The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (7 page)

Just looking at changes in pronunciation works very well on the great unchanging concepts like fathers and numbers. However, many words change their meaning as they go along. Let’s look at the Proto-Indo-European word
neogw
, which meant
unclothed
.

In the German languages (of which English is one)
neogw
became
naked
. In the Latin languages
neogw
became
nude
. But a funny thing happened in Persia to do with cookery.

You see, the ancient Persians cooked their meat by burying it in hot ashes. However, they baked their bread
uncovered
in an oven. They still used the PIE
neogw
, and therefore called their bread
nan
.

Nan
was taken into Hindi as
naan
, and if you go into an Indian restaurant today you can still buy a lovely, puffy sort of bread called
naan
, and it’s etymologically
naked
.

Some bread names are even stranger.
Ciabatta
is the Italian for
slipper
,
matzoh
means
sucked out
, and
Pumpernickel
means
Devil-fart
.

Now what has
Pumpernickel
got to do with
partridge
?

Concealed Farts

Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
contains this sad story about the seventeenth Earl of Oxford:

This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his return the Queen welcomed him home and sayd, My Lord, I had forgot the Fart.

Farts are quickly delivered and slowly forgotten. The English language, though, has had much more than seven years to let the world forget its flatulence. The smell of the original meaning slowly peters out.

Take, for example, the phrase
peter out
. Nobody is quite sure where it comes from, but one of the best theories is that it comes from the French
peter
, which meant
fart
.
Peter
definitely gave us the word
petard
, meaning a little explosive, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has eaten beans.

However, when Hamlet says, ‘’Tis sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard’, he doesn’t mean that the poor engineer is raised into the air by the jet-power of his own flatulence, but that he’s blown upward by his own explosive. The fart had ceased to smell.

The same thing has happened with the phrase
fizzle out
, which once meant cutting the cheese and was delicately described in one nineteenth-century dictionary as ‘an escape backwards’. The same dictionary describes a
fice
as:

A small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged [blamed] on their lap-dogs.

And
fice
itself comes from the Old English
fist
, which likewise meant fart. In Elizabethan times a smelly dog was called a
fisting cur
, and by the eighteenth century any little dog was called a
feist
, and that’s where we get the word
feisty
from. Little dogs are so prone to bark at anything that an uppity girl was called
feisty
, straight from the flatulent dogs of yore. This is a point well worth remembering when you’re next reading a film review about a ‘feisty heroine’.

The fart lingers.

Our word
partridge
comes from the Old French
pertis
which comes from the Latin
perdix
which comes from the Greek
perdix
which comes from the Greek verb
perdesthai
which means
fart
, because that’s what a partridge sounds like when it flies. The low, loud beating of the wings sounds like the clapping of the buttocks when the inner gale is liberated.

A polite, even beautiful, word for foods that make your bottom quack is
carminative
. There used to be carminative medicines, for it was widely believed that farting was good for you, as in the rhyme:

Beans, beans, they’re good for the heart

The more you eat, the more you fart;

The more you fart, the better you feel;

So let’s have beans for every meal.

This belief in the curative powers of flatulence was, originally, based on the idea of humours. The body was thought to be filled with substances that could get horribly out of balance. A fart was a like a comb or card being pulled through wool and removing the knots. The Latin for a wool card was
carmen
, which has nothing to do with the opera, but is exactly the same as
heckling
.

Wool

Heckling is, or once was, the process of removing the knots from wool. Sheep are notoriously lackadaisical about their appearance, so before their wool can be turned into a nice warm jumper it must be combed.

It’s easy to see how combing wool and teasing out the knots could be used metaphorically for
combing
through an oration and
teasing
the orator, but the connection is probably far more direct and goes to the Scottish town of Dundee.

Dundee was a radical place in the eighteenth century. It was the local centre of the wool trade and was therefore overrun with hecklers. The hecklers were the most radical workers of all. They formed themselves into what today would be called a trade union and used collective bargaining to guarantee themselves good pay and perks. The perks were mostly in the form of alcohol, but that was to be expected.

They were a political lot, the hecklers. Every morning while most of them were busy heckling, one of their number would stand up and read aloud from the day’s news. They thus formed strong opinions on all subjects and when politicians and dignitaries tried to address them, their speeches were combed over with the same thoroughness as the wool. Thus
heckling
.

Wool is everywhere in language. If you possess a mobile phone you are probably wooling your friends every day without even realising it. You are, after all, currently reading wool.

Or had you never noticed the connection between
text
and
textile
?

That you send woolly messages on your telephone and read wool and cite wool from the Bible is all down to a Roman orator named Quintilian. Quintilian was the greatest orator of his day, so great that the Emperor Domitian appointed him as tutor to his two grand-nephews who were also his heirs. Nobody knows what exactly Quintilian taught them, but Domitian soon sent them both into exile.

The two lines of Quintilian that interest us are in the
Institutio Oratorico
, a gargantuan twelve-volume work on absolutely everything to do with rhetoric. In it, Quintilian says that after you have chosen your words you must weave them together into a fabric –
in textu iungantur
– until you have a fine and delicate
text
[
ure
[
ile
]] or
textum tenue atque rasum
.

It’s the sort of thing we say all the time. We
weave
stories together and
embroider
them and try never to lose the
thread
of the story. Quintilian’s metaphor lasted. Late classical writers took up
text
to mean any short passage in a book and then we took it to mean anything that was written down and then somebody invented the SMS message. This sheepskin writing is all rather appropriate, given that the size of books depends upon the size of sheep.

Paper was invented in China about two thousand years ago, but we in the West didn’t take up the invention until the fourteenth century. Even then, paper was considered an oriental oddity. The first English paper mill was founded in 1588.

Before paper, readers had to make do with one of two alternatives. They could use the papyrus plant, which grew plentifully in Egypt. If you mashed up papyrus you could make something that resembled paper – indeed, it was similar enough that
papyr
us is where we get the word
paper
.

Unfortunately, there’s very little papyrus in England. Instead, we used sheepskins, and now you can too. Here’s the recipe.

1. Take one sheep.
   
2. Kill it and skin it (it’s vital to do this in the right order).
   
3. Wash the bloody skin in water, then soak it in beer for a couple of days until the hair falls out.
   
4. Let it dry stretched out on a wooden rack called a
   tenter
   . To keep it taut and flat, attach it using
   tenterhooks
   .
   
5. After a couple of days you should have something that’s approximately rectangular with four sad extrusions that used to be legs.
   
6. Cut off legs and discard.
   
7. Trim the remainder down until you have an exact rectangle.
   
8. Fold in half.
   
9. You should now have four pages (printed front and back) that are roughly the size of a modern atlas. This is called a folio. All you now need to make an atlas of more than four pages is more sheep.
   
10. Fold it in half again and you’ll have eight pages at roughly the size of a modern encyclopedia. You’ll need to slice the pages at the top to make the pages turnable. This is called a quarto.
    
11. Fold again.
    
12. Provided you started off with an average-sized medieval sheep, you should now be holding something pretty much the size of a hardback novel. This is called an octavo.
    
13. Fold again.
    
14. Mass-market paperback.
    

When Caxton built his printing press in the fifteenth century, he set it up to use sheepskin and not paper. When paper was finally introduced it was manufactured to fit the existing printing presses, and that’s the reason that both the text you’re reading and the book that contains it are dependent upon sheep.

Of course, you may be reading this on your e-book reader, but as those have been designed to mimic the size of normal books, you’re still at the mercy of the sheep.

Wool gets everywhere in language. Muslim mystics are called
Sufis
because of the woollen,
suf
, garments that they wore.
Burlesque
dancers on the other hand are taking part in a nonsensical or trifling show named after the Latin
burra
meaning
a tuft of wool
. Burras were used as coverings for desks, and that gave us
bureaus
and then
bureaucracies
.

Then there are all different kinds of wool: cashmere came originally from Kashmir and Angora came from Ankara, the capital of Turkey.

Turkey is, of course, the country you eat for Christmas.

Turkey

Early explorers in the Americas saw flocks of turkeys singing in the magnolia forests, for the turkey is native to America. Indeed, it was domesticated and eaten by the Aztecs. Why it should therefore be named after a country in Asia Minor is a little odd, but explicable.

Many animals are misnamed. Guinea pigs, for example, aren’t pigs and they aren’t from Guinea. They are found in
Guyana
in South America, and it takes only a little mispronunciation to move them across the Atlantic. The pig bit is just weird.

The same is true of the helmeted guinea fowl, or
Numidia meleagris
, which was once native to Madagascar but not Guinea. The helmeted guinea fowl is an ugly bird. It has a big bony knob on the top of its head (hence the name), but it tastes
delicious
.