The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (4 page)

Miltonic Meanders

A boring commentary in ten books of meandering verse on the first chapter of Genesis …

… is how Voltaire described
Paradise Lost
, the great epic poem by John Milton. Voltaire was wrong, of course.
Paradise Lost
is mainly about Adam and Eve, and that pomavorous couple don’t actually appear until the
second
chapter of the book of Genesis.

Paradise Lost
is about the fall of Satan from Heaven and the fall of humanity from the Garden of Eden into the Land of Nod, and is generally speaking a downhill poem. However, it’s still the greatest epic in English, an achievement that’s largely due to its being almost the only epic in English that anybody has ever bothered writing, and certainly the only one that anyone has ever bothered reading. It’s also the origin of
Pandemonium
.

In Milton’s poem, when Satan is thrown out of Heaven and into Hell, the first thing he decides to do is to get a roof over his head. So he summons all the other fallen angels and gets them to build a huge and hideous palace. And just as the Pantheon is the temple of All the Gods, so Satan decides to name his new
pied-à-terre
All the Demons
or
Pandemonium
, and that’s how the word was invented.

Of course, since then pandemonium has come to mean anywhere that’s a bit noisy, but it all goes back to Milton’s idea, and his fondness for inventing language.

Milton adored inventing words. When he couldn’t find the right term he just made one up:
impassive
,
obtrusive
,
jubilant
,
loquacious
,
unconvincing
,
Satanic
,
persona
,
fragrance
,
beleaguered
,
sensuous
,
undesirable
,
disregard
,
damp
,
criticise
,
irresponsible
,
lovelorn
,
exhilarating
,
sectarian
,
unaccountable
,
incidental
and
cooking
. All Milton’s. When it came to inventive wording, Milton actually invented the word
wording
.

Awe-struck
? He invented that one too, along with
stunning
and
terrific
.

And, because he was a Puritan, he invented words for all the fun things of which he disapproved. Without dear old Milton we would have no
debauchery
, no
depravity
, no
extravagance
, in fact nothing
enjoyable
at all.

Poor preachers! People always take their condemnations as suggestions. One man’s abomination is another’s good idea. This is the law of unintended consequences, and yes, Milton invented the word
unintended
. He probably didn’t intend or imagine that one of his obscurer words would end up as the title for this book.
Etymologicon
, meaning a book containing etymologies, first crops up in his essay on
Nullities in Marriage
.

Whether you’re
all ears
or obliviously
tripping the light fantastic
, you’re still quoting Milton. ‘[T]rip it as ye go, / On the light fantastic toe’ is from his poem
L’Allegro
, ‘In a light fantastic round’ and ‘all ear’ are from his play
Comus
. When a tennis player has an advantage, that’s Milton’s too, or at least he invented
advantage
in its sporting sense. When
all
Hell breaks loose
, that’s
Paradise Lost
, because when Satan escapes from Hell a curious angel asks him:

Wherefore with thee

Came not all Hell broke loose?

We rely on Milton. For example, he invented space travel, or at least made it linguistically possible. The word
space
had been around for centuries, but it was Milton who first applied it to the vast voids between the stars. Satan comforts his fallen angels by telling them that though they have been banned from Heaven,

Space may produce new worlds

And that’s why we don’t have
outer distance
or
void stations
or
expanse ships
. Because of Milton we have
2001: A Space Odyssey
and David Bowie’s song ‘Space Oddity’. Indeed, if there were any justice in pop music John Milton would be raking in the royalties from Jeff Beck’s ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’, because Milton invented
silver linings
:
2

Was I deceived or did a sable cloud

Turn forth her silver lining on the night?

This chapter is becoming rather
quotationist
, which is one of Milton’s words that didn’t catch on. So let us proceed to pastures new (‘At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue,/Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new’). Let us forget about the silver linings and concentrate on the clouds.

2
He’d also be making a little less from Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’.

Bloody Typical Semantic Shifts

Do you know the difference between the clouds and the sky? If you do, you’re lucky, because if you live in England, the two are pretty much synonymous. The clouds aren’t lined with silver. The weather is just miserable. It always has been and it always will be.

Our word
sky
comes from the Viking word for
cloud
, but in England there’s simply no difference between the two concepts, and so the word changed its meaning because of the awful weather.

If there’s one thing that etymology proves conclusively, it’s that the world is a wretched place. We may dream of better things, but the word
dream
comes from the Anglo-Saxon for
happiness
. There’s a moral in that.

It has always rained, happiness has always been a dream, and people have always been lazy. I should know, I’m lazy myself. Ask me to do something like the washing up or a tax return and I’ll reply that I’ll do it
in five minutes
.

Five minutes
usually means
never
.

If the task that I have been assigned is absolutely essential for my survival then I might say that I’ll do it
in a minute
. That usually means
within an hour
, but I’m not guaranteeing anything.

Do not condemn me. Remember that a
moment
is the smallest conceivable amount of time. Now, turn on the radio or the television and wait. Soon enough an announcer will come on and say that ‘In a moment we’ll be showing’ this, that or the other, ‘but first the news and weather’.

There’s an old pop song by The Smiths called ‘How Soon is Now?’ The writers of the song must have been even lazier than I am, because the answer is available in any etymological dictionary.
Soon
was the Anglo-Saxon word for
now
.

It’s just that after a thousand years of people saying ‘I’ll do that soon’,
soon
has ended up meaning what it does today.

These days,
now
has to have a
right
stuck on the front or it doesn’t mean a thing. The same happened to the word
anon
(not the shortening for
anonymous
, but the synonym for
soon
). It derives from the Old English phrase
on an
, which meant
on one
or
instantly
. But humans don’t do things instantly, we just promise to. And the word
instantly
will, of course, go the way of its siblings.

And people are nasty, condemnatory creatures. The way people overstate the faults of others is, frankly, demonic. There’s a lovely bit in
King Lear
where the Duke of Gloucester is having his eyes gouged out by Regan and responds by calling her a ‘naughty lady’.

Naughty
used to be a much more serious word than it is now, but it has been overused and lost its power. So many stern parents have called their children naughty that the power has slowly drained from the word. If you were naughty it used to mean that you were a
no-human
. It comes from exactly the same root as
nought
or
nothing
. Now it just means that you’re mischievous.

Every weakness of human nature comes out in the history of etymology. Probably the most damning word is
probably
. Two thousand years ago the Romans had the word
probabilis
. If something was
probabilis
then it could be
proved by experiment
, because the two words come from the same root:
probare
.

But
probabilis
got overused. People are always more certain of things than they really should be, and that applied to the Romans just as much as to us. Roman lawyers would claim that their case was
probabilis
, when it wasn’t. Roman astrologers would say that their predictions were
probabilis
when they weren’t. And absolutely any sane Roman would tell you that it was
probabilis
that the Sun went round the Earth. So by the time poor
probably
first turned up in English in 1387 it was already a poor, exhausted word whose best days were behind it, and only meant
likely
.

Now, if
probable
comes from the same root as
prove
, can you guess why the proof of the pudding is in the eating?

The Proof of the Pudding

As we’ve seen, both
probable
and
prove
come from a single Latin root:
probare
. But while
probable
has, through overuse, come to mean only
likely
,
prove
has prospered and its meaning has grown stronger than it ever used to be. However, you can still see its humble origins in a few phrases that don’t seem to make sense any more.

Why would an exception
prove the rule
? And why do you have a
proofreader
? What happens on a
proving ground
that is so very definitive? And what kind of rigorous philosopher would require
proof of a pudding
?

The answer to all of these can be found in that old Latin root:
probare
. Despite what was said in the last section,
probare
didn’t exactly mean
prove
in our modern English sense, but it meant something very close. What the Romans did to their theories was to
test
them. Sometimes a theory would be tried and tested and found to work; other times a theory would be tried and tested and found wanting.