Bless the Buccaneer with Barbecued Blood

cad/cadet/caddie

2010-10-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

If a trainee army officer offers to carry your golf clubs and then steals them, which of these words would you use to describe him? Well, all of them of course, because they’re one and the same person. Originally, a cadet, ultimately from the Latin capitellum, “little head”, meant “chief”. It came to mean “younger brother” in the Gascon dialect of French, through the practice of the younger brother in a family entering the army to train to become an officer, and was borrowed into English in the 17^th century with the meaning of “officer trainee”.

In Scotland, cadet came to refer to a young man who entered the military without a commission. These young men were used to carry golf clubs, hence caddie, preserving the original French pronunciation. Caddie had also been used to denote and errand boy or porter, and eventually a passenger on a coach who travels without a ticket. The final meaning of cad probably arose through a derogatory reference to the local people by students at Oxford University. It just goes to show, you never know in which direction a word is “heading”.

cab/caper

2010-08-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

If ever a taxi driver said to a passenger “you’re really getting my goat”, he would be absolutely right. When you catch a cab don’t be surprised if it bleats and jumps about a bit. Both these words come from the Latin caper, “goat”. Cab is short for cabriolet, “carriage”, formed ultimately from Italian capriolare, “leap about”, so called because it jumped around like a wild goat as it ran along. The same verb gives us caper, which developed from “jump around playfully” into “play tricks”. So if you were born around Christmas/New Year, your birthday bash in a taxi could be termed a Capricorn caper in a cab!

butler

2010-08-14T05:05:00.000-07:00

This was obviously the best job in Medieval Europe. Originally, he was the butuler, the one who brought the wine cup to the lord. Ultimately, it derives from Old French bouteille, “wine vessel”, which also gives us our modern bottle.

bust

2010-08-08T13:49:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered how you could get from “burning” to “breasts” in a few easy steps? Just read on. The original Latin word was ambustus, literally “burned around”, referring to a funeral pyre and related to the modern combustion. In ancient times, the Etruscans, neighbours of the early Romans, had the practice of placing a person’s ashes in an urn shaped like their upper body, hence a bust. The Romans copied this and the Italians continued the practice of placing a figurine of the departed on the grave. Eventually, the link with the departed was lost and it simply referred to a statue of the upper body. In English it went further in also referring solely to the most prominent part of a woman’s anatomy. It would help to explain why a busty woman can inflame men's passions before reducing them to ashes.

bus

2010-06-06T14:55:00.000-07:00

This really a “for”. It was coined in France in the early 19th century phrase voiture omnibus, literally “conveyance for all”. The Latin omni meant “all”, and omnibus meant “for all”. It was shortened to just the word ending, which took on the whole meaning of the conveyance. The English translation gave rise to the famous quote "you wait an hour for a number forty-four for to come and then four number forty-four fors come at the same time". This became so confusing that people eventually reverted to bus.

burglar

2010-05-22T15:32:00.000-07:00

If ever the old saying, an Englishman’s home is his castle, needed proof, then the person who steals from it provides it. Burglar ultimately derives from the Latin verb burgare, “break open”, from burgus, “fortress, castle”, itself borrowed from a Germanic source. One can imagine that breaking into a medieval castle was far more difficult and risky than climbing in through a kitchen window.

bureau

2010-05-21T07:34:00.000-07:00

First we had theocracy, “rule by God”, then aristocracy, “rule by the best”, and then democracy, “rule by the people”. And now we have bureaucracy, “rule by woolly cloth”. “Hmm, yes,” I hear you say. “Sounds about right.” In medieval France, desks were covered with a coarse woollen cloth called burel. The covering came to refer to the desk itself, and then the room which contained the desk. From there it was downhill all the way to rule by government department.

bull

2010-05-12T15:06:00.000-07:00

This is about as descriptive a word for an animal as you are ever likely to come across. What’s the main difference between a cow and a bull? It’s what sticks out, of course. However, while a cow is not defined by its udder, a bull is most definitely defined by its testicles. The word derives from an ancient root meaning “swell”, which also gives rise to ball and the Old English word for testicle, bealluc. Enough said.

bugle

2010-04-30T17:13:00.000-07:00

That boogie-woogie bugle boy from Company B must have been incredibly strong to lift a whole ox and blow through its horn. Actually, not really. The Latin bos, “ox”, is from the same ancient root as the English cow. From bos comes the Old French bugle, “wild ox”, whose horn was used as a musical instrument, or bugle horn, later shortened to just bugle.

budget

2010-04-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

There’s absolutely no truth in the rumour that the government is making a gigantic “leather pouch” to hold the increasing amounts of money that it is spending every year. How big is your annual leather pouch, sorry, budget?

buccaneer

2010-03-03T18:06:00.000-08:00

Your neighbour invites you to a barbecue on a Sunday afternoon and you gladly accept. You turn up on the day and the door opens. There’s your neighbour with the parrot on the shoulder, the patch over the eye, the wooden leg and the full costume, saying “avast there, me hearties, ‘tis a great day to be on the high seas, Jim lad. Arr, so it is! Splice the main brace and...” oh, well, you get the idea. But it’s entirely understandable. In the 17th century, a boucan was a barbecue, and a buccaneer was a hunter, who then dried and smoked the meat he caught on the boucan. The Spanish used French settlers to hunt wild oxen for their meat. When the Spanish authorities drove them out of business, they turned to hunting treasure from ships on the high seas, hence the meaning we use now.

broker

2010-03-02T16:12:00.000-08:00

One would assume that if you employed a specialist financial expert to personally seek out the best investment opportunities for your hard-earned cash, he/she wouldn’t turn up roaring drunk and brandishing a large spike. But that’s what could well have been the case in medieval times. The pointed tool was known as a broche in Old French, which also gives us the modern broach and brooch. It was used to pierce wine casks, which were then stopped up with a bung. The broker, who did this job, was also a wine seller, and the term was later applied to any middleman or commercial agent. Of course, if your investment goes up, he’ll be a useful person to have a round to broach the wine casks for the celebration.

brand

2010-02-26T01:45:00.000-08:00

You might think that you could get your fingers burnt if you bought something second hand and not brand new. However, the opposite is the case. If it’s brand new, you’re sure to get your fingers burnt, as it’s literally come straight out of the fire (think of “firebrand”). A brand in the modern sense of a make or trade-mark comes from the idea of branding something with a hot iron to show its provenance, just like branding farm animals to prove ownership.

braggart

2010-02-25T17:24:00.000-08:00

The next time you find someone boasting about something, just have a look at their trousers. If they are of inferior style/quality/cloth, then politely inform them that they have no right to be a braggart unless they have the finest quality brague, or “breeches”, which men would show off in the past, earning the disapproval of their peers.

boy

2010-02-22T17:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the history of a word reveals something dark about human history and society, and this is probably one of them. Boy as a general word meaning “young male” became current from early medieval times, but prior to that it had meant just “servant” (compare the modern French garçon, which doubles for both “boy” and “waiter”). However, it gets darker; it is likely that boy is a shortened form of emboié, “shackled, fettered”, which implies that not only were servants shackled, but they were defined by those shackles. There are some who would certainly be happy to see the practice revived.

boulevard

2010-02-21T16:30:00.000-08:00

It’s a lovely evening and you’re strolling along the wide boulevard. People are relaxing and chatting, the birds are singing and a warm breeze is rustling the leaves on the trees. Suddenly, there’s a loud boom and a cannon shot whistles overhead and explodes on the other side. People scream and run for cover as soldiers stream out to return fire. You’ve just walked from the boulevard to its older French manifestation, a passage along a castle rampart, ultimately from the German bolwerk, originally a defence made from tree trunks, from which we get bulwark. Somehow Sunset Bulwark doesn’t sound quite right.

bonfire

2010-02-21T01:35:00.000-08:00

It’s November 5th, and everyone is gathered around the big fire, throwing in potatoes and warming their hands. The guy is on top of the fire, the old clothes and straw stuffing burning merrily away. Well, you think it’s a guy, but it may be a real body! In the old days, that’s just what the bonfire was for - to burn corpses. The bon part is actually bone, so the fire is actually a bone-fire. Don’t get any ideas about disposing of unwanted relatives next bonfire night.

bless

2010-01-20T07:45:00.000-08:00

The next time someone sneezes, just make sure that you have a vial of animal blood in your pocket so that you can sprinkle it on them. Why, you may ask? Simple: bless is from the Old English bloedsian, which referred to the act of sanctifying something by marking it with sacrificial blood (the modern French blesser, “wound” comes from the same root word in Frankish). When Christianity arrived in England, the meaning was transferred to the Christian idea of benediction, literally "speaking well". The idea of saying "bless you" comes from the belief that the devil could enter your body at the moment you sneezed. The jury's still out on the question of whether flinging copious quantities of animal gore over someone will block Satan's entry into their body (if anybody still believes it anyway). So, next time someone says to you "Ah, bless!" you have complete licence to do a total "Carrie" on them. See you down the pig farm!

biscuit

2010-01-20T07:39:00.000-08:00

As the old saying goes, once is never enough. If you want something done right, you have to do it twice, hence bes-cuit, literally “twice cooked” in Old French. That really takes the biscuit. Or it might be the way the cookie crumbles.

berserk

2010-01-16T16:18:00.000-08:00

The next time you’re out and about and you come across someone running around screaming and smashing things up, he might just be wearing a shirt made from bear fur. What is certain is that the Viking warriors who ransacked and pillaged Old England were termed berserk. Well, you might just do the same if you went around wearing an itchy bearskin.

bear/beaver

2010-01-15T01:49:00.000-08:00

Do you like bears? Which one’s your favourite? Perhaps it’s the polar bear, or maybe the grizzly, or even the black bear. Well, hard luck, they’re not bears. The only true bear is the brown bear, but that’s a bit silly really, as bear already means “brown”, deriving from an ancient Germanic root word denoting “brown animal”, which also comes from the same root word for brown. Presumably, the brown bear was the only one the ancient German tribes came across. Funnily enough, they also applied the same term (in an altered form) to another brown animal, the beaver, which might have been confusing, though I suppose a cry of “look out, run, there’s a brown animal coming!” would make the difference clear. I wonder if there’s a market for teddy beavers.

bastard

2009-12-21T14:58:00.000-08:00

Those Medieval French nobles certainly got about a lot. When they weren’t with their wives, they were off having their way with the local farmers’ daughters. Of course, we know how their offspring were termed, but where does the name come from? A bast in Old French was either a barn or a packsaddle, so a bastard was literally someone born in a barn or sleeping on a packsaddle, which doubled as a bed. It certainly adds a new meaning to the expression “were you born in a barn?”

barbarian

2009-12-14T16:08:00.000-08:00

“Excuse me, do you know the way to the forum? I’m new in town and I’m looking for a new toga.” “Bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar.” “Bloody barbarians. Why can’t they speak Latin?” OK, maybe this exchange never took place in the ancient Roman empire, but it captures the way the Greeks and Romans saw other peoples: barbarians. Originally, barbaros in Greek meant “stammering”, and it was further applied to all peoples who didn’t speak Greek, including the Romans, who the Greeks regarded as below them. The Romans took on the term and applied it in turn to all peoples apart from themselves and the Greeks, with the meaning generally ending up as “rude, uncivilised”.

bankrupt

2009-12-11T02:02:00.000-08:00

It's the credit crunch. You're sitting in the garden of your lovely suburban house, thinking that now you've lost your business and had to sell all your assets to cover your debts, you'll barely have two pennies left to rub together. Still, you can sell the house and buy something smaller. And many of your possessions are still in good condition so you can sell them and use the money to help you get by in the future. Why, the bench that you're sitting on is still quite new and worth a bit of money and - what the hell! Someone's just thrown you off your lovely garden bench and has proceeded to smash it to pieces with a huge sledgehammer! Who the hell is this guy? Oh, it's one of your major creditors. And here comes another one, and another one, all wielding sledgehammers, and before long they've reduced your lovely bench to firewood.

Well, what else do you expect? Originally, Medieval moneylenders used a bench or a table, known as a banca in Italian, to conduct their business. These bench tables eventually lent their names directly to the business, and banks were born. If a bank or indeed any other business was unable to pay its creditors and went out of business, it was broken up to pay them, hence banca rotta in Italian, literally "broken bank". This was rendered bankrupt after it was borrowed into English. So while the idea of bankruptcy simply refers to a business being broken up, I think you'll agree that the idea of the bench being smashed up with sledgehammers tickles the imagination far more.

ball/ ballad/ballistic

2009-12-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

Have you ever had a dance partner who has no coordination or technique and just throws their legs around, like the worst nerd at the end-of-year disco? Well, that’s just what they’re meant to do. The Greek verb ballein meant “throw”, and from this came ballizein, “throw one’s legs around, dance”, which comes down to us as ball (not the round object) and its little sister ballet through the Latin borrowing ballare. This also gave rise to ballade in Old French, with the original meaning of “dancing song”, though a ballad today is hardly a song to dance to. If you’re an army commander you could always sing a ballad or have a ball when you press the button to launch a ballistic missile, literally something you throw. Your worst nightmare: a soldier in a tutu dancing around, singing songs and throwing missiles.

avocado

2009-12-07T16:35:00.000-08:00

The next time you cut open an avocado to make a guacamole or to spread onto your bread, just as you’re about to put it into your mouth, think of this: it comes from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl, “testicle”. Enjoy! Oh, so you’re actually eating one now. Er, sorry.

atrocious

2009-12-06T16:31:00.000-08:00

You were ambushed by the bullies at school on your way home and had a seriously hard fight with them. Your clothes are torn, you’re cut and bruised all over, and to top it all you’ve got a big black eye and a grim look on your face. You look atrocious on two counts. Ater meant “black, dark” in Latin and was compounded with an obsolete old Latin word meaning “eye, face” to create atrox, “dark, gloomy looking”, and hence” cruel, wicked”, which comes out in atrocity.

atom

2009-12-05T16:51:00.000-08:00

This word is unusual in that its essential being remained intact for two and a half thousand years, before a single act literally demolished it. When the atom was first split, its nature and meaning changed in an instant. Really, we should now refer to it as tom. This is because the Greek atomos literally means “indivisible, uncuttable”. Once the atom had been split, things were never going to be the same again, not just for the atom itself, but for the word. So let’s hear it for tom, which is far more personable anyway. Any takers?

assassin

2009-12-04T02:45:00.000-08:00

“Hey, man. Like, let’s go and kill someone”. “No can do, dude. I’m too far out of it. Anyway, where did you get this stuff? It’s really faaar out!” Murder isn’t an activity you’d generally expect stoners to engage in. Quite apart from the fact that it’s uncool, you’d have thought that they wouldn’t exactly be fully enough in control of their mental and physical faculties to commit the act. But the reality is different. Assassin comes from the Arabic hashshashin, “hashish eaters”. These were fanatical followers of a medieval religious and political group who were made to eat so much hashish that they would blindly obey their leader and assassinate political and public figures. The word passed into English through Italian and French.

arsenic

2009-12-03T16:42:00.000-08:00

Here’s one which may well confirm some women’s opinions of men. Arsenic is from the Greek word for “masculine”. There you have it - all men are deadly poison. Except that it’s not quite that simple. This is an example of a folk etymology, in which a word is wrongly thought to derive from a certain source because of its resemblance to it. It actually comes from the Middle Persian zarnik, “golden” from a Semitic source referring to the poisonous substance. So there it is: we men are not poisonous...most of the time.

arrive

2009-12-02T09:51:00.000-08:00

OK, scrub those big signs at the airports saying Arrivals. We have to think of another word to refer to coming somewhere by air. The same goes for trains, coaches, horses, camels and even for your own feet. There’s only one form of transport that is entitled to use the word arrive: boat. Arrive ultimately derives from the Latin ripa, “shore”, through the verb arripare, and the French arriver, literally meaning “to come to shore”. Now, let me work out a new set of words for all the other modes of transport.

arctic/antarctic

2009-12-01T01:17:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered why they are lots of bears around the North Pole and none around the South Pole? Well, it would be nice to think that it was in the name, but the reality has no bearing on the animals themselves, or their geographical distribution. When the ancients mapped the night sky, they named the most prominent northern constellation The Great Bear, arktos in Greek, presumably because it resembled (to them) a bear. Thus the northern regions were named the Arctic after the constellation, not based on the presence of lots of white bears roaming around the ice. It follows that at the opposite end of the world you have the Antarctic, which is not inimitable to bears because of its name, but because they never got there. Anyway, the penguins got there first.

amethyst

2009-11-27T15:13:00.000-08:00

This is one of those ancient beliefs that you just wish were true. You just put the amethyst in your pocket and go out on the town all night, and you'll still be able to drive home, without having to say “shorry oshiffer, it’sh a fair cop (hic)”. The ancient Greeks believed that the stone amethystos literally rendered you “not drunk”, though they weren’t right about everything, so I wouldn’t risk my driving licence if I were you.

Amazon

2009-11-27T02:07:00.000-08:00

Do rivers have breasts? I know, it’s a stupid question, but at least it’s relevant for one river. Strictly speaking, the Amazon is the “River of No Breasts”, passed on to us by a mixture of Greek myth and explorer fantasy. Amazon literally means “breast-less”, from the Greek root for “breast” which we also see in mastitis, and, incidentally, mastodon, which literally means “breast-tooth”, so named because of the nipple-like shape of the prehistoric elephant’s teeth.

The ancient Greeks believed there was a tribe of women warriors who were superior to men and who cut off one of their breasts so that they could shoot arrows more accurately, and the name came to refer to any warlike woman. When the Portuguese were exploring the great river system in Brazil, they heard legends of warrior tribes of women, and so named the river after them. But they didn’t find any amazons, or mastodons for that matter.

ambush

2009-11-25T08:21:00.000-08:00

Travel in the old days must have been a fraught experience, especially when you were walking through a forest. You never knew who might have been literally hiding in a bush, ready to jump out and relieve you of your money. That’s it, from Old French embuscher, “be in a bush”. Well, what else would you be doing in a bush? No, don’t answer that.

algebra

2009-11-23T04:57:00.000-08:00

I always remember once in a maths class when I was at school, the teacher brought in a load of broken human bones and asked us to reset them. Well, actually, he didn’t. He just gave us a load of incomprehensible sets of letters and numbers and asked us to work them out. We might just as well have been setting bones, as that was the original practice of algebra, Arabic for “reintegration”. It originally described the resetting of broken bones, but was applied to maths to describe the putting together of parts of the problem to produce a whole solution. Great. So now I know forty years too late.

alarm/alert

2009-11-22T06:59:00.000-08:00

Do you sleep with a gun or a club under your bed? Perhaps it’s for fear of burglars breaking in and attacking you. Maybe you live in a rough area. Or just maybe you can’t stand getting up in the morning. So when the alarm clock goes off at 7.00 to summon you once more to the abject boredom of another day at the office, you finally lose it and blast or pummel it into tiny scraps of plastic and metal. For that’s what alarm actually means, “to arms!”, from the Italian all’arme through French.

Then there’s its cousin, alert, which is evidenced in Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”. If you’re truly alert that’s where you need to be. The Italian erta, “lookout, watchtower”, comes from the same Latin verb which gives us erect. Soldiers were called to the watch by the call all’erta, which comes to us again through French.

aftermath

2009-11-20T16:20:00.000-08:00

You mowed the lawn once last week and you’re sitting in the garden reading the paper on a sunny afternoon. Your wife comes out, looks at it and says, “you know, it could do with another mowing. It’s getting a bit long already.” You feel your blood-pressure rising and a blazing row coming on. What’s going to be the aftermath of this episode? Why, you’re going to mow the grass for the second time, which is, after all, precisely what aftermath meant to the Anglo-Saxons.

affair

2009-11-20T04:04:00.000-08:00

This is one for the ladies. The next time you call your husband at work, and he tells you that he’ll be home late because he has lots of things “to do” before he comes home, he’s telling the truth, even if he’s “doing” the secretary. That’s because affair is literally the French à faire, “to do”. Just don’t tell my wife.

aegis

2009-11-18T02:04:00.000-08:00

The next time you find yourself doing something under the aegis of somebody else, if you have a look up you may well see a goat. Well, OK then, a goatskin, which was the original meaning of aegis in Greek. The shield of Zeus, the Greeks’ top god, was said to have been made from goatskin, so that’s what he would use to give you his protection. Probably smelled a bit as well.

accolade

2009-11-16T15:22:00.000-08:00

You’re up for the Oscar for best actor or director or something. The actor/actress presenting it is really hot, so you’re taking notice. Then it’s your name that is read out of the glittery card. You leap up, false modesty and disbelief running down your cheeks, and stride towards the stage, glad-handing every rival who would sooner plunge a metaphorical knife in your back. Then on the podium, you get a peck on the cheek from the hottie, then simper and blub, saying “this is the greatest accolade anyone in this profession can get”. What you really wanted was for the presenter of the prize to fling themselves round your neck, which is the real accolade, an embrace round the neck, done as only the French can do it.

abysmal

2009-11-16T02:58:00.000-08:00

We can apply this word to almost anything in our experience - a book, a film, a sports event, an exam performance, but just calling something awful abysmal really doesn’t do it justice. In Greek it literally means “bottomless”, so we should use it to refer to things that can only get worse and worse without end, like a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream without the guy with the donkey head.

abundance

2009-11-15T16:03:00.000-08:00

You know what it’s like. You turn on the tap, then go downstairs to have a cup of tea, and it’s only when you notice the tea tasting particularly weak that you realise that it’s being topped up by the water that’s dripping through the ceiling. Horror-stricken, you rush upstairs to find that you literally have an abundance of water in your bathroom. And that’s because abundance literally means “overflowing”, from the Latin root unda, “wave”. I wish my bank account was making waves.