that he used for drinking. Then one day he saw a peasant scooping water up with his hands and immediately threw his mug away. Accounts of his death vary, but one story is that he held his breath.

Cynic
meant
doglike
. But why was Diogenes’ school known as
the dogs
?

There was a
gymnasium
near Athens for those who were not of pure Athenian blood. A gymnasium in ancient Greece wasn’t exactly the same thing as a gymnasium today. For starters, it was an open-air affair. It was more of a leafy glade than a building filled with parallel bars and rubber mats. People did do their physical training at the gymnasium, in fact they did it naked. The word
gymnasium
comes from the Greek
gymnazein
, meaning
to train in the nude
, which itself comes from
gymnos
, meaning
naked
. But if you could take your mind off the naked boys (which many Greek philosophers found difficult), gymnasiums were also places for socialising and debating and teaching philosophy. Diogenes’ gymnasium was known as the Gymnasium of the White Dog or
Cynosarge
, because a white dog had once defiled a sacrifice there by running away with a bit of meat.

Diogenes, not being a native Athenian, was forced to teach in the Dog’s Gymnasium, which is how one hungry and ownerless canine gave his name to a whole philosophical movement. A fun little result of this is that any cynical female is, etymologically speaking, a bitch.

Greek Education and Fastchild

If Cynics are dogs, the Stoics were the
porch philosophers
because their founder Zeno taught in the painted porch or
Stoa Poikile
of the Great Hall in Athens. If you didn’t like either the Stoics or the Cynics you could go out to a grove that was named after a hero of the Trojan War called
Akademos
. It was in the grove of
Akademeia
that Plato taught, and all
academies
since are named after it, which means that the
Police Academy
films are all named after a hero of the Trojan War via Plato.

The Athenians, as you can tell, were jolly philosophical chaps. This was largely because they had a wonderful education system in which the Greek children, or
paedos
, were taken through the whole cycle, or
cyclos
, of learning. Their knowledge was therefore
encyclo-paedic
.

The Romans were so impressed with the way Greek children were taught all these different subjects that they started writing books called
encyclopaedias
that were meant to contain articles on every topic there was. Then, two thousand years later, the internet was invented.

The internet works on computers, and computers work on all sorts of different programming languages. These programming languages tend to be rather complicated things that are hard to learn and, even for initiates, slow to use. So in 1994 a chap called Ward Cunningham developed a system of making related webpages that would be very simple and very fast. Because it was so quick, he called it
wikiwikiweb
, because
wiki
is Hawaiian for
fast
and the reduplication
wikiwiki
therefore means
very fast indeed
.

Soon, though, people decided that
wikiwiki
was a bit of a mouthful, and so it was colloquially shortened to
wiki
. That was the state in which Larry Sanger found the word in 2001, when he had the idea of a collaborative, web-based encyclopaedia that would use the wiki system. He took the words
wiki
and
encyclopedia
and mashed them together to form
Wikipedia
, which is now the seventh most visited website in the world. However, few among its 365 million readers know that
Wikipedia
means
Fastchild
. Fewer still will have considered the fact that anyone who likes Wikipedia is technically and etymologically a
Wikipedophile
.

Cybermen

These days, if you aren’t
wiki
or
cyber
or
virtual
, you are nothing. You might as well give up and make do with real life, which mankind has been trying for thousands of years without success.

Cyberspace is out of control and filled with cybersquatters having cybersex with cyberpunks. This would make more sense if anybody actually knew what
cyber
meant, and the answer may come as a shock to cyberpunks, because
cyber
means
controlled
– indeed, it comes from the same root as
governed
.

Back in the 1940s there was a man called Norbert Wiener who was studying how animals and machines communicated with and controlled each other. He decided to call his field of study
cybernetics
after the Greek word for a steersman. A steersman controls the boat that he’s in: in Greek, he
cubernans
it. From this the Romans got the idea that a governor who steers the ship of state
gubernans
it. Even though the B has been replaced by a V in the modern
governor
, things that belong to the governor are still
gubernatorial
.