licit

I came across this word in the book I’m reading at the moment (A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine in case you’re interested). You can probably guess that it’s the opposite of ‘illicit’, a word I’d always assumed is unpaired (i.e. one that looks like it should have an opposite, but doesn’t – I wrote a blog post on this a while back, which you can read here). Because that’s the kind of thing I think about. What a loser.

I don’t know what this picture has to do with anything, but it was the only one that came up when I put ‘illicit’ into the Unsplash image search (there was nothing at all for ‘licit’). So I stuck it here anyway. Oh, and it’s by timJ.

Licit means ‘lawful’ and comes from the Latin word licitus, meaning ‘lawful, permitted, allowed’ which is where we also get ‘licence’ from. Its first use in print was in 1483, and then someone stuck an ‘il’ on it to make its opposite number around 19 years later (‘il’ as a prefix often appears at the start of words beginning with ‘l’ to change the meaning – think logical/illogical, literate/illiterate, legal/illegal, and so on). For some reason – maybe because us humans much prefer doing/writing about bad behaviour over the good stuff…? – illicit went on to be used much more regularly while licit fell by the linguistic wayside. I also found a source that said that in the 19th century licit was ‘condemned unjustly as an Americanism’, which might be another reason we stopped using it (because it seems we’re xenophobic as well as naughty).

Read the other words of the week.

eggcorn

(Photo by Caleb Lucas on Unsplash.)

An eggcorn is when you mistakenly use a word or phrase for another word or phrase that sounds similar. But the end result still makes a weird kind of sense. Wow, that explanation sucked all the fun out of it, didn’t it? Sorry. Eggcorns are things like:

• ‘it’s a bit of a damp squid’ (should be squib, but it still make sense cos squids are wet)

• ‘for all intensive purposes’ (should be ‘intents and purposes’, but ‘intensive purposes’ sound like very important things)

• ‘he’s a card shark’ (it’s a sharp, not a shark, but still makes sense because we use shark to mean someone who’s really good at stuff, like a pool shark).

The name ‘eggcorn’ was coined by a linguistics professor called Geoffrey Pullum. He read an article by a linguist called Mark Liberman about a woman who used the word ‘egg corn’ instead of ‘acorn’ (because acorns look like eggs in egg cups), and pointed out that there was no name for this. Pullum suggested that we all just call them ‘eggcorns’. So now we do. I think I love Geoffrey Pullum.

Because the internet is a wonderful thing, there’s a whole website devoted to eggcorns. 648 and counting…

Bonus word: malapropism

A malapropism is the same as an eggcorn in that it’s when you use the wrong word in place of one which sounds similar. The difference is that the end result doesn’t make sense and you end up with something humorous (another super-fun explanation there, sorry). A couple of famous examples of malapropisms include ‘And then he’ll have only channel vision’ (Frank Bruno talking about Mike Tyson) and ‘Don’t upset the apple tart’ (Bertie Ahearn, former Taoiseach of Ireland).

The word malapropism comes from Mrs Malaprop, a character in a play called ‘The Rivals’ (1775, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan), who often mixes up her words. Her name’s probably based on the French phrase ‘mal à propos’, which means ‘poorly placed’.

According to the New Scientist, an office worker described a colleague as ‘a vast suppository of information’ (presumably they meant ‘repository’). They then apparently apologised for their ‘Miss-Marple-ism’, which is a malapropism for the word malapropism. HEAD EXPLODES.

Bonus, bonus word: malaphor

Wow, I’m really spoiling you this week, aren’t I? A malaphor is an informal term (which means it’s not really a proper word, hence it being a buy-one-get-one-free type of deal) for when you mix your metaphors, idioms, clichés or aphorisms. So that’s when you mash two phrases together like ‘we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it’, ‘you hit the nail on the nose’ or ‘stop winding my leg’ (© my sister, 1986).

Read the other words of the week.

tmesis

This is a linguistic term (don’t fall asleep) for when you stick a word in the middle of another word or phrase. Like ‘fan-bloody-tastic’ or ‘abso-fucking-lutely’. It doesn’t have to be a swearword, but obviously swearing’s funny (and big and clever, regardless of what your parents might tell you).

George Bernard Shaw was one of the first writers to bring tmesis to the masses in Pygmalion, published in 1912, when Eliza Doolittle says ‘abso-blooming-lutely’. And in English we mainly use tmesis like this, for comic effect. But as a rhetorical device, it’s been around for a really long time. It started out in classic literature (although not with swearwords sadly). Homer (of Iliad/Odyssey fame) was a big fan of whacking some tmesis in an epic poem, as was Ovid who used it in Metamorphoses (an 11,995-line narrative poem in Latin – woop woop). Shakepeare also jumped on the tmesis bandwagon and used it in Romeo and Juliet (‘This is not Romeo, he’s some other where,’) and Richard II (this one’s a bit harder to spot, but he’s splitting ye old version of ‘however’:  ‘how heinous e’er it be’).

The word itself first turned up in the 1550s, and is Greek (although you probably guessed that from the weird-ass spelling). It means, unimaginatively, ‘to cut’.

In Australian English, tmesis is called ‘tumba rumba’, which is obviously a much better name, and one I’ll be shoehorning into every conversation I have from now on. No one knows exactly why it’s called this, but it’s probably down to a poem called Tumba-bloody-rumba (1959) by Aussie writer John O’Grady (about the small town of Tumbarumba in New South Wales). It has loads of tmeses in it, which I’m pleased to say almost all involve swearing. Here’s an extract:

This is a kangaroo I met a few weeks ago when I was in Australia.

“And the other bloke says ‘Seen’ im? Owed ’im half a bloody quid.
Forgot to give it back to him, but now I bloody did –
Could’ve used the thing me bloody self. Been off the bloody booze,
Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin’ kanga-bloody-roos.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Read the other words of the week.

quincunx

This was a pointless answer on ‘Pointless’ (obviously) last week (they had to come up with words ending in ‘nx’ – who says daytime telly rots your brain?). A quincunx is a geometric pattern made up of four points forming a square or rectangle, with a fifth in the middle. If you’re having trouble visualising that, it’s basically the five-side on a dice (yes, yes, I know the singular is ‘die’, but saying that just makes you sound like a wanker – like those people who insist on saying ‘panino’ because ‘panini’ is plural), or the five of anything in a pack of cards.

The word comes from the name of a Roman coin which dates back to ye olde time of 211–200BC. It was worth five twelfths (‘quinque’ and ‘uncia’) of an ‘as’, which (according to my usual in-depth Wikipedia-based research) was the standard Roman bronze coin. Five dots on it showed it was a quincunx, which is why we now use it to describe that formation.

Later, people started using the word ‘quincux’ in English for other things placed in this cross-shape. Quincunxes actually turn up a lot in different places – for example, a quincunx is the standard pattern for planting in an orchard (I don’t know why, and finding out involved reading a different Wikipedia page which, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered to do). They’re also used in modern computer graphics as a pattern for multisample anti-aliasing, and in numerical analysis to describe the two-dimensional five-point stencil, a sampling pattern used to derive finite difference approximations to derivatives. Obviously we all know what those are, so I won’t bore you with the details. Oh, and Thomas Edison of lightbulb-inventing fame had a quincunx tattoo on his forearm. Rock and roll.

Read the other words of the week.

gymkhana

Photo by Christine Benton on Unsplash.

If you’re a bit posh, or you’ve ever read Jilly Cooper, then you’ll know what a gymkhana is – an event where people, usually children whose parents have lots of dosh, on horses do jumping over stuff (that’s the technical term) and other equestrian-type things. But, have you ever wondered where the word comes from? Probably not, but I’m going to tell you anyway.

Away from the UK and trashy novels (sorry Jilly, I love you really), ‘gymkhana’ is an Indian word which originally meant ‘place of assembly’. The first bit, ‘gym’ doesn’t have anything to do with the exercise place where I never go (that has its roots in Latin and Greek) – it’s from a Hindustani word, ‘gend’, which means ‘ball’. And the ‘khana’ part is an Indo-Persian/Indo-Arabic word meaning a place or a dwelling. So it literally means ‘ball-house’, which sounds a bit rude (or maybe that’s just me), but was actually used to describe somewhere where racket games were played. Over time the meaning changed to mean any type of skill-based event.

The word ‘gymkhana’ can also refer to a type of motorsport where drivers have to get round a track while performing Top-Gear like manoeuvres including reversals (don’t know what they are), 180 and 360-degree spins, parking boxes (huh?) and figure 8s. Oh, and in the days of the Raj, ‘gymkhana’ also referred to an upper-class gentlemen’s club which didn’t allow locals or women in, just to make sure all the racist/sexist bases were covered.

Read the other words of the week.

hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia

The word of the week is going on holiday for a while (it’s been working really hard and it deserves it). So I thought I’d better make it a good one. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (phew) means a fear of long words.

Photo by Dušan Smetana on Unsplash.

Basically this is one big wordy joke. And whether or not it’s a ‘real’ word is debateable. There’s a shorter version – ‘sesquipedaliophobia’ – which turns up in The Aldrich Dictionary of Phobias and Other Word Families (published in 2002). ‘Phobia’ means ‘fear of’ (from Phobos, the Greek personification of fear – check out this blog post for more words we get from ancient Greek), while ‘sesquipedalian’ means having many syllables. That dates back to 1656, and comes from a Latin word ‘sesquipedalis’, which literally means a foot and a half long. From what I can gather, some wordy wag (those lexicographers are a wacky lot) then added the ‘hippo’ and the ‘monstro’ to make it even longer and, presumably, more scary sounding. Which is very unfair on any hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobics out there.

Bonus fact: the longest word in the English dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis. It’s a lung disease you catch from inhaling very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano. So not much chance of getting it in Suffolk then. Which is lucky as I’d never be able to tell people what was wrong with me.

(See you back here in January for more words of the week.)

ghost

You already know what a ghost is. So instead of the meaning, in this WOTW (as no one calls it), I’m looking at that silent ‘h’ nestled between the ‘g’ and ‘o’. It hasn’t always been there – back in the 16th century, the word was spelled ‘gost’, as it comes from an Old English word, ‘gást’ (other spellings included gæst – ooh, I do love a ligature – goost, goist and goste). So how did the ‘h’ sneak in?

BOO! This picture is genuinely a bit unsettling, sorry. (Oh, and it’s by Syarafina Yusof on Unsplash.)

Well, we can blame this on William Caxton, the dude who introduced the printing press to us Brits in 1476. His first press was in Bruges (great film), and when he came back to Blighty to set up shop he brought some Flemish typesetters with him. One of them was called Wynkyn de Worde which is (a) an awesome name and (b) a nice case of nominative determinism (when your name matches your job). It seems that Caxton didn’t give a flying whatsit about spelling (gasp!), so largely left de Worde and his posse to it when they were typesetting English works. So if they came across a word that looked like a Flemish one, they tended to just use the Flemish version (because, why not?). And the Flemish word for ‘ghost’ was ‘gheest’. All of which means that they stuck an ‘h’ in our ‘gost’ whenever they typeset it. They did the same with ‘gastly’ and ‘agast’. Apparently they also tried it with ‘goat’, ‘goose’ and ‘girl’ but lucky for us, and small children trying to learn written English everywhere, those didn’t stick.

(I shamelessly stole this story from Susie Dent on Countdown, so thanks Suze.)

benighted

Benighted has two meanings – the one that you probably know (although I confess I thought it meant something else until I looked it up for this) is that it’s an adjective which describes someone who’s without morals or knowledge. There’s also a second older, and more literal, meaning which is to be overtaken by darkness – whacking the prefix ‘be’ on to the start of a word generally changes the meaning to making or causing to be, as in becalm or bedazzle. If you put the two meanings together then it all makes sense – if you’re short on morals or knowledge then you’re unenlightened, or in the (figurative, this time) dark.

The literal definition of ‘benighted’ has been around since the mid-1500s. Here’s a nice example of it in action from W.B. Yeats in ‘From The Tower’ (1928):

“Benighted travellers

From markets and from fairs

Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.”

(When I re-read that, the thought of seeing someone’s midnight candle glimmering made me giggle a bit, because I’m extremely juvenile and smutty. I’m sure you’re much more grown up than me though, and the thought never crossed your mind.)

endling

This is a bit of a sad one (sorry). An endling is the last known member of a species – so once it dies, that species (it can be an animal or a plant) is officially extinct.

The word was coined in the scientific journal ‘Nature’ in 1996. Other equally gloomy words for endling include ‘ender’ and ‘terminarch’. And if there’s a couple left, then they’re referred to collectively as a ‘relict’.

[This isn’t actually a Sehuencas water frog, but I couldn’t find a royalty-free one of those. Sorry.]

Etymology-wise, the ‘end’ bit of ‘endling’ is self-explanatory, I hope. Adding the suffix ‘-ling’ to a word either denotes that the thing is younger, smaller or inferior to the thing at the start (which is a terrible explanation but hopefully you get the gist) – think duckling, hatchling and so on. Or it can just mean that the thing is in the category described by the root word (that’s a slightly better explanation), as in earthling, and some other words which I can’t think of right now.

You can find a list of notable endlings on Wikipedia. It’s incredibly depressing though, so I wouldn’t recommend reading it if you’re feeling at all maudlin.

Now that we’re all thoroughly glum, here’s a nice story about an endling called Romeo, which I saw on QI this week (where I first heard the word). Romeo is a Sehuencas water frog, a native of Bolivia. He lives in Bolivia’s Natural History Museum (I suspect not voluntarily), and is 10 years old, which is pretty darn old in frog years. To try to see if he really is an endling, conservationists put a profile for Romeo on match.com. REALLY – you can see it here. (If you can’t be bothered to do reading, his profile begins with ‘Well, hi there. I’m Romeo. I’m a Sehuencas (pronounced “say-when-cuss”) water frog and, not to start this off super heavy or anything, but I’m literally the last of my species.’) Romeo had much better luck that I ever have with internet dating, and with money raised through the profile, some other conservationists found his Juliet in a Bolivian cloud forest (which is the most romantic-sounding thing ever), along with four other froggy pals. A breeding programme will be happening soon, so hopefully lots of Sehuencas tadpoles will follow. Hurrah!

(You can read more about R&J here.)

burnsides

Now, if you’re one of my more, erm, mature readers, you might be thinking of DCI Frank Burnside from ‘The Bill’ (I just googled him and his entry on ‘The Bill’ wiki – yes, that’s a thing – says ‘built his reputation on good detective work combined with his unique approach of putting informants’ heads down the toilet’. They don’t make ’em like that anymore). Unfortunately this doesn’t have anything to do with long-running police procedural dramas, but it does have a military background, which I’ll get to in a minute. It’s also my second (spoiler alert!) beard-related word in two weeks – make of that what you will.

Excellent facial hair, questionable military tactics

So, burnsides are another name for sideburns – strips of facial hair growing down your cheeks and connecting to a moustache, but with a clean-shaven chin. They’re named after one General Ambrose Burnside whose face hair was so distinctive it spawned a whole new genre (?). Which was lucky, as he was a pretty crap general – his most notable achievement was a crushing defeat in the American Civil War.

The savvy among you will have realised that sideburns is just burnsides swapped round. Annoyingly, I can’t find out how or why this happened – maybe it just made more sense to people as (in a happy coincidence) they’re on the side of your face?

A sideburn fact for you: sideburns went out of fashion in the early 20th century. One of the reasons for this was war – to keep a gas mask on your face you needed to be clean-shaven (which meant ’taches were still okay).

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering what sideburns were called before the 1800s, the answer is, rather disappointingly, ‘side whiskers’.)

ambivert

Nope, not a plug-in air freshener. I’m an ambivert and you’re (probably) an ambivert. It’s a person whose personality is a mixture of extrovert and introvert, AKA basically everyone, ever. Specifically, ambiverts change according to the situation they’re in. So if they’re at a party where no one’s talking to anyone else, then they won’t talk to anyone else either. But if everyone’s having it large (sorry) at the party, they’ll do the same.

The word’s been around since 1927, and was coined by an American social scientist with the excellent name of Kimball Young. The ‘ambi’ bit is from the Latin meaning ‘both’, as in ‘ambivalent’ and ‘ambidextrous’ (‘ambi’ also means ’round about’, as in ‘ambient’). The ‘vert’ is also Latin and comes from ‘vertere’ which means ‘to turn’ (vertere also has a starring role in words like ‘reverse’ and ‘revert’).

Bonus fact – you can also be an omnivert, which means you do the opposite of whatever situation you’re in. So omniverts would sit quietly in the corner at the fun party, but try to get everyone up and dancing at the quiet party. Omniverts sound like arseholes.

Bonus bonus fact: Kimball Young was the grandson of one Brigham Young, who was the second president of the Church of the Latter-day Saints i.e. the Mormons. He had 55 wives (boooooo!) but a most excellent beard (yay!).

Excellent beard. Bad marital practices.

lukewarm

When I was little and I heard someone describe a bath as ‘lukewarm’, I totally thought it had something to do with Luke Skywalker. You’ll be sad to hear that, unfortunately, it doesn’t.

You know what ‘lukewarm’ means – something (usually liquid or food) that’s not very hot. The ‘warm’ bit means ‘warm’, obviously (and doesn’t have very interesting etymology – it comes from the old German word… wait for it… ‘warm’). But what about the ‘luke’ part?

Photo by Karla Alexander on Unsplash.

Well, we can trace that all the way back to the proto-Germanic (obviously you’re far too clever for me to need to explain what that means) word ‘hlēwaz’, which also means ‘warm’. Old English then nicked it in and used it for (again) ‘warm’. ‘hlēwaz’ then morphed into ‘lew’, ‘lewk’ or ‘leuk’ in Middle English, which meant ‘tepid’ (or ‘slightly warm’), which then, through the magic of language, became the ‘luke’ we know today.

You’ll be noticing a theme here. All the words I’ve mentioned, including ‘luke’, mean ‘warm’. So ‘lukewarm’ means ‘warm warm’. This makes it on a par with saying LCD display (liquid crystal display display) or PIN number (personal identification number number).

metathesis

Photo by Jay Ruzesky on Unsplash.

‘Metathesis’ is a linguistic term (wait, come back – it’s interesting, honest!) which basically means to swap bits of a word round to create a new one. The word ‘walrus’ came about because of metathesis. It’s from an old Norse word ‘hrossvalr’ which means ‘horse whale’. At some point when the word made its way over to us, somebody switched it round (it was possibly more complicated than this) and we got ‘walrus’. ‘Foliage’ is another example. The word comes from a Latin root (BOOM BOOM), ‘follium’ which means leaf. Metathesis happened to it at some point and it went from ‘foillage’ to the better known ‘foliage’ we use today.

The most famous modern (or is it…?) example of metathesis is ‘aks’ for ‘ask’. ‘Aks’ actually came first from the Old English word ‘acsian’. Because of metathesis in ye olde times (scientific, I know), there was also another version floating about – ‘ascian’ – which won the linguistic fight and is how we ended up with ‘ask’ being the norm. (I used to absolutely loath it when I heard people saying ‘aks’ instead of ‘ask’, but now I know it’s from Old English and that Chaucer used it, I don’t feel so cross about it. Because I’m a pretentious wanker apparently.)

The word metathesis itself comes from the Greek word ‘metatithenai’, which just means ‘to put in a different order’. So that’s not very interesting, sorry. There’s also a super-poncy joke in here about metathesis being a thesis about a thesis, but I’ll spare you. Because I don’t think it’d be very funny, even to me.

fanfaronade

After a few weeks of everyday words with interesting backstories, this time I thought I’d go for one that you probably haven’t come across before (and if you have, then I salute you, and you should probably be writing these instead of me). ‘Fanfaronade’ means empty boasting. And if you do it, which, let’s face it, we all do on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, you’re a fanfaron.

The word comes from ‘fanfarrón’, which is a Spanish word for a big old boasty mcboastface. It made its way into English in the 1600s, probably passing through French (‘fanfaronnade’) on the way.

Fanfaronade is probably where we get the word ‘fanfare’ from, although sources differ on whether there’s any definite etymological evidence for that. But since a fanfare involves a trumpet, and fanfaronade means blowing your own brass instrument, I think it’s a fairly safe bet. (Also, if you say it out loud and go up on the ‘nade’ bit, it even sounds like a fanfare. Or is that just me?)

Dickens used the word ‘fanfaronade’ in place of ‘fanfare’ in a short story called ‘Somebody’s Luggage’ (good name for a band):

“And hark! fanfaronade of trumpets, and here into the Great Place, resplendent in an open carriage, with four gorgeously-attired servitors up behind, playing horns, drums, and cymbals, rolled ‘the Daughter of a Physician’ in massive golden chains and ear-rings, and blue-feathered hat.”

THAT IS HOW TO MAKE AN ENTRANCE.

quintessential

You know what it means: something which represents a typical or perfect example of something. But do you know where it comes from? Yes? Well, you can look smug and stop reading. No? Strap in, you’re in for a fun ride. No, seriously, stay with me – it actually has a surprisingly mystical back story.

You might have already worked out that the ‘quint’ refers to five (as in quintet, quintuplets, and so on, but not the guy from Jaws). But what does that have to do with being perfect? Well, the ‘essential’ bit comes from ‘essentia’ which means essence. So ‘quintessential’ actually means the ‘fifth essence’. Still none the wiser? Me neither. We need to go all the way back to ancient Greece for this, so run and get your toga. All set? Let’s go.

Aristotle, the head honcho of western philosophy, introduced the idea of a fifth element (nope, not the Bruce Willis film), to the existing four (i.e. 70s disco group earth, wind and fire, plus water). The fifth one was an airy-fairy thing that made up the heavenly and divine bodies, also called ‘aether’.

According to the A-man, a little tiny bit of this perfect, god-like substance was supposed to exist in all things (including us human beans). So that’s why the word’s since come to mean the most refined version of something.

clue

Usually I like to pretend to be super clever by using big long words here, which ‘clue’ obviously isn’t. But I’ve picked it because it has really interesting etymology. It actually comes from Greek myth. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. (This is a long one, sorry.)

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash.

Minos, king of Crete, was married to Pasiphae. She had sex with a bull (because, Zeus), and gave birth to a hideous beast called the minotaur (I don’t know why it was named after Minos as he didn’t have anything to do with it, but I digress). Minos was a bit embarrassed by this, but decided to put his bovine stepson to work rather than just killing it (again, I don’t know why, as he was a bit of a git – he must have been feeling uncharacteristically charitable that day). So he imprisoned it in a huge labyrinth, then stuck anyone who pissed him off in there. They then couldn’t find a way out and were eventually eaten by the minotaur. Which saved on the Ocado bills.

Cut to Athens, where Minos’ actual son gets killed by the same bull that boffed his mum (what are the chances!). Minos is understandably miffed about this, and demands that Athens send him human sacrifices every year to make up for it. I told you he was a bastard. This goes on for a few years, until an Athenian named Theseus thinks ‘f*ck this, my people shouldn’t be ending up as hors-d’oeuvres for a cow-man’, and decides to kill the minotaur. So he sails to Crete, where he meets another of Minos’ offspring, Ariadne. They fall madly in love, and she gives him a ball of wool (he’s a cheap date). He then heads off into the labyrinth, kills the minotaur and uses the wool to find his way back out. Then he pops Ariadne on his ship and takes her back to Athens where they live happily ever after.* What does this have to do with ‘clue’, I hear you shouting? Well, the old word for a ball of wool was ‘clew’ (sorry it took so long to get there). Because of the way Theseus used it, i.e. as a clue to get him out of the maze, it slowly took on the meaning it has today.

Bonus fact: I’ve used the word maze above, because I didn’t want to write labyrinth again. But in fact they’re different things. A maze has choices of paths and directions, and can have different entrances and exits, and dead ends. A labyrinth only has one single path which leads to the middle, and only one way in and out. And David Bowie lives in one.

Well done for making it to the end BTW.

*Due to a mix up over some sails, Theseus’ dad thought his son had been killed by the minotaur and, in his grief, chucked himself off a cliff. So it wasn’t an entirely happy ending, sorry.

(Like what you just read? Check out the other words of the week. There’s loads.)

quarantine

Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash

Yes, yes, smarty pants, I know you know what it means – it’s when a person’s (or animal’s) movement is restricted for a certain amount of time to make sure they don’t pass on any nasty diseases. But it has quite an interesting origin story. Allow me to take you back to the 17th-century. Trading ships are travelling from one country to another, sometimes bringing unwanted cargo like typhoid, cholera and yellow fever alongside their goods. In a bid to stop these spreading, authorities order them to be isolated in port for 40 days before people can come ashore. And that’s where we get the word – ‘quaranta giorni’ which literally means 40 days in Italian.

Why 40 days? No one really knows, is the short answer. And it actually started out as 30 days, and was called, unimaginatively, ‘trentino’. At some point an extra 10 days was added, possibly just as a precaution as people began to understand incubation periods a bit more. Or it might be because the number 40 has lots of Biblical significance – it was the number of days and nights J-Christ spent in the desert, and also the time Moses spent up Mount Sinai doing something very important that I can’t remember (commandments, maybe? You can tell I went to convent school can’t you?).

Interestingly (kinda), lots of us use ‘quarantine’ wrongly. You can only be quarantined if you’re not actually ill i.e. you don’t have a medical diagnosis. If you’re already sick and you have to be kept away from healthy peeps, then you’re in ‘medical isolation’, not quarantine. There’s also a thing called ‘cordon sanitaire’ which is similar, but refers to restricting people’s movement in or out of a specific geographic area to stop an infection from spreading.

skeuomorph

Nothing to do with the Alien quadrilogy (not an actual word BTW) – that’s a xenomorph. A skeuomorph is a derivative object that keeps non-functional ornamental design cues from structures that were inherent to the original. Nope, me neither.

Photo by Bruno Nascimento

Okay, so in everyday words, it’s a thing that imitates another, older (or retro) thing, just for show. An example is the rivets in jeans – they used to be there to reinforce areas of denim trews where stitching might break. But obviously thread is much better these days, so now they’re only there because they look nice.

Skeuomorphs are most common on electronic gadgets – think the ‘Save’ icon in MS Word which is a picture of an old-school floppy disc (look it up kids). Or the noise your phone camera makes when you take a picture. It obviously isn’t coming from a mechanical shutter – but the skeuomorphic sound lets us know we’ve actually taken a picture. Having a quick look at my iPhone I can see at least three skeuomorphs:

• the phone symbol itself: an old-fashioned handset

• email: an envelope

• the notes app: a yellow legal pad

• the Facetime icon: an old-timey video camera.

I’m not sure what’ll happen when all the people who remember what these icons really mean are pushing up daisies though – maybe it’ll be time for some new designs?

The word itself was coined by one Henry Colley March who, I gather from Mr Google, was a researcher of some kind (this is very vague, sorry – but I couldn’t find much about him, except he wrote a book called ‘The Mythology of Wise Birds’ which would make a brilliant album name). Being as Hank was around in the 1890s, obviously he wasn’t using an iPhone. He came up with the term after looking at ancient artefacts like old pottery which had patterns carved in it to resemble a woven basket. He formed it from the Greek words ‘skéuos’ for ‘container’ or ‘tool’, and ‘morphḗ’ meaning ‘shape’.

(Extra special thank-you-muchlys to my friend Hannah Walbridge for telling me about this word at the weekend, which I’d never heard of before. So cheers Hannah.)

apotropaic

If something is apotropaic, it means it’s designed to avert evil. The word comes from the Greek – ‘apo’ means ‘away’, while ‘trópos means ‘turn’. There are lots of obvious apotropaic symbols and actions that we still use today, like horseshoes, rabbit’s feet (yuck) or knocking on wood.

Now, if you’re easily offended (a) why are we friends, and (b), you might want to stop reading now. Still here? Good. While I was researching this, quite far down the Google search page I noticed the heading ‘Genitalia, As Apotropaic’. Obviously, I had to click on it (god knows what targeted advertising I’ll be getting from now on). And according to this article, people have been waving their rude bits around for 1,000s of years to fend off bad stuff. The article says that exposing your ladygarden in ancient Greece could scare off devils, evil spirits and gods, attacking troops and dangerous animals, while simultaneously stopping whirlwinds and thunderstorms. If you did it in old-timey Russia you could calm the sea and/or see off a bear. Handy.

Trouser snakes also have an apotropaic function. Representations of winkies were often carved above doorways in ancient Greece (you wouldn’t want to bang your head on that doorframe), while in ye olde Japan there was a whole set of gods who were represented as massive dongs. These were erected (hee hee) on bridges and roads to stop evil spirits. Unfortunately when Western travellers got that far they were super offended and the Japanese took them down. Damn us oversensitive Westerners.

(PS If I die tomorrow and the police check my internet search history, please let them know that it was all in the name of research. Thanks.)

Read the other words of the week.

poppycock

Unless you’re a retired army colonel or elderly lord of a manor, you probably don’t use this word very much. But if you’re a native English speaker then you’ll know what it means – it’s a harmless, inoffensive way of calling bullshit. But my (as always, very in depth) research reveals that the word poppycock has some shady etymological origins.

Before you start, it’s nothing to do with cocks (stop it). Or, indeed, poppies. ‘Poppycock’ comes from a Dutch word ‘pappekak’. (This is where it gets a bit minging.) ‘pappe’ means ‘soft’ and ‘kak’ means, well, cack. Yep, if you tell someone they’re talking poppycock, you’re saying that ‘soft poop’ is coming out of their mouth. What a lovely image.

Read the other words of the week.