gyves

This is an old word for manacles or fetters, and cropped up in a book I’m reading at the moment (no, not ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ – it’s a medieval murder mystery-type thing called ‘Beloved Poison’ by E.S. Thomson which my sister bought me purely because she liked the cover). A not-very-in-depth internet search tells me that ‘gyves’ possibly comes from the Welsh ‘gefyn’ for ‘fetter’ or ‘shackle’, or the Irish ‘geibbionn’ (‘fetters’) or ‘geimheal’ (‘fetter’, ‘chain’, ‘shackle’).

PS Had I remembered to post this yesterday, you would have got a nice fluffy, lovey-dovey word for Valentine’s Day. Although if you’re reading ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ then maybe manacles are your idea of romance...

gatecrash

This is American slang which seems to date back to the early 20th century. And that's all I got folks – the etymology is surprisingly hard to find. This leads me to think that it’s just what it says on the tin – that to enter an event without an invite you have to literally crash through the gate. Maybe?

booze

It’s FINALLY the end of January which means many people (not me) will be jumping back on the alcohol wagon after a month off (I had a drink last night). So the word of the week is in honour of this fact.

The etymology of ‘booze’ is actually quite hard to find. Disappointingly it doesn’t come from the name of a 19th-century American distiller, E.C. Booz (some nice nominative determinism there for you, folks). It looks like it first appeared way back in the 14th century as ‘bouse’ (also how I spell it after a few shandies), which possibly came from the Dutch word ‘búsen’ which means to drink excessively.

Go forth and get hangovers, my friends.

anarcho-syndicalism

This is in honour of Ursula K Le Guin who very sadly passed away this week. A central part of Le Guin’s novel ‘The Dispossessed’, this is a form of anarchism which is very complicated and far too difficult for me to give a full explanation of here because as per usual I’m very late doing this and I don’t have time to type it all (have a look at Wikipedia which explains it much better than I can).

Please come back next time, I promise it’ll be better.

arpeggio

I sing in a choir on a Wednesday, so this is inspired by that. For those of you who aren’t musically inclined (which includes me), an arpeggio is the notes of a chord played in rapid succession, either ascending or descending. It comes from arpeggiare which is Italian for ‘play the harp’.

portmanteau

As well as being a type of bag, a portmanteau is also a word made up of two other words, like ‘smog’ (smoke and fog) or ‘breathalyser’ (breath and analyser). It was Lewis Carroll who first used ‘portmanteau’ in this way. Here’s Humpty Dumpty in ‘Through the Looking Glass’:

‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy” ... You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.’

Modern slang continues to embrace the portmanteau with words like ‘chillax’, ‘bromance’ and, a personal favourite, ‘craptacular’ (something that’s so crap it’s also spectacular).

Weirdly, and rather pleasingly (at least if you’re a wordy geek like me – maybe not so much if you’re a normal person), ‘portmanteau’ itself is a portmanteau. It's made up of ‘porter’, French for ‘to carry’ and ‘manteau’, also French for cloak. MIND. BLOWN.

scumbag

This was inspired by a documentary I’ve just watched on BBC 4 about the song ‘Fairytale of New York’ by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl (well worth a look if you have the time).

In British slang scumbag just means a horrible person. But in US slang it means condom. Yep. It comes from ‘scum’ which is US slang for ‘semen’ and ‘bag’ which means, well, ‘bag’. So, there you go.

Happy Christmas.

ickle*

These days we use this to mean ‘little’ (as in ‘Who’s an ickle pickle?’ which I regularly ask my dog. Answer: it’s her). But it actually means ‘a frozen drop of water’. Which is where ‘icicle’ came from.

* Shamelessly stolen from Susie Dent’s Twitter feed. Except the bit about my dog. Susie Dent doesn't ask my dog if she’s an ickle pickle.