The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  The other is the fearsome crocodile, whose name comes from the Greek kroke-drilos, which means pebble-worm. Pebbles also play a crucial part in calculus, which means pebble.

  21 Although people do wear wigs in odd places. Seventeenth-century prostitutes used to shave their economic areas in order to get rid of lice, and then wear a special pubic wig called a merkin. And while we’re on the subject of earwigs, ear-hair grows from a place medically known as the tragus because tragos was Greek for goat, and ear-hair resembles a goat’s beard. Ancient Athenian actors used to wear goatskin when they acted in serious plays, which is why the plays came to be known the songs of the goat, or tragedies.

  Mathematics

  Mathematics is an abstract discipline of such austere beauty that it’s often surprising to find that its words and symbols have dull, concrete origins. Calculus is a formidable word that loses some of its grandeur when you realise that a calculus is just a little pebble, because the Romans did their maths by counting up stones.

  Oddly, an abacus, which you might reasonably have expected to mean little pebbles, comes ultimately from the Hebrew word abaq meaning dust. You see, the Greeks, who adopted the word, didn’t use pebbles; instead they used a board covered with sand, on which they could write out their calculations. When they wanted to start on a new sum, they simply shook the board and it became clear, like a classical Etch A Sketch.

  Average has an even more mundane explanation. It comes from the Old French avarie, which meant damage done to a ship. Ships were often co-owned and when one was damaged and the bill came in for repairs, each owner was expected to pay the average.

  A line is only a thread from a piece of linen, a trapezium is only a table, and a circle is only a circus. But the best of the mathematical etymologies are in the signs.

  People didn’t used to write 1 + 1, they would write the sentence I et I, which is Latin for one and one. To make the plus sign, all they did was drop the e in et and leave the crossed +. By coincidence, ET also gave us &, and you can see how t became & simply by messing around with the typefaces on your word processor. Type an & and then switch the font to Trebuchet and you’ll get , to French Script MT and you’ll get , to Curlz MT and you’ll get , Palatino Linotype and you’ll get and finally, as this book is printed in Minion, you get .

  Most mathematics used to be written out in full sentences, which is why the equals sign was invented by a sixteenth-century Welshman who rejoiced in the name of Robert Recorde. Robert had got thoroughly bored of writing out the words is equal to every time he did a sum. This was particularly irritating for him, as he was writing a mathematical textbook with the memorable title, The Whetestone of Witte whiche is the seconde parte of Arithmeteke: containing the extraction of rootes; the cossike practise, with the rule of equation; and the workes of Surde Nombers.

  But the prolixity of the title was matched by the brevity that the book brought to algebra. Recorde wrote:

  … to avoid the tedious repetition of these words: is equal to: I will set as I do often in work use, a pair of parallels, or Gemowe lines of one length, thus: , bicause no 2 things, can be more equal.

  So is an equals sign because the two lines are of equal length. Robert Recorde published his Whetstone of … (see above) in 1557 and died in debtors’ prison the following year, thus demonstrating the difference between good mathematics and good accounting.

  Recorde thought that the two lines of were so similar that they were like identical twins, which is why he called them gemowe, meaning twin. Gemowe derived from the Old French gemeaus, which was the plural of gemel, which came from the Latin gemellus, which was the diminutive of Gemini.

  Stellafied and Oily Beavers

  The zodiac is, of course, the little circular zoo that runs around the sky. It’s a zoo-diac because eleven of the twelve signs are living creatures and seven of them are animals. In fact, when the Greeks named the zodiac all of the signs were living creatures. Libra, the odd one out, was added in by the Romans.

  The zodiac is filled with all sorts of strange word associations. Cancer is the crab largely because Galen thought that some tumours resembled crabs and partly because both words come from the Indo-European root qarq, which meant hard. Goats such as Capricorn skip about and are generally capricious, or goatlike. And bulls like Taurus get killed by toreadors. But let’s stick, for the moment, to Gemini, the twins.

  The twins in question are two stars called Castor and Pollux, and how they came to be there is a tender and touching story. Despite what astronomers would have you believe, most of the stars were created not by energy cooling into matter, but by Zeus.

  Zeus had a thing for a girl called Leda and decided to turn into a swan and have his wicked way with her. However, later that night Leda slept with her husband Tyndareus. The result was a rather complicated pregnancy and Leda popping out two eggs, which is enough to make any husband suspicious.

  The first egg contained Helen (of Troy) and Clytemnestra. The second egg contained Pollux and Castor. Extensive mythological paternity testing revealed that Helen and Pollux were the children of Zeus, and Castor and Clytemnestra were the mortal children of Tyndareus, which can hardly have been much of a consolation for the poor chap.

  Castor and Pollux were inseparable until one day Castor was stabbed and killed. Pollux, who was a demi-god, struck a deal with his dad that he could share his immortality with his twin brother, and the result was that Zeus turned them into two stars that could be together for ever in the heavens (well, in fact they’re sixteen light years apart, but let’s not get bogged down in details).

  Castor was the Greek word for beaver, and to this day beavers all across the world belong to the genus Castor, even if they don’t know it. We usually think of beavers as sweet little creatures who build dams, but that’s not how a constipated Renaissance man would view them; a constipated Renaissance man would view them as his relief and his cure.

  You see, the beaver has two sacs in his groin that contain a noxious and utterly disgusting oil that acts as a very effective laxative. This very valuable liquid was known as castor oil.

  The name survives, but the source of the liquid has changed. To the delight of beavers everywhere, people discovered in the mid-eighteenth century that you can get exactly the same bowel-liberating effect from an oil produced from the seeds of Ricinus communis, also known as the castor oil plant. So though it’s still called castor oil, it’s no longer obtained from the groin of a beaver.

  Several anatomical terms derive from the beaver, but in order to keep this chain of thought decent and pure and family-friendly, let us for the moment consider that beaver was once a word for beard.

  Beards

  The number of hidden beards in the English language is quite bizarre. Bizarre, for example, comes from the Basque word bizar or beard, because when Spanish soldiers arrived in the remote and clean-shaven villages of the Pyrenees, the locals thought that their bizars were bizarre.

  The feathers that were stuck into the back of arrows were known by the Romans as the beard, or barbus, which is why arrows are barbs, and that’s ultimately the reason that barbed wire is simply wire that has grown a beard.

  Barbus is also the reason that the man who cuts your beard is known as a barber. The ancient Romans liked to be clean-shaven, as beards were considered weird and Greek, so their barbers plied a regular and lucrative trade until the fall of the Roman empire. Italy was overrun by tribesmen who had huge long beards which they never even trimmed. These tribesmen were known as the longa barba, or longbeards, which was eventually shortened to Lombard, which is why a large part of northern Italy is still known as Lombardy.

  The Romans by that time had become effete, perhaps through a lack of facial hair, and couldn’t take their opponents on. If they had been more courageous and less shaven, they could have stood beard to beard against their enemies, which would have made them
objectionable and rebarbative.

  What the Romans needed was a leader like General Ambrose Burnside, who fought for the Union during the American Civil War. General Burnside had vast forests of hair running from his ears and connecting to his leviathan moustache. So extraordinary was his facial foliage that such growths came to be known as burnsides. However, Ambrose Burnside died and was forgotten, and later generations of Americans, reasoning that the hair was on the side of the face, took the name burnside and bizarrely swapped it around to make sideburns.

  And it’s not only humans that have beards, nor only animals. Even trees may forget to shave, namely the giant bearded fig of the Caribbean. The bearded fig is also known as the strangler tree and can grow to 50 feet in height. The beards and the height and the strangling are connected, for the tree reproduces by growing higher than its neighbours and then dropping beard-like aerial roots into their unsuspecting branches. The beards wrap themselves around the victim until they reach the ground, where they burrow in and then tighten, strangling the host.

  There’s an island in the Caribbean that’s filled with them. The natives used to call it the Red Land with White Teeth, but the Spanish explorers who discovered it were so impressed with the psychotic and unshaven fig trees that they called it The Bearded Ones, or Barbados.

  Islands

  Some parts of the English language can only be reached by boat. For instance, there’s a small dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean whose natives called their home Coconut Island, or Pikini, which was mangled into English as Bikini Atoll.

  For centuries nobody knew about Bikini except its natives, and even when it was discovered by Europeans, the best use that anyone could think of for the place was as a nautical graveyard. When a warship had outlived its effectiveness, it would be taken to the beautiful lagoon and sunk.

  Bikini Atoll was put on the map (and almost removed from it) by America in 1946 when they tested their new atomic bombs there. Atom is Greek for unsplittable, but the Americans had discovered that by breaking the laws of etymology they were able to create vast explosions, and vast explosions were the best way of impressing the Soviets and winning the Cold War.

  However, the tests at Bikini had a more immediate effect on the French and the Japanese – both, perhaps, illustrative of their national characters.

  In 1954 the Americans tested their new hydrogen bomb, which they had calculated would be a little more powerful than the A-bombs they’d previously been mucking around with. It turned out to be an awful lot more powerful and ended up accidentally irradiating the crew of a Japanese fishing boat. Japanese public opinion was outraged, as the Japanese and Americans had a rather awkward military and nuclear relationship. Protests were made, hackles were raised, and a film was made about an irresponsible nuclear test that awoke a sea monster called Gorilla-whale or Gojira. The film was rushed through production and came out later in the same year. Gojira was, allegedly, simply the nickname of a particularly burly member of the film crew. Gojira was anglicised to Godzilla, and the film became so famous across the world that –zilla became a workable English suffix.

  A bride-to-be who has become obsessed with every fatuous detail of her nuptials from veil to hem is now called a bridezilla, and one of the world’s most popular internet browsers is Mozilla Firefox, whose name and old logo can be traced straight back to the tests at Bikini Atoll.

  But where the Japanese saw a threatening monster, the French saw what the French always see: sex. A fashion designer called Jacques Heim had just come up with a design for a two-piece bathing costume that he believed would be the world’s smallest swimsuit. He took it to a lingerie shop in Paris where the owner, Louis Réard, proved with a pair of scissors that it could be even more scandalously immodest. The result, Réard claimed, would cause an explosion of lust in the loins of every Frenchman so powerful that it could only be compared to the tests at Bikini Atoll, so he called the new swimwear the bikini.

  So by a beautiful serendipity, it’s now possible to log on to the internet and use a Mozilla browser to look at pictures of girls in bikinis, knowing that the two words spring from the same event.

  The word serendipity was invented in 1754 by Horace Walpole, the son of the first prime minister of England. He was kind enough to explain exactly how he had come up with the word. He was reading a book called the Voyage des trois princes de Serendip, which is a story of three princes from the island of Serendip who are sent by their father to find a magical recipe for killing dragons. Walpole noticed that ‘as their highnesses travelled they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of’. Though the story of the three princes that Walpole read was pure fiction, the Island of Serendip was a real place, although it has since changed its name, first to Ceylon, and then, in 1972, to Sri Lanka. So a serendipity is really a Sri-Lanka-ness.

  Now let us cross the Indian Ocean and head up the Suez canal to Sardinia. In fact, let’s not, because the people of Sardinia are a nasty bunch. In ancient times they were considered so waspish and rebarbative that any unfriendly remark would be referred to as Sardinian, which is where we get the word sardonic. However, Sardinia also gave its name to the little fish that were abundant in the surrounding seas, which are now called sardines.

  We could go to the island of Lesbos, but that wouldn’t make us very popular. The most famous resident of Lesbos was an ancient Greek poetess called Sappho. Sappho wrote ancient Greek poems about how much she liked other ancient Greek ladies, and the result was that in the late nineteenth century Lesbian became an English euphemism for ladies who like ladies. The idea, of course, was that only people with a good classical education would understand the reference, and people with a good classical education would have strong enough minds not to snigger. In this, lesbianism was considered preferable to the previous English term, tribadism, which came from a Greek word for rubbing.

  Before being adopted in the 1890s, Lesbian was the name of a kind of wine that came from the island, so you could drink a good Lesbian. Of course, it also was, and is, the name for the inhabitants of the island, not all of whom are happy with the word’s new meaning. In 2008 a group of Lesbians (from the island) tried to take out an injunction against a group of lesbians (from the mainland) to make them change the name of their gay rights association. The injunction failed, but just to be on the safe side, let us sail our etymological ship out through the straits for Gibraltar and head for the islands where dogs grow feathers.

  The Romans found some islands in the Atlantic that were overrun with large dogs. So they called them the Dog Islands or Canaria. However, when the English finally got round to inspecting the Canaria a couple of millennia later, all they found there were birds, which they decided to call canaries, thus changing dogs into birds (and then into a pretty shade of yellow). Now let’s continue due west to get to the Cannibal Islands.

  When Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic, he arrived at the Caribbean Islands, which he rather hopefully called the West Indies because the purpose of his voyage had been to find a western route to India, which everyone in Europe knew to be a rich country ruled by the Great Khan.

  Columbus was therefore terribly pleased when he landed in Cuba and discovered that the people there called themselves Canibs, because he assumed that Canibs must really be Khanibs, which was a rare triumph of hope over etymology. At the next island Columbus came to, they told him they were Caribs, and at the island after that they were Calibs. This was because in the old languages of the Caribbean, Ns, Rs and Ls were pretty much interchangeable.

  The sea got named the Caribbean after one pronunciation. But it was also believed in Europe that the islanders ate each other, and this gastronomic perversity came, on the basis of another pronunciation, to be called cannibalism. Whether they did actually eat each other is a subject that is still disputed. Some say they did, others say that it was just a projection
of European fears – and it’s true that the European imagination was set humming by these stories of far-off islands. William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest was set on a desert island where a strange half-man half-fish is the only true native. There definitely aren’t any men-fish in the Caribbean, but that didn’t stop Shakespeare from naming his bestial character Caliban after the third possible pronunciation.

  But now we sail onwards through the Panama canal22 to the last of our island chain, Hawaii, after which the world’s most popular snack was almost named.

  22 The neatest palindrome in English is undoubtedly: ‘A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.’

  Sandwich Islands

  The first European to stand on the shores of Hawaii was Captain James Cook, who arrived there in 1778 and died there in 1779 after an unsuccessful attempt to abduct the king. Captain Cook introduced the words tattoo and taboo into English, both having been practices that he came across in his Pacific voyages, but there was one name that he couldn’t get into the dictionary, or even the atlas.

  European explorers loved to name the places that they discovered, a habit that didn’t always endear them to the natives, who felt that they must have discovered the place first as they were already living there. So, although Cook noted down that the locals called his new discovery Owyhee, he knew which side his bread was buttered and decided to rename the place in honour of the sponsor of his voyage. Captain Cook was, of course, thinking of his future career (something that he should probably have considered when abducting the king), for Cook’s sponsor was, at the time, the First Lord of the Admiralty: John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich.