by Mark Forsyth
Back in London, Mr Darling, Wendy’s father, is rather morose about the disappearance of his progeny. He realises that it’s all his fault, as he had forced the family dog to sleep out in the kennel. So, as a penance, he takes to sleeping in the kennel himself. In fact, he never leaves the kennel at all and is transported to work in it every day. He is scrupulously polite and raises his hat to any lady who looks inside, but he remains in the doghouse. And so popular was Peter Pan that Mr Darling’s fate became a phrase.
So that’s a name, a noun and a phrase: all from one story. But Barrie also took names that had been around already.
The most famous admirer of Peter Pan was Michael Jackson, a singer and composer of indeterminate tan, who named his home Neverland. This means that Mr Jackson must have been working from the novelisation, because in the original play of Peter Pan, Peter doesn’t live in Neverland, but in Never Never Land, a name that Barrie got from a thoroughly real place.
The very remotest and most unwelcoming parts of Australia, in Queensland and the Northern Territory, are known as Never Never Land, although today this is often shortened by Australians to The Never Never. Why give a place a name that refers to time? There have been various explanations for that.
It was claimed in 1908 that it was called Never Never because those who lived there never never wanted to leave, an explanation so remarkably unconvincing that it deserves a prize. An earlier and more plausible story comes from the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1862:
There is in a certain part of Australia a wide and desolate tract of land, a heart-breaking region which has been christened the ‘Never-Never’ land. It is so called, I believe, from the impression which its drouthy wastes convey to the mind of the traveller on first emerging within its loveless limits that he will never again emerge therefrom.
But the actual origin is a little older and much more racial. A book of 1833 described the strangely peaceful wars of the local aborigines:
There is certainly more talking than fighting in their battles, and it is, therefore, to be hoped they will some day send over a few of their people as missionaries, to convince civilized nations that it is far worse to cut the throat of a man while alive, than to eat his body when dead.
I was greatly disappointed at not falling in with a tribe on Liverpool Plains, but the stockkeepers informed me that they had gone to war against the Never-never blacks, who are so called because they have hitherto kept aloof from the whites.
So Barrie’s imaginary place came from part of Australia named after blacks who would never never have anything to do with white-skinned people. This origin is rather odd when you think about Michael Jackson.
8 Thank God.
Herbaceous Communication
At the time that the Never Never was being named, the British had decided that a warm, sunny country with beautiful beaches was clearly a great spot for a penal colony. If you were caught stealing a loaf of bread in early Victorian Britain you were sent to Australia, where there was less bread but much more sunshine. This system was abolished in 1850 when word got back to Britain that Australia was, in fact, a lovely place to live and therefore didn’t count as a punishment. It was decided that lounging on the beach at Christmas did not produce what judges described as ‘a just measure of pain’.
Rather than join the colony’s work gangs, where they might be forced to do hard labour or, worse, administration, some of the more enterprising of the transportees set off into the Outback, where they obstinately continued to commit crimes. The Australian police would chase after them, hoping to arrest them and deport them somewhere else. However, the population at large tended to prefer the criminal bushrangers to the policemen, and would inform the furtive outlaws about exactly where the long arm of the law was reaching. This irritating and unofficial system of communication became known as the bush telegraph.
The bush telegraph isn’t recorded until 1878, but that’s because the telegraph wasn’t introduced to Australia at all until 1853. In America, the telegraph had been around since 1844 and it took Americans only six years before they had invented their version of bush telegraph.
The grapevine telegraph became famous during the American Civil War, but nobody is sure who invented it or why. The Confederate soldiers seemed to think that they had invented the grapevine and that it was wonderfully Southern and lackadaisical. This view is backed up by a contemporary Yankee source claiming that:
We used to call the rebel telegraphic lines ‘the grapevine telegraph’, for their telegrams were generally circulated with the bottle after dinner.
However, the other story goes that it was the slaves of the South, those who picked the grapes, who were the true and original operators of the grapevine telegraph. In this alternative version, the grapevine telegraph was the sister system of the metaphorical Underground Railroad that took slaves from the South to freedom in the North.
Then, in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, and the telegraph – bush, grapevine or otherwise – became old hat.9 The telephone had a great effect on the English language. For one thing, it made the previously obscure greeting hello wildly popular. Before the telephone, people had wished each other good mornings, days and nights; but as the person on the other end of the line might not deserve a good day, people needed an alternative. Alexander Bell himself insisted on beginning a phone call with the bluff nautical term ahoy, but it didn’t catch on and so hello rose to become the standard English greeting.
The other effect that the telephone had was that it made telegraph sound rather old-fashioned. So unofficial communication became known simply as the grapevine, which is why, in 1968, Marvin Gaye sang that he had heard dispiriting news of his beloved’s plans through the grapevine.
9 A dictionary of 1776 defines ‘old hat’ as ‘a woman’s privities, because frequently felt’.
Papa Was a Saxum Volutum
Marvin Gaye didn’t write ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’. It was written for him by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, who also wrote the classic ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’, which is based on another old phrase.
Revolving minerals already had their (movable) place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bob Dylan had written ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and some students from London had formed a band called The Rolling Stones, named after the Muddy Waters song ‘Rollin’ Stone’.
All these rock and rollers were referring indirectly to the fact that a rolling stone gathers no moss. This was observed in the 1530s by the poet Thomas Wyatt:
A spending hand that alway powreth owte
Had nede to have a bringer in as fast,
And on the stone that still doeth tourne abowte
There groweth no mosse: these proverbes yet do last.
The phrase also crops up in Erasmus’ adages of 1500, where it’s rendered in Latin as saxum volutum non obducitur musco. But why are all these stones rolling? On the rare occasion that you actually see a stone rolling downhill, it usually gets to the bottom a few seconds later and stops. Its brief trip doesn’t tend to knock much moss off, and if it does, then the moss will just grow back later. To keep a stone moss-free, it needs to be rolled regularly.
That’s why the original rolling stones were not boulders crashing down a hillside. In fact, the sort of rolling stone that gathers no moss is helpfully pinned down in a dictionary of 1611 as a gardening implement used to make your lawn nice and flat. The solicitous gardener who rolls his lawn every weekend will find that his rolling stone gathers no moss.
Which means that Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters et al are all referring to diligent gardening. Moreover, one of the most successful bands of the twentieth century belongs in the garden shed.
The part of the phrase about gathering no moss actually predates the gardening implement. In the mid-fourteenth century you can find this observation on ston
e flooring:
Selden Moseþ þe Marbelston þat men ofte treden.
Which translates loosely as moss doesn’t grow on marble that gets trodden on a lot. That line is from a mystic allegorical poem called The Vision of Piers Plowman. So before we proceed, what has Piers got to do with a parrot?
Flying Peters
Piers Plowman is a variant of Peter Plowman because the farmer in the poem was representative of the ideal disciple of Christ, the chief of the apostles and the first pope, whose real name was not, of course, Peter.
Once upon a time there was a fisherman called Simon. He fell in with a chap called Jesus who nicknamed him ‘The Rock’ (presumably in preparation for a career in professional wrestling), which in Greek was Petros.
And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona … And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
So Simon was – quite technically – petrified. And this Jesus chap, not content with renaming his friend, then decided to walk on water and, in contravention of every health and safety rule you can think of, encouraged Peter to do the same. This did not work out well.
And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear. But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.
And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.
With that story in mind, what do you call a sea bird that appears just before a storm and dips its feet into the water? You call it a storm peter. And then you muck about with the letters a bit – just as a cock is a cockerel – until it’s called a storm petrel.
Peter went into French as Pierre. Little Peters are called Pierrots and in French sparrows are, for some obscure French reason, therefore called perots. For reasons even more obscure, England then imported this word as parrot. The word first pops up in the alliterative claptrap that the Tudor writer John Skelton was pleased to call his poetry. Skelton wrote an attack on Cardinal Wolsey called ‘Speke, Parrot’. Some fragments of the poem survive, which is a pity.
Parrot got verbed by Thomas Nashe at the end of the sixteenth century in the equally pointless but fantastically titled Have With You To Saffron Walden, an inexplicable work of incomprehensible invective.
Parrots are very important linguistically because they preserve the words of the dead. There was an explorer at the beginning of the nineteenth century called Alexander von Humboldt. He was in Venezuela and found an old parrot that still repeated words from the language of the Ature tribe. Nobody else did, because the Atures had been wiped out a few years before. Another tribe had slaughtered every last one of them and returned victorious with, among other things, a pet parrot. This parrot still spoke only words from the tribe that had raised him. So all that was left of a Venezuelan civilisation were the echoes and repetitions of a parrot.
Venezuela and Venus and Venice
The name Venezuela has nothing to do with Venus, but the chap who thought it up was related to her by marriage.
Amerigo Vespucci was a Florentine explorer with three claims to fame. First, and most obscurely, he was the cousin of a nobleman called Marco Vespucci. Marco married a girl called Simonetta Cataneo, who was possibly the most beautiful woman who ever lived. So beautiful was she, that even after she had died (in 1476) Botticelli still used his memory of her (and the myriad portraits that already existed) as the model for his ‘Birth of Venus’.
But to return to Amerigo: not being as noble as his cousin, Amerigo was sent to work in a bank. However, the world of finance couldn’t hold him and, at the invitation of the King of Portugal, he set off on an early expedition to the New World. On his return he wrote several accounts of his travels. These accounts were written in Latin and so he signed his name using the Latin form of Amerigo: Americus.
One of these accounts fell into the hands of a man called Martin Landseemuller, who, being a map-maker, ran off and made a map with the New World marked on it. He was going to call it Americus, but decided that ending a continent name with –us simply wouldn’t do. Africa, Asia and Europa all ended with the feminine A, so he called it America instead.
Finally, Amerigo Vespucci named part of South America Little Venice, or in Spanish, Venezuela, because lots of the local tribesmen lived in huts that were built out into the water and supported by stilts, making it a sort of ramshackle miniature Venice.
What News on the Rialto?
For all its drainage problems, Venice has given the English language a fair number of words besides terra firma. Several parts of the city have entered the language. It was Venice that had the original Ghetto and the original Arsenale, where the warships were made. The first regattas were held on Venice’s Grand Canal; and the lagoon in which Venice stands was the original lagoon (and is cognate with English lake and Scots loch and even the bibliographic lacuna).
Venice was the first modern democracy, which is why ballot comes from the Venetian word ballotte, which means small balls. Indeed, the word ballot arrived on English shores inside The Historie of Italie by William Thomas, because the Venetians would cast their votes by placing different coloured ballotte in a bag.
The same naming process happened with the voting in ancient Athens. When the Athenians wanted to banish somebody for not being classical enough, they would vote on the question by putting little black or white fragments of pottery in a box. White meant he could stay: black meant banishment. These tiles were called ostrakons. Hence ostracism. Ostracism has nothing to do with ostriches but is distantly related to oysters (both words relate to bone).
The method and term survives to this day in blackballing. In the gentlemen’s clubs of London, an application for membership may be refused on the basis of a single black ball in the ball-ot box.
In ancient Syracuse, votes for banishment didn’t use shards of pottery. They used olive leaves and so ostracism was called petalismos, which is far more beautiful.
Venice was also the first place to introduce what we would now call newspapers. These appeared in the mid-sixteenth century and were little sheets describing trade, war, prices and all the other things that a Venetian merchant would need to know about. They were very cheap and were known as a halfpennyworth of news or, in the Venetian dialect, a gazeta de la novita. Gazeta was the name for a Venetian coin of very little value, so called because on it was a picture of a magpie or gazeta. Gazette was therefore a doubly appropriate name: it referred both to the cheapness of the news and to the fact that newspapers were, from the first, as unreliable as the chattering of a magpie, and filled with useless trinkets like the thieving magpie’s nest. The Elizabethan linguist John Florio said that gazettes were ‘running reports, daily newes, idle intelligences, or flim flam tales that are daily written from Italie, namely from Rome and Venice’.
How different from our own more modern magazines. Now, can you take a guess as to why a magazine is a glossy thing filled with news and a metal thing filled with bullets?
Magazines
Once upon a time there was an Arabic word khazana meaning to store up. From that they got makhzan meaning storehouse and its plural makhazin. That word sailed northwards across the Mediterranean (the middle of the earth) and became the Italian magazzino, which then proceeded by foot to France and became magasin, before jumping onto a ferry and getting into Britain as magazine, still retaining its original meaning of storehouse, usually military, hence the magazine in a gun. Then along came Edward Cave.
Edward Cave (1691–1754) wanted to
print something periodically that would contain stuff on any subject that might be of interest to the educated of London, whether it be politics or gardening or the price of corn. He cast around for a name for his new idea and decided to call it The Gentleman’s Magazine: or, Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer. So far as anyone can tell (and in the absence of a séance we can only guess at Mr Cave’s thought process), he wanted to imply that the information in his publication would arm the gentleman intellectually, or perhaps he wanted to imply that it was a storehouse of information.
The first edition came out in January 1731. It was largely a digest of stories that appeared in other publications, but it also had its own column of amusing stories from around the world, such as the following:
From Dijon in France, ’tis written that a Person having withdrawn himself, his Relations charg’d one who was his sworn Enemy with his murder, and examin’d him with such exquisite tortures that, to shorten them he confess’d the crime: whereupon he was broke alive, and two others as his accomplices were hanged. The Man supposed to be murder’d, soon after return’d home.
Or this pleasant round-up from the courts:
This day one Tim. Croneen was, for the murder and robbery of Mr St. Leger and his wife at Bally volane, sentenc’d to be hang’d 2 minutes, then his head to be cut off, his bowels to be taken out and thrown in his face; and his body divided in 4 quarters to be placed in 4 cross ways. He was servant to Mr Leger, and committed the murder with the privity of Joan Condon the servant maid, who was sentenced to be burnt.