myrmecophilous

If you’re described as ‘myrmecophilous’, then you’re associated with, benefited by or fond of (hopefully not in a weird way) ants. It’s a scientific term that describes the positive relationships ants have with other species like butterflies, crickets, beetles and mites, all of which help them be good at staying alive (that’s the science). For example, butterflies belonging to the family Lycaenidae (which is almost 6,000 species worldwide), are myrmecophiles. In return for protection from predators, some caterpillars have developed dew patches, small button-like spots on their backs, that ooze a thick sugary fluid that the ants go nuts for, while others have a nectar gland that pumps out the same sweet goodness (sounds gross, I know). So the ants get their fix, and the caterpillars get bodyguards (even if they are all hopped up on sugar).

The word myrmecophilous has Greek roots. ‘Myrmec’ means ‘ant’, while the ‘phile’ ending comes from ‘philos’, which means to love. Like extremophile, galanthophile and lots of other nasty words we won’t mention here.

Okay, ant facts.

• There are over 12,000 ant species worldwide.

• The bullet ant is said to have the most painful sting in the world – it feels like being hit by a hammer. Just kidding, it feels like a bullet, obviously.

• A single ant can carry 50 times its own bodyweight. And they even work together to move stuff they can’t manage on their own.

• Ants can be found on every single continent except Antarctica, which is mental considering it’s the only continent that literally starts with ‘ant’.

• The biggest ants’ nest ever found is over 3,700 miles wide. Yep, you did read that right. Called the ‘Argentine Ant Supercolony’ (good name for a band), it goes from northern Italy through the south of France, and out to the western coast of Spain. Many ant experts think it’s actually much much bigger than this and stretches across the globe – that’s because Argentine ants from opposite sides of the world recognise each other (which I think basically means they don’t try to kill each other), leading them to think they all live in one utterly ginormous colony. Here’s hoping they don’t rise up and take over the world… actually maybe that would be better.

• I ate a stir-fry in a restaurant in Cambodia that had ants in it (as an ingredient – it wasn’t a really dirty restaurant) – although I didn’t realise until I was about halfway through. I thought they were saffron or something like that. It was very nice, but once I did realise, I couldn’t finish it.

tartle

‘This is…’

Picture the scene. You’re at a party (not that I ever go to parties anymore. But I do remember them. Vaguely). You’re making small talk with someone you’ve met a few times, but whose name currently escapes you. Then disaster strikes. Your partner/friend/someone else you know comes over to join the conversation. They both look expectantly at you, waiting for introductions. You hesitate just a bit too long. Panic… PANIC…!

Congratulations, you’ve just tartled.

This lovely Scottish verb is the act of hesitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name. It’s important to note that it’s the hesitation that ‘tartle’ is referring to here – not the act of bad memory itself. If you do this type of thing a lot, then you can be described as ‘tartlesome’.

Sadly ‘tartle’ hasn’t taken off as much as it should, so there’s not much info on its origins. It’s possible that it comes from an Old English word, ‘tealtrian’, which means to totter, shake, stagger or generally be uncertain.

So there you have it. Next time you find yourself trying to introduce someone whose name you’ve forgotten, just fill that awkward silence with ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve just tartled.’ And hope no one thinks that means you’ve broken wind.

Krampus

This one’s a bit of a cheat, because it’s a proper noun (but still a word). As it’s nearly Christmas, I’m hoping you’ll let me get away with it. Because tis the season for nightmarish shadowy figures who’ll, at best, whip you with a birch rod, and at worst, drag you to hell. Merry Christmas!

Krampus in action – LOOK AT HIS TONGUE (source)

In central and eastern Europe, Krampus is a horned hairy figure, usually brown or black, with cloven hoofs and a lolling tongue. He’s basically Santa Claus’s evil twin – the anti-Santa. According to myth, Krampus accompanies Old Saint Nick to doll out punishment to kiddies who’ve found themselves in the naughty section of that checked-it-twice list. He does that by whipping them with a bunch of birch rods, presumably on the bum, or some rusty chains. Ouch. Some stories say he then pops them in a basket, and drags the naughty children to hell.

Krampus’s name either comes from the Bavarian word ‘krampn’ meaning ‘dead’ or ‘rotten’, or from the German words ‘kramp’ or ‘krampen’ meaning ‘claw’. His origins are a bit murky, although he’s thought to have appeared around the 6th or 7th century CE – some clever anthropology bods think he actually pre-dates Christianity. He’s even got his own feast day, on 5 December, called Krampusnacht, which is the day before St Nicholas’ Day. People dress up as Krampus, drink too much, then run about trying to scare each other in something called the ‘Krampuslauf’ or ‘Krampus Run’. These events still go on annually in a lot of Alpine towns, and have even made their way to some American towns and cities, including Portland and San Francisco. There are also Christmas cards with him on, called Krampuskarten, which is fun to say out loud.

A genuinely scary Krampusnacht costume (source)

Krampus has recently made his way into popular culture, particularly in North American horror films. One of my favourites is, well, ‘Krampus’ starring Toni Collette and Adam Scott, which involves some excellent killer toys (including a particularly nasty child-eating clown) alongside some anti-commercialism messaging. And if you’re a fan of Inside No. 9 (which you absolutely should be), you’ll remember him from the exceedingly disturbing Christmas special ‘The Devil of Christmas’ (still available on BBC iplayer). Honourable mention also goes to the anthology horror film ‘A Christmas Horror Story’ where (a surprisingly ripped) Krampus has a full-on fight with Santa Claus himself. It also stars William Shatner – what more could you ask for?

All that’s left for me to say is ‘Grüß Vom Krampus’… or Greetings from Krampus. See you in 2023 for lots more word-related shenanigans.

quiddity

The most popular sport in the wizarding world, it’s played on broomsticks, and involves each team… I jest, of course. Quiddity is a philosophical concept that describes the thing that makes something what it is – its essence. So you could write: ‘Emma’s weekly posts capture the quiddity of complicated words in straightfoward prose.’ Oh really? How kind of you to say, thank you so much.

It’s nothing to do with HP. But there are no good pictures for ‘essence’.

Now, my two major word-of-the-week sources (which are Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster), disagree on the meaning of quiddity. The one above is Merriam-Webster’s definition, which is the one I’m going with because it’s easiest to understand. But according to Wikipedia, quiddity is a bit more complicated, and describes the properties that a particular thing shares with others of its kind. This makes it the opposite of something called ‘haecceity’ or ‘thisness’ (which apparently is an actual word) i.e. a positive characteristic of an individual that causes it to be this individual, and no other. See why I’m going with the first one?

Quiddity comes from a Latin word, ‘quidditas’. That’s a translation of a Greek phrase ‘to ti en einai’ , meaning ‘the what it was to be’, which sounds like something a drunk person would say.

Quiddity can also refer to a small and usually trivial criticism or complaint, or to a quirk or eccentricity in someone's behaviour or personality. Hamlet uses it in this way in, well, ‘Hamlet’ in his graveside speech, referring to a lawyer: ‘Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures.’

That’s not a very fun note to end on, so here’s a quidditch joke:

Why should you never have sex with a wizard?

Because you might catch Hogwarts, and they never stop quidditching.

(I didn’t say it was a good joke.)

psychomanteum

I’ve been listening to a podcast on BBC Sounds called ‘The Witch Farm’ about Heol Fanog in Wales, a real-life haunted house (I highly recommend it – the podcast, not the house – and the previous one called ‘The Battersea Poltergeist’; unless you scare easy, in which case maybe don’t listen to either of them). In a recent episode, the presenter, Danny Robins (whose response to anything scary is always ‘Bloody hell’) set up a psychomanteum. This involved him watching several scary films while depriving himself of sleep for 36 hours. He then sat and gazed into a mirror, then nearly shit his pants when he saw a shadowy figure in it. The point of this was to prove how easy it is to trick the human brain into thinking it’s seen a ghost.

The word psychomanteum was invented by a guy called Raymond Moody. After a near-death experience he built one in Alabama, called the Dr John Dee Theater of the Mind (named after Queen Elizabeth I’s astronomer and famous occultist). Here he carries out (he’s still going) experiments where he gets people to summon visions of ghosts by staring into a mirror in a dimly lit room.

Despite the newness of the word, psychomanteums and mirror divination (called catoptromancy, fact-fans) have actually been around for yonks. A psychomanteum (although it’s not called that) is mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey (written in the 8th century BCE) when Odysseus gazes into a pit filled with the blood of sacrificed sheep and eventually sees his dead mum presumably berating him for killing a bunch of innocent barnyard animals. And in the 1950s, a psychomanteum was excavated at Ephyra in the western Greek province of Epiros. It was a subterranean complex containing fragments of a giant bronze cauldron which was probably gazed in by ancient Greeks looking to contact long-dead relatives. Spooky, right?

zugunruhe

You can be forgiven for never having come across this word before – it cropped up in a book I’ve just finished reading about how different animals perceive the world (‘An Immense World’ by Ed Yong – well worth a read). Zugunruhe is a German word that means ‘migratory restlessness’. It’s a thing that happens to birds as they start getting anxious when the time for them to start their migration draws near. The symptoms include fluttering wings, sleeplessness and general disruption to the birds’ normal activities. Birds in captivity are affected by it as well – caged birds will launch themselve at the walls in the direction they want to travel in. Sad, right?

As I said, this is a German word, which is made up of ‘Zug’ meaning ‘move’ or ‘migration’, and ‘unruhe’ for ‘anxiety’ or ‘restlessness’. It first appeared in 1707, and is now well recognised in ornithology.

Around one in five of all the world’s bird species migrate. And just before setting off, some have been found to atrophy organs that they don’t need while they’re flying (like their digestive organs), while beefing up those that they need for power (like pectoral muscles and hearts). Amazing.

Here are some more awesome migration facts.

• Bar-headed geese travel from their breeding areas in Mongolia, the Tibetan Plateau and northern China to India. They cross over the Himalayas using less than ten per cent of the oxygen available at sea level (I confess I don’t really understand what this means, but I guess it’s impressive…?), and reach altitudes of up to 23,000 ft (7,000 m). That. Is. Well. High.

• Great snipes put on a lot of weight before their winter migration. Despite this giving them a lack of aerodynamism, they’ve been recorded reaching speeds of up to 60mph (97kmph) over a distance of 4,225 miles (6,800 km). They don’t take any breaks while flying from Scandinavia to sub-Saharan Africa, and arrive much thinner than they started, losing half of their weight en route.

• Bar-tailed godwits (great name for a band) travel from Alaska to New Zealand, and hold the record for the longest non-stop flight of any bird. They fly for over 6,835 miles (11,000 km) without stopping.

• It’s not all about flying either. Adélie penguins trek around 8,077 miles (13,000 km) across ice every year.

• The Arctic tern has the longest migration known in the animal kingdom. It travels 55,923 miles (90,000 km) every year, going from pole to pole. Arctic terns can live for up to 30 years, which someone much cleverer than me has worked out means that a single tern’s migration distance is the equivalent of going to the moon and back more than three times.

Most of the birds on this list are endangered due to climate change and habitat loss. Have a look at BirdLife International or World Animal Protection if you’d like to find out more about ways to protect them and our other furry friends.

proprioception

If I asked you how many senses we have, you’d probably say ‘five’, right? Taste, smell, sight, hearing and touch. But there’s actually another sixth sense, which has nothing to do with ghosts or Bruce Willis. It’s called proprioception.

(Before I get into this, I’m no scientist. So if I’ve got any details wrong in this article, please forgive me. And don’t shout at me.)

Proprioception, also known as kinaesthesia, is the sense that lets your brain know where your body is in space. Which basically means it’s how you know where and what your legs, arms and other extremities (stop it) are doing. You don’t need to look down at your feet to know where they are. That’s proprioception, right there.

So how does it work? Well, we all have cells called proprioceptors in our muscles and joints that process sensory information when our bodies move. And when we stretch our muscles and change the position of our joints, these cells send feedback to our brains, telling them where our arms, legs and body are at any given moment.

Without this sense, we wouldn’t be able to do anything much really. For example, if I have a gin and tonic, I don’t have to look at the glass as I move it to my mouth. That’s because my proprioceptors are sending information to my brain about where my hand is. I also don’t smash the glass into my own face (unless it’s the fourth or fifth gin and tonic), which is again thanks to my proprioceptive sense making sure my hand moves smoothly and at the right speed to get to my mouth.

Another good example is walking. You don’t need to look at your feet to lift them up, move them forward and put them back down again. That’s because proprioceptors send constant sensory information to your brain about where your hips, knees, ankles and toes are, and make sure you don’t fall over (most of the time). Proprioceptors are also constantly working in the background to make sure we use the right amount of force when we’re pulling or pushing something, and the right speed when we move our limbs. So we don’t end up breaking all the gin and tonics when we do a cheers, or punching people when we try to shake hands (unless we really don’t like them).

As a concept, proprioception has been around since 1557, where it was described by one Julius Caesar Scaliger (an Italian scholar and physician) as a ‘sense of locomotion’. In 1827, Charles Bell, a Scottish surgeon, anatomist, physiologist, neurologist, artist and philosophical theologian (and show-off, presumably), called it ‘muscle sense’. This was obviously deemed too easy to understand by the scientific community, and in 1906 the term ‘proprio-ception’ was coined by Charles Scott Sherrington, an English neurologist. This comes from the Latin word ‘proprius’, which means ‘one’s own’ or ‘individual’, and ‘capio’/‘capere’ meaning ‘to take’ or ‘grasp’. So it’s basically about grasping oneself in space. Which sounds like a sci-fi porn film, but you get the idea.

picayune

If something is picayune, it’s trivial or paltry. So you could say to someone ‘your opinions are picayune’ (if you’re mean and don’t want the person to realise). You can also use it as a noun, as in ‘our lives don't amount to a picayune in the grand scheme of things’. Which is depressing, sorry.

One silver Spanish real, from the reign of Peter I of Castile (1350–1369).

Picayune is a relatively modern word. In the 19th century, in Louisiana and other southern American states, a picayune was a small coin which wasn’t worth very much. Specifically, it was a Spanish half real – the real (meaning ‘royal’) was a Spanish unit of currency used for several hundred years after the mid-14th century. It was eventually replaced by the peseta in 1868.

The coin’s name comes from ‘picaioun’, a word that means ‘small coin’ in Occitan, a language spoken in French luxury cosmetic shops. I jest, of course (and apologise for the bad joke and product placement – although if anyone from L’Occitane is reading and would like to send me some free stuff, please do. I’m a particular fan of your hand cream) – it was spoken in Southern France. ‘Picaioun’ comes from the Occitan word ‘pica’, which means ‘to jingle’, as in the noise coins make when you have lots of them.

Just in case you don’t know what an aeroplane looks like (this might not be a Cessna though – no idea).

Further investigation into the word ‘pica’ led me to an eating disorder when people crave things that aren’t food. First described by Hippocrates way-back-when, in this context ‘pica’ actually has completely different etymology, and comes from the Latin word for ‘magpie’, a bird believed to eat anything.

This investigation then took me back to France (the internet is a wonderful thing) and one Michel Lotito, an entertainer who was famous for eating things that you shouldn’t. Known as Monsieur Mangetout (‘Mr Eat-All’), over the course of his 57-year lifetime, he ate 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, 7 TVs, 6 chandeliers, 2 beds, a pair of skis, a computer, a waterbed, 500 metres of steel chain, a coffin (with handles), 45 door hinges and even a bloody aeroplane (a Cessna 150, if you’re interested), which took him two years to get through. He was awarded a brass plaque by Guinness World Records to commemorate his abilities, and he ate that too. Lotito died in 2007 after a heart attack – and his death was apparently nothing to do with his ‘unusual’ diet.

vocable

A vocable is a form of non-lexical utterance. Got it? Nope? Okay, in normal-person speak, they’re word-like sounds that aren’t actually words. Their meaning can change depending on the context, and they often show the speaker’s emotional reaction to something. If you’re still thinking ‘WHAT?’, here are some English examples of vocables and their translations:

I think this is definitely ‘um….?’

• uh-huh: yes

• mm-hmm: also yes

• uh-uh: nope

• hmmm: I’m not sure, maybe

• uh-oh: crap, this isn’t good

• awww: thanks or that’s super-cute

• um…?: what the f*ck

• ewwww: yuck yuck and more yuck.

Filler words like ‘er’ and ‘um’ (i.e. words we use to buy more time when we’re thinking and talking at the same time) also count as vocables. And they turn up in music a lot, as in ‘lalala’ or ‘dumdedum’ (in fact, there are lots of Native American songs that consist entirely of vocables). Every language on earth has its own vocables.

There are lots of other types of words that aren’t actually words. These are called pseudowords, and they include the following…

Nonsense words

Beloved of Lewis Carroll, nonsense words sound like they could be words, but aren’t. Have a read of The Jabberwocky to see them in action.

Nonce (!) words

Nothing to do with Prince Andrew (allegedly), nonce words are words coined for a single occasion only. They’re often used to study the development of language in children, because they let researchers test how kids treat words they don’t already know.

The name comes from ‘for the nonce’ which is an old English idiom meaning ‘for the time being’ or ‘for now’ (thank god).

Ghost words

Words published in a dictionary or reference book by mistake, which are often taken as gospel by readers. A great example is ‘dord’, which was accidentally created by the staff of G. and C. Merriam Company (now part of Merriam-Webster) in the 1934 edition of the New International Dictionary. It was defined as follows:

dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chem. Abbreviation for density.

So how did this happen? Well, on 31 July 1931, Austin M Patterson, the dictionary’s chemistry editor, sent in a slip reading ‘D or d, cont./density’, which was supposed to add ‘density’ to the list of words that the letter ‘D’ can abbreviate. But whoever was doing the dictionary misread this as one word: Dord. It then appeared on page 771 of the dictionary between the entries for ‘Dorcopsis’ (a type of small kangaroo) and ‘doré’ (golden in colour). It wasn’t until 1939 that an eagle-eyed editor realised ‘dord’ didn’t have any etymology and investigated, then flagged the error. Books being what they are though, it took until 1947 before ‘dord’ was completely removed.

ketchup

Think ketchup originated in America? Well, despite the fact that 97% of American households have a bottle of the red stuff in their kitchens, this condiment actually started life on much more exotic shores. The word ketchup comes from a Hokkien Chinese word, ‘kê-tsiap’, which was the name of a sauce made from fermented fish. (While any food with the word ‘fermented’ in it just doesn’t sound appetising, I think this was actually quite similar to soy sauce.)

So how did ketchup migrate? Well, it’s likely that British travellers brought ‘kê-tsiap’ home, before attempting to recreate it in their kitchens and anglicising it as ‘catchup’ (also ‘catsup’). The first written mention of ‘catchup’ is in ‘A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew’, a dictionary of English slang first published in 1698. It has over 4,000 entries and, frankly, sounds awesome.

At some point ‘catchup’ mutated into ‘ketchup’. And the first published recipe for ketchup appeared in 1727, in ‘The Compleat Housewife’, an incredibly popular cookbook by Eliza Smith which went through a massive 18 editions. Ingredients in Smith’s recipe included anchovies, shallots, vinegar, ginger and nutmeg, and involved shaking the bottle once or twice a day for a week before using it. A second recipe for ‘ketchup in paste’ appeared in 1732, written by one Richard Bradley (who was the first professor of botany at Cambridge University, and also published the first recipe with pineapple in it – hopefully it wasn’t a pizza). This still wasn’t the ketchup we know today though – the main ingredient was red beans, and there definitely weren’t any tomatoes in there. Other versions followed, often containing mushrooms (apparently Jane Austen was a big fan of mushroom ketchup), unripe walnuts (YUM) and oysters. At this point ‘ketchup’ was really just another word for ‘sauce’.

Despite having been brought to England in the 1500s from South America, tomatoes weren’t popular as people actually thought they were poisonous (possibly due to the lead from lead pewter plates leaching into them). So it wasn’t until around 1812 that the first tomato ketchup recipe appeared. James Mease, a scientist from Philadelphia, gets the credit for this, although he loses points for calling tomatoes ‘love apples’ (due to their reputation for being an aphrodisiac – which seems somewhat at odds with the whole poison thing, but never mind), which doesn’t seem very scientific, and sounds gross. A little start-up by the name of Heinz then introduced their recipe in 1876, and the red sauce we know today was born. Today Heinz is the best-selling brand of ketchup in the United States, with more than 650 million bottles sold every year.

I still don’t like it though.

haywire

If something goes haywire, it means it works erratically, in a crazy way or doesn’t work at all. We often use it when we’re talking about technology. That might make you think the ‘wire’ of ‘haywire’ is something to do with power-type wires (that’s the official technical term), but you would in fact be wrong. ‘Haywire’ actually has a much older meaning to do with… wait for it… hay.

Well, I didn’t say it was exciting.

People who deal with hay (farmers, I guess?) use baling wire – a thin, flexible metal wire – to bind together (you’ve guessed it) bales of hay. It’s a bit like duct tape, in that it’s used for all different types of quick and dirty repairs (see ‘The Martian’ by Andy Weir – and the Matt Damon-starring film – for the wonders of duct tape: ‘Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.’ I wholeheartedly agree). Some of the repairs baling wire is used for include ‘wiring gates shut, mending a fence, holding rickety machinery together and stuff like that’. This led to the expression ‘haywire outfit’, which appeared around the turn of the century. It referred to New England logging camps which used cheap temporary fixes (often involving baling wire) for repairing equipment, rather than doing it properly. Eventually the word ‘haywire’ came to describe anything that was flimsy or patched together, and then for attempts to fix things that went wrong.

Unlike duct tape, hay wire also has a reputation for being tricky to manage. That’s because, much like Christmas lights, wired headphones and my jewellery, it can get itself in a complete tangle without any outside intervention. It was probably this that led to ‘haywire’ getting the meaning of ‘crazy’ or ‘out of control’.

solivagant

If you’re a solivagant, it means you like wandering alone (with or without a cloud). It’s also an adjective (AKA a describing word) – so you can be a solivagant while taking a solivagant walk. The etymology is fairly straightforward: it’s from the Latin words sōlus for ‘alone’, and vagō which means ‘to wander’. And it has the suffix ‘ant’ at the end, which we use to form nouns of agency (a fancy way of saying people or things that do an action) and adjectives that describe a state or quality.

Tod Sloan (on the right), before it all went tits up – at least he has a pal in this picture (photo from Wikipedia)

If you like wandering at night (which obviously you can only really do if you’re a man, sadly), you’re a noctivagant.

Perhaps because writers are generally quite solitary creatures (and always cold, if you’re me), English has lots of words and phrases for being on your tod. In fact, there’s one right there – ‘on your tod’ is a shortening of the (weirdly posh) Cockney rhyming slang phrase ‘on one’s Tod Sloan’. Tod Sloan was a world-famous American horse jockey who lost all his money and died penniless and alone (sad face).

Other lonely words you might not have come across before include:

• solitudinarian: this one’s pretty obvious – someone who leads a solitary or secluded life

• anchorite: a man who keeps himself to himself for religious reasons (like a hermit). If you’re a lonely religious lady, you’re an anchoress. This comes from the Late Latin word (I’m not sure why it wasn’t on time) anachoreta, which can be traced to the Greek anachōrein, meaning ‘to withdraw’

• eremite: another type of religious hermit (turns out religion is a lonely biz). This word comes from the Greek erēmitēs which means ‘living in the desert’.

In case my solitary words have left you feeling a bit depressed, here’s (a very un-PC/sweary) puppet version of Kim Jong-il singing about feeling alone in the world because no one’s as great as he is.

carceral

Carceral is an adjective meaning of, or relating to, jails or prisons. The sharp-eyed among you have probably already realised that it shares its roots with ‘incarcerate’ (i.e. put in prison). Both of these come from the Latin word for prison, ‘carcer’. And that comes from ‘karkros’, a Proto-Italic word for ‘enclosure’ or ‘barrier’. In case you’re wondering ‘Proto-Italic’ languages are the ancestors of the Italic languages, spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. So well old, then.

There are lots of other slang words for prison and going to jail. Here are just a few I found.

Slammer

This one didn’t appear until the 1950s in the US of A. It’s pretty straightfoward – it refers to doors being closed noisily behind you.

Clink

Possibly from the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer closing the irons around the wrists or ankles of prisoners. There was also a prison called the Clink in Southwark which goes all the way back to 1129 (and is now the site of The Clink prison museum, where my sister and I once spent a memorable afternoon – there are A LOT of awesome photo opportunities in there). It might also have been influenced by the Flemish word ‘klink’ meaning ‘latch’.

Doing bird

Cockney rhyming slang for ‘birdlime’ which translates to ‘doing time’. This is probably because birdlime is horrible sticky stuff spread on twigs to trap small birds by utter bastards (thankfully banned in most places now).

Pokey

This first appeared in the early 20th century, although no one knows its exact origins. It might come from ‘pogey’, a 19th-century English slang word for poorhouse.

Pen

This is short for ‘penitentiary’, which has been around since the early fifteenth century. Then it meant a ‘place of punishment for offenses against the church’, from the Medieval Latin ‘peniteniaria’ meaning ‘of penance’. The slang term ‘pen’ first appeared in 1884.

In other prison news, England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe, locking up 149 people for every 100,000 of the population. Yay us. And apparently old people are getting naughtier – between 2002 and 2015, the number of prisoners aged 60 and over rose by 164%.

If all that’s left you feeling a bit depressed, here’s Johnny Depp in a parody of Jailhouse Rock in John Water’s stone-cold classic ‘Cry Baby’. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you watch it immediately – alongside JD, it also has Iggy Pop and Ricki Lake in it, for crying out loud.

kowtow

If you kowtow to someone, it means you agree to do something a bit too easily, or in an obsequious way – AKA sucking up. It now has quite negative connotations, but in days gone by a kowtow was actually the ultimate way to show respect to a superior. It involved bowing or kneeling so low that your forehead was touching the floor (if I did this I wouldn’t be able to get back up again), or even lying fully prostrate on the ground. Apparently a kosher kowtow was three kneelings and nine knockings of your forehead on the floor – and if you can’t hear your skull hitting the ground then you ain’t doing it properly. Ouch.

Vietnamese graduates kowtowing to their teachers in 1897

The word ‘kowtow’ itself comes from Cantonese – it’s a combination of ‘kòu’ which means ‘to knock’ and ‘tóu’ which means ‘head’. In Sinospheric culture (which is a fancy-dancy term for countries in East and Southeast Asia that were historically influenced by China, like Japan and Korea), it was used to show respect for one’s parents and elders, superiors and religious big-wigs, all the way up to the Emperor of China himself. The Emperor wasn’t immune either – apparently he would do a kowtow (possibly not the right terminology) to the shrine of Confucius, and also to heaven (that was it though).

The kowtow caused an international incident in 1793 when Lord George (not Paul) Macartney*, the first British ambassador to China, refused to do a full kowtow to Emperor Qianlong (because, British). He went as far as removing his hat and bowing, but that was it. This pissed off the Chinese no end, especially as every other European ambassador had just got on and done it. The Brits agreed to do a kowtow only if the emperor would do the same to a portrait of King George III (yes, the mad one). Unsurprisingly that was a hard ‘no’. China then rejected every single one of Britain’s diplomatic and trade requests. All for the sake of a bow and not a kowtow. Also, MEN.

Macartney’s first meeting with Qianlong. Hope he sang the Frog Chorus

The term ‘kowtow’ arrived in English in the early 1800s, probably as a result of those failed trade negotiations. Within a few decades its meaning had changed to the ‘fawning’ verb we have today.

The kowtow tradition pretty much disappeared after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911–12. Nowadays in China it’s reserved for paying homage to ancestors at family burial grounds.

* Yes, it is spelled differently but I liked the Frog Chorus joke so I left it in.

juggernaut

A juggernaut is something huge and powerful, usually destructive, that can’t be stopped, either literally or metaphorically. Like a steam roller, or Donald Trump’s ego. In British English we also use it for a big old lorry. But it is a bit of a weird word. So what is a jugger, and why is it nauting?

A slightly unimpressive photo of the temple

Well, the good news is that ‘juggernaut’ has some epic etymology. The bad news is that it’s a bit grim. It comes from Jagannāth, the Hindi word for ‘Lord of the World’. Jagannath is an incarnation of the god Vishnu, and has an important temple in Puri, on the eastern coast of India. That’s not the grim bit, obviously. Each year the temple holds the Ratha Yatra, or chariot festival, when images of Jagannath and his brother (Balabhadra) and sister (Subhadra) are pulled on huge and elaborately decorated (you’ve guessed it) chariots. According to hopefully apocryphal (i.e. bullshit) reports going back to the 14th century, hardcore Vishnu fans would throw themselves in front of these to show their devotion by being crushed beneath the wheels of carriages. That. Is. Commitment. Colonial Brits supposedly saw this, then anglicised Jagannath as ‘juggernaut’ giving it the meaning of unstoppable force that we have today.

Jagannath and his siblings’ temple at Puri is freaking massive – it covers an area of over 400,000 square feet (37,000 square metres in new money). It was built in the 11th or 12th century (depending on which page of Wikipedia you look at) by king Anantavarman Chodaganga, a ruler of the Eastern Ganga dynasty who were in charge of the southern part of Kalinga in India. There’s a flag on the top of it which apparently defies science, and always flies in the opposite direction to the way the wind’s blowing. (Boringly, there is actually some science that explains this involving fluid dynamics and something called a Kármán vortex street, but that isn’t half as fun so let’s ignore it.) Every day since it was built, a priest has scrambled up the walls of the temple – the height of a 45-storey building – without any protective gear, to change this flag. Bagsie not me.

boondocks

If someone lives out in the boondocks (also boonies), it means they live in the middle of nowhere. It’s generally an American term (the British equivalent is probably ‘the sticks’) and is usually used in a derogatory way to mean somewhere that’s considered backward or dull, AKA the basis for many a disturbing redneck-based horror film.

While boondocks might be a more popular word in the US of A, it didn’t originate there. It’s actually a term from Tagalog, the language that’s the base for Filipino, one of the official languages of the Philippines (obvs). That word is ‘bundok’, which means ‘mountains’. So how did it get from southeast Asia to Murica? Well, during the Philippine Revolution of 1896 to 1898 (when the Philippines fought for independence from 300 years of Spanish colonial rule), occupying American military forces adopted ‘bundok’, broadening its meaning to refer to the wild and remote country they found while fighting abroad. They then took it home with them as ‘boondocks’.

Tagalog is spoken as a first language by the Tagalog people (again, obvs), who make up a quarter of the population of the Philippines, and as a second language by almost everyone else who lives there. Taglish or Englog, a mixture of Tagalog and English is also widely spoken. In fact, it’s so prevalent that non-native speakers can be identified easily because they use pure Tagalog, whereas native speakers speak Taglish.

prosody

Image courtesy of Tshirt Superstar - Music

Prosody is a linguistic term – wait, don’t stop reading! – concerned with the way we say things. So basically it’s not interested in the actual words we use, but in the way we deliver them. To put it rather more romantically, it’s all about the music of speech – its rhythm (spelled that right first time, well done me), stresses and intonation (called suprasegmentals, fact-fans).

Prosody plays a really important role in communication because it gives us humans information beyond what the words in a sentence literally mean. In case you’re thinking WTF, let’s have a look at it in action.

Imagine someone says this to you:

Wow, this is a really great post about words, isn’t it?

Depending on the intonation and rhythm (nailed it again) this person uses, they could be saying that this really is an excellent post about words that’s packed with useful information. Or they might mean that actually it’s incredibly boring, and they wish they’d never come to this godforsaken website. It all depends on the delivery.

As you’ve probably gathered, prosody is particularly important when it comes to picking up on nuance, like if someone’s being sarcastic or not. It can also change the meaning of simple one-syllable utterances like ‘Ah!’ or ‘Ooh!’ to give them loads of entirely different meanings depending on how you say them. Don’t be smutty.

According to Charles Darwin, prosody probably predates the evolution of human language. That’s because even animals use it. For example, monkeys express their feelings using different tones: low ones for anger and impatience, and high ones for fear and pain.

Wow, this is a really great post about words, isn’t it?

cathedral

I live in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, which is a cathedral town. Not a city – contrary to what a lot of people think, a town doesn’t immediately become a city just because it has a big ole church in it. In fact, Suffolk doesn’t have any cities in it at all. It’s not alone in this – there are actually nine others which are also city free. Want to have a guess at which ones? Answers at the bottom of the post…

Bury St Edmunds Cathedral (photo by DAVID ILIFF. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0)

Anyway, I digress. A cathedral is called a cathedral because it contains a cathedra, which is basically a nice chair (or throne) for a bishop. Originally the Latin word cathedra didn’t have any religious connotations though – it literally just meant ‘armchair’, and was a term usually reserved for a chair specifically for ladies. I’m not sure what makes a chair female – maybe it gets paid significantly less than the men’s chairs?

The origins of ‘cathedra’ go way back to ‘kmt’ (you can tell that’s an old word because it doesn’t have any vowels in it), a Proto-Indo-European word meaning ‘down’ or ‘with’. It’s thought that the Proto-Indo-European language, or PIE, was spoken from 4500 BC to 2500 BC (I told you it was old). This went into Greek as ‘kata’, meaning ‘down’, and soon fused with ‘hedra’, which comes from another PIE root ‘sed’, ‘to sit’. This created ‘kathedra’ for ‘seat or bench’. When words went from Greek to Latin, the ‘k’s often changed to ‘c’s (which is something to do with how they’re pronounced I think) – hence, ‘cathedra’. And with the Catholic church’s penchant for Latin, it wasn’t long before it made it into their lexicon (losing its femininity along the way, of course).

Time for Bury St Edmunds facts. Did you know…

1. The single largest witch trial in England was held in BSE in 1645. It led to 18 women being executed by famous witchfinder general Vincent Price, sorry Matthew Hopkins, sorry utter sexist bastard. The site of the trial is now a Premier Inn hotel, and the places where the witches were executed are now a garden centre and a golf club.

2. Bury St Eds featured prominently in Armando Iannucci’s film The Personal History of David Copperfield. Dickens himself stayed in The Angel Hotel in town three times during his life. You can even sleep in the same four-poster bed as he did in room 215 (although presumably they’ve changed the sheets since then).

3. Measuring just 15ft by 7ft, The Nutshell pub is officially the smalled pub in Britain. Opened in 1867, it has a mummified cat hanging over the bar which was discovered behind the walls during renovations. Mummified cats were often placed in the walls of newly built homes to ward off unwanted spirits back in the day. There are also several mummified cats in our local museum – I’m not sure why we love them so much here.

Some mummified cats (and mice). Sorry

So, did you guess the other city-less counties? They are: Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Dorset, the Isle of Wight, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Rutland (also Britain’s smallest county), Surrey and Warwickshire. Buckinghamshire was on the list until quite recently, but the Queen made Milton Keynes a city at part of the Platinum Jubilee Civic Honours, whatever they are.

extremophile

It’s another ‘-phile’ word this week, but there’s nothing to worry about, honest. An extremophile is an organism that thrives in extreme environments previously thought to be uninhabitable, for example under massive pressure or really bastard cold. These organisms not only tolerate these conditions – for many, they need them to survive. Extremophiles have been found 6.7 km below the Earth’s surface, more than 10km deep in the ocean at pressures of up to 110 MPa (which is a lot, apparently), in acid, in frozen seawater at -20°C and in underwater hydrothermal vents at temperatures of 122°C. The name is made from the Latin extremus meaning, um, ‘extreme’, and the Greek philiā which means ‘love’.

A tardigrade*. Doesn’t he look like he’s about to start singing ‘Always look on the bright side of life’?

Extremophiles are also normally polyextremophiles (‘poly’ meaning ‘many’), which means they can live in more than one shit place – for example, the deep ocean is generally very cold and also under high pressure. So that’s a double whammy. And most extremophiles are microorganisms, but not all – the tardigrade (which I thought was a made-up thing in Star Trek) is one example. Also known as a water bear or moss piglet (awwww), a tardigrade is a microscopic eight-legged animal that thrives in environments that would kill most other forms of life – on mountaintops including the Himalayas, at the bottom of the sea, in mud volcanoes (which are literally what they sound like) and even in solid ice. They can go up to 30 years without food or water, and have been on earth for about 600 million years, which means they pre-date the dinosaurs by a mere 400 million years.

Not long ago, some nice scientists chucked a load of tardigrades out into outer space to see what would happen. Not only did lots of them survive, but some of them even went on to have babies. And in August 2019, scientists reported that some tardigrades might be living on the moon after an Israeli lunar lander carrying thousands of them crash landed (although it’s since been reported that they probably didn’t survive the impact, booooo). Both of these things sound like the start of really good sci-fi horror films.

The name ‘water bear’ comes from the way tardigrades walk, which apparently resembles the way bears get around. The largest ones can get to a (still pretty tiny) 1.5mm, which means you can see them using a bog-standard microscope if you have such a thing.

Extremophiles like the tardigrade are proof that life can exist in many different forms, and that oxygen and water aren’t pre-requisites. In the words of well-known mathematician and chaos theory specialist Dr Ian Malcolm (AKA Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park): ‘Life, uh, finds a way.’

*Wikipedia says I have to credit that tardigrade photo with this horrible bit of text: photo by Bob Goldstein and Vicky Madden, UNC Chapel Hill – http://tardigrades.bio.unc.edu/pictures/ >https://www.flickr.com/photos/waterbears/sets/72157607218607395/ >https://www.flickr.com/photos/waterbears/2851666759/in/album-72157607218607395 (note permission below), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4747599).

cacafuego

The Cacafuego getting its arse kicked by The Golden Hind.

You might know a cacafuego – it’s a swaggering braggart or boaster. Even if you’re not a linguist you’ve probably guessed that this is a Spanish word. And it literally means ‘fire shitter’, from the old Spanish verb cacar (now cagar), meaning ‘to void excrement’, and fuego, which means ‘fire’.

Cacafuego first appeared in English in the early 1600s, and that’s down to Sir Francis Drake, English explorer, sea captain, ahem, slave trader, naval officer, politician and circumnavigator of the globe (show-off). He was also a privateer, which is basically a government-sponsored pirate who went around attacking foreign vessels and stealing all their treasure. One of the ships he captured was a Spanish galleon called Cacafuego. Okay, the ship wasn’t actually called fire shitter (shame) – this was a nickname given to her by her crew due to her impressive cannon fire and other weaponry. Her real name was Nuestra Señora de la Concepción or Our Lady of the (Immaculate) Conception, which isn’t half as fun.

On 1 March 1579, while doing the aforementioned circumnavigation of the globe, Drake’s ship the Golden Hind caught up with Cacafuego near Ecuador. Having heard that she was packed to the rafters (not sure ships have rafters but never mind) with goodies, Drake decided to capture her. Rather than reduce the Hind’s sails in daylight (as this might look suspicious), Drake trailed some wine barrels behind to slow her down and wait for night to fall. In the early evening he came alongside and, because there weren’t many English ships in the Pacific at this time, the Cacafuego was taken completely by surprise and surrendered without much resistance. Drake sailed both ships to the South America coast and, after nicking all the treasure, treated the officers on board to a nice dinner, some presents (sadly Wikipedia doesn’t say what these were) and letters of safe conduct before offloading them. So that’s nice. And it wasn’t long before cacafuego became a byword for a swaggering person – probably due to the fact that Drake made such short work of taking control of such a supposedly impressive ship.