by Mark Forsyth
There are several theories as to why Montalvo chose the name Calafia, but by far the most convincing is that, as she was fighting alongside Muslims, her name was chosen to suggest or echo the title of the Muslim leader: the Caliph. So California is really, ultimately, etymologically the last surviving Caliphate.
The Caliphate, a sometimes factual and sometimes formal union of all Islamic states, was abolished by the Young Turks of Turkey in 1924. Recently there have been strenuous and violent attempts to revive the Caliphate by Al Qaeda. However, if a troop of crack etymologists could be sent into terrorist strongholds, they could gently explain that the Caliphate never disappeared: it’s alive and well and is, in fact, the most populous state in America.
24 Just to keep you informed, the Garden of Eden, being perfect, was assumed not to have been destroyed in Noah’s flood, but to have been washed far away to some inaccessible place where it could no longer be found.
25 I refer the curious reader to Seymour Schwartz’s The Mismapping of America, whose detailed account of the mistake I have tried, and failed, to compress.
The Hash Guys
Even without California complicating the matter, the question of who should be Caliph and what counts as the Caliphate has been a tricky one ever since the Prophet Mohammed died. The first khalifa was a fellow called Abu Bakr who had been one of the first converts to Islam. However, after a few years, some folk decided that it shouldn’t have gone to him and that the position should, instead, have been handed down to Mohammed’s son-in-law and thence to his grandson and so on and so forth from one eldest son to the next. These people were called the Shia, and the others were called the Sunni.
However, heredity in principle always leads to dispute in practice, and so in 765 AD, when one of the descendants of Mohammed disinherited his eldest son, Ismail, the Shias themselves split into two. There were those who agreed that Ismail should be passed over and there were those who didn’t. These latter were called the Ismailis.
The Ismailis did rather well for themselves. They managed, in the ninth century, to conquer most of North Africa and they sent out lots of undercover evangelists to the rest of the Islamic world. These evangelists converted people in secret until there was a huge network of secret Ismailis who were, perhaps, going to help to establish an Ismaili Caliphate once and for all.
But they didn’t, because the Sunnis invaded North Africa, burnt all the Ismaili books and converted everybody straight back to the first form of Islam at the point of a scimitar. Now all the Sunnis needed to do was to root out the Ismaili converts in their home territory and everything would be fine and dandy.
So the Ismailis had a hard time of it. They were tracked down and persecuted and fined and put to death and all the other lovely things that mankind likes to do to his neighbour. They couldn’t fight the persecution because, though there were a lot of them, they were scattered about here and there and couldn’t raise an army. Then an Ismaili called Hasan-i Sabbah had a brilliant idea.
He seized one single, solitary castle near the Caspian Sea. It wasn’t a strategically important castle, as it was at the top of a remote mountain at the end of a remote mountain valley in a remote region. But for all these reasons the castle of Alamut was essentially invincible and unattackable. From this base Hasan let it be known that if any Ismailis got persecuted he would respond: not by fighting the soldiers or taking territory or anything like that – he would simply send one of his disciples out to kill the one man, the senior official who had ordered the persecution; and what’s more, the killing would be done with a golden dagger.
And they did. The first chap they killed was the Vizier of the Caliphate himself, and then they picked people off left, right and centre. Two things (other than the gold dagger) made them utterly terrifying. The first was that they would get into their target’s entourage as sleeper agents and were prepared to work for years as stable boy or servant just to get close enough to the victim. You could hire bodyguards, but how did you know the bodyguards weren’t killers themselves? The second was that they were quite prepared to suffer death afterwards, indeed they saw it as a bit of a bonus. They would kill their targets and then kill themselves, confident in the promise of paradise.
Nobody knew what to make of them, but the general opinion was that they were all on hashish. This is almost certainly untrue, but the name stuck. They were the hash guys, or in the colloquial Arabic plural, the hashshashin.
Religious fervour fades but gold always gleams, and when the Crusaders arrived in the Middle East they made contact with the Syrian branch of the Ismailis, in a second mountain fortress that was run by the Old Man of the Mountain. The Old Man agreed to hire out the services of his disciples to the Christian invaders, who were immensely impressed by their fatal fanaticism and discipline. Stories of the hashshashin got back to Europe, where the Arabic H was dropped and the hash-guys became the assassins.
It wasn’t long before assassin had been verbed into assassinate, and then all you needed was William Shakespeare to invent the word assassination for his play Macbeth:
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success …
But, etymologically speaking, assassination will always be the cannabisation of the victim, or the marijuanafication or the potification, or whatever synonym you want to use for dope.
Drugs
Dope is a terrible thing, and is particularly bad for racehorses. Drug a racehorse just a little bit and you ruin his performance, which is why it’s absolutely necessary for a betting man to know in advance which horses have been doped and which are clean-living and ready to win. Such a gambler is said to have the dope on a race: the inside knowledge of which runner has gone to pot.
Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of Mary Jane for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember. Another Mexican part of drug language is reefer, which comes from grifo, a word for a drug addict south of the border.
In fact, the vocabulary of drugs is as exotic as their origins. The assassins would, if they did smoke hashish, have done so through a hookah, a small pot through which the intoxicating vapours are allowed to bubble. When American troops took up doing the same thing during the Vietnam War, they took the local Thai word for a hookah, buang, and turned it into bong.
Of course, the terminology of drugs is a matter of dispute, legend and stoned supposition. Nobody is utterly sure whether a joint is something smoked in an opium joint, or whether it’s something that’s shared and therefore is jointly owned. Nor does anybody have any idea why people from 1920s New Orleans called joints muggles, but it sheds an interesting new light on the Harry Potter novels (another of Rowling’s characters is called Mundungus, which is an archaic word for low-grade tobacco). Whoever invented the word spliff didn’t bother to write down why.
Dope itself was originally a kind of thick sauce called doop into which Dutch people would dip pieces of bread. The sense transferred over to drugs only when people started smoking a thick and gloopy preparation of opium. Given that Amsterdam’s dope cafes have now become famous throughout the world, it’s a little disappointing that any high you might receive from the original Dutch doop would be a placebo effect.
Pleasing Psalms
Placebo is Latin for I will please, and its origins are not medical, but religious.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century a placebo has been a medical term for a ‘medicine adapted more to please than to benefit the patient’. Before this, a placebo was any commonplace cure that could be dreamt up by a barely qualified medic. The point was not that that pill would please, but that the doctor would. For long befor
e placebo medicines there was Dr Placebo.
In 1697, a doctor called Robert Pierce recalled rather bitterly how he was always being beaten to new business by a charming and talentless medic whose name he was either too polite or too scared to write down. He called him instead Doctor Placebo, and noted with tragic jealousy that Placebo’s ‘wig was deeper than mine by two curls’.
Whoever the original Dr Placebo was, his nickname was taken up by various other embittered doctors of the eighteenth century, until placebo doctors had given placebo pills with placebo effects.
At this point things get a little misty, because although placebo does mean I will please, the word was originally associated not with cures, but with funerals. There’s nothing so much fun as a good funeral, and anybody who’s truly fond of a good party will tell you that the death rate is much too low, even though it adds up to 100 per cent in the end. The drink doled out at a wake has a certain morbid lavishness to it that is rarely or never found at christenings.
People probably still do turn up at the funerals of those they never knew, just in order to get their hands on some booze, but the practice was much more common in medieval times. People would put on their best clothes and turn up to the funerals of the rich, taking part in the service in the hope of joining in the wake.
This meant that they would all stand silent while the first nine verses of Psalm 114 were sung. Then, as it was an antiphon, and as they all wanted to seem particularly enthusiastic about the deceased, they would lustily sing the ninth verse back to the presiding priest:
Placebo Domino in regione vivorum
Which means:
I will please the Lord in the land of the living
In the Ayenbite of Inwit (‘The Prick of Conscience’) from the mid-fourteenth century, the author observes that ‘the worst flattery is that one that singeth placebo’. Chaucer chimes in by saying that ‘Flatterers [are] the Devil’s chaplains that singeth ever Placebo’.
So the psalm led to the funeral, which led to the flatterers, which led to the flattering doctors, which led to the placebo pill.
This may all seem rather unlikely, and some etymologists are more inclined to go straight to the Latin I will please, but the psalms were much more important in the Middle Ages than they are today, and they have given us all sorts of words that we might not expect. Memento became famous because it was the first word of Psalm 131:
Memento Domine David et omnis mansuetudinis eius
Lord, remember David and all his afflictions
Even more obscure is the connection between the psalms and the phrase to pony up or pay.
Consider that 25 March is the end of the first quarter of the year, and was thus the first pay day for those who were paid quarterly. 25 March was therefore a good day for everybody except employers, and nobody likes them anyway.
People would wake up on 25 March, toddle along to church for Matins, and sing the psalm with avaricious expectation in their heart. The psalm for that day is the fifth division of Psalm 119, which is the longest psalm in the Bible and needs to be broken up into bite-size chunks. The fifth division begins with the words:
Legem pone mihi Domine viam iustificationum tuarum et exquiram eam semper
Legem pone (‘teach me, O Lord’) therefore became a slang word for a down-payment, because in the psalm-obsessed medieval mind it was the first two words of pay-day. In the centuries since then, the legem has been dropped, but that doesn’t mean that the phrase has disappeared. If you have ever been asked to pony up, it’s only a corruption of legem pone and a reference to the praises of pay.
Biblical Errors
Some people say that the Bible is the revealed word of God, which would imply that God spoke English. There’s even a society in America that believes the King James Version was given to mankind by divine revelation, and it has a big ceremony once a year in which other versions of the Bible are piled up and burnt.
It’s certainly true that the King James Version was a lot more accurate than Myles Coverdale’s attempt of a hundred years before. Myles Coverdale was an early Protestant who believed in principle that the Bible should be translated into English. He decided that, as nobody else seemed to be doing it, he had better get on with the job himself, and he didn’t let the tiny detail that he knew no Latin, Greek or Hebrew get in his way. This is the kind of can-do attitude that is sadly lacking in modern biblical scholarship.
Coverdale did know a bit of German, though, and the Germans, who had invented Protestantism, had already started preparing their own translation. Coverdale threw himself into his work and produced a Psalter that is still used in Church of England services today. It is, though, much more beautiful than it is accurate. For example, he has the line:
The strange children shall fail: and be afraid out of their prisons.
It’s beautiful and mysterious. Who are the strange children? What’s so strange about them? And what on earth are they doing in prison? The answer is that the line should be translated as:
The foreign-born shall obey: and come trembling from their strongholds.
But the best of Coverdale’s mistranslations is about Joseph, whose neck, we are told in Psalm 105, was bound in iron. The problem is that Hebrew uses the same word for neck as it does for soul. The word is nefesh, and it usually means neck or throat, but it can mean breath (because you breathe through your neck), and it can also mean soul, because the soul is the breath of life. (You have the same thing in Latin and English with spirit and respiratory.)
If Coverdale had made only one mistake, English would have been given the phrase, His soul was put in iron. But Coverdale was never a man to make one mistake when two would do; so he mixed up the subject and the object and came up with the wonderfully inappropriate and nonsensical: The iron entered into his soul.
And yet somehow that phrase works. It may have nothing to do with the original Hebrew, but Coverdale’s phrase was so arresting that it caught on. Nobody cared that it was a mistranslation. It sounded good.
Even if the translation of the Bible gets it right, English-speakers can still get it wrong. Strait, these days, is usually used to describe a narrow stretch of water like the Bering Straits or the Straits of Gibraltar, but, if you think about it, other things can be strait. Straitjackets are small jackets used to tie up lunatics. People who are too tightly laced-up are strait-laced. If a gate is hard to get through, then it’s a strait gate, and the hardest gate to pass through is the gate that leads to heaven:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
Which is why it’s not the straight and narrow but the strait and narrow.
Finally, the salt of the earth is a biblical phrase that has managed to almost reverse its meaning. These days, the salt of the earth are the common folk, the working men and women, the ordinary Joes on the Clapham omnibus; but if that were the case, then the earth would be much too salty to taste good.
When Jesus invented the phrase the salt of the earth, he meant exactly the opposite. The world was filled with sinners and pagans, and the only reason that God didn’t destroy it utterly was that the few people who believed in Him were like salt to earth’s stew.
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under the foot of men.
This is strange, as Jesus was later crucified by a bunch of Roman salt-men.
Salt
Nobody is certain where the word soldier comes from, but the best guess is that it has to do with salt. Salt was infinitely more valuable in the ancient world than it is today. To the Romans, salt was white, tasty gold. Legionaries were given a special stipend just to buy themselves salt and make their food bearable; this was called the salarium and it’s where we get the English wo
rd salary, which is really just salt-money. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder therefore went so far as to theorise that soldier itself derived from sal dare, meaning to give salt. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this theory, but as Pliny the Elder was a little bit of a nutjob, it should probably be taken with a pinch of salt, which, like the salt of the earth, makes something easier to swallow.
Mainly, though, salt is not military but culinary. Salt gets into almost every food, and into an awful lot of food words. The Romans put salt into every single one of their sauces and called them salsa. The Old French dropped the L and made this sauce, and they did the same with Roman salsicus, or salted meats, that turned into saucisses and then into sausages. The Italians and Spanish kept the L and still make salami,26 which they can dip into salsa, and the Spanish then invented a saucy dance of the same name.
So necessary is salt to a good meal that we usually put it on the table twice. The Old French used to make do with a salier or salt-box on the table at mealtimes. The English, who are always trying to work out how the French make such delicious food, stole the invention and took it back home. However, once the salier had been removed from France, people quickly forgot the word’s origin and how it should be spelt. So we ended up changing salier to cellar. Then, just to be clear what was in the cellar, we added salt onto the beginning and called it a salt cellar, which is, etymologically, a salt-salier or salt-salter.
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