The Etymologicon
That’s how the French played a game of chicken. The French, though, being French, called it a game of poule, which is French for chicken. And the chap who had won all the money had therefore won the jeu de poule.
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English gamblers picked the term up and brought it back with them in the seventeenth century. They changed the spelling to pool, but they still had a pool of money in the middle of the table.
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The gene of gene pool comes all the way from the ancient Greek word genos, which means birth. It’s the root that you find in generation, regeneration and degeneration; and along with its Latin cousin genus it’s scattered generously throughout the English language, often in places where you wouldn’t expect it.
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Take generous: the word originally meant well-born, and because it was obvious that well-bred people were magnanimous and peasants were stingy, it came to mean munificent.
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the Greek for water producer is hydro-gen. The bit of air that made things acidic he decided to call the acid-maker or oxy-gen, and the one that produced nitre then got called nitro-gen.
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(Argon, the other major gas in air, wasn’t known about at the time, because it’s an inert gas and doesn’t produce anything at all. That’s why it’s called argon. Argon is Greek for lazy.)
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a general can order his troops to commit genocide, which, etymologically, would be suicide.
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privates is a euphemism for gonads, which comes from exactly the same root, for reasons that should be too obvious to need explaining.
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This is because the Latin for witness was testis. From that one root, testis, English has inherited protest (bear witness for), detest (bear witness against), contest (bear witness competitively), and testicle.
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They are testifying to a man’s virility. Do you want to prove that you’re a real man? Well, your testicles will testify in your favour.
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Nobody knows how oaths were sworn in the ancient world, but many scholars believe that people didn’t put their hands on their hearts or their thighs, but on the testicles of the man to whom they were swearing, which would make the connection between testis and testes rather more direct.
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that’s what an orchid’s root resembles, and orchis was the Greek for testicle.
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One of the Gaulish words that the Gauls used to speak was braca meaning trousers. The Romans didn’t have a word for trousers because they all wore togas, and that’s why the Gaulish term survived.
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braguette or little trousers. This is not to be confused with baguette, meaning stick. In fact a Frenchman might brag that his baguette was too big for his braguette, but then Frenchmen will claim anything. They’re braggarts (literally one who shows off his codpiece).
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The original architectural device was called a bragget/bracket, because it looked like a codpiece. But what about a double bracket, which connects two horizontals to a vertical? An architectural double bracket looks like this: [
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Pantaleon’s head off and he died, thus becoming one of the megalomartyrs (the great martyrs) of Greece. By the tenth century Saint Pantaleon had become the patron saint of Venice.
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This last kindness was what earned the doctor the name Pantaleon, which means All-Compassionate. In the end they got Pantaleon’s head off and he died, thus becoming one of the megalomartyrs (the great martyrs) of Greece. By the tenth century Saint Pantaleon had become the patron saint of Venice. Pantalon therefore became a popular Venetian name and the Venetians themselves were often called the Pantaloni.
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he wore one-piece breeches, like Venetians did. These long breeches therefore became known as pantaloons. Pantaloons were shortened to pants and the English (though not the Americans) called their underwear underpants. Underpants were again shortened to pants, which is what I am now wearing.
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Pan is one of those elements that gets everywhere.
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An epidemic is only among the people, whereas a pandemic means all the peoples of the world are infected.
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Pantophobia, for example, is the granddaddy of all phobias as it means a morbid fear of absolutely everything.
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Panic is not a fear of everything; it is, in fact, the terror that the Greek god Pan, who rules the forests, is able to induce in anybody who takes a walk in the woods after dark. And the Greek god Pan is not panipotent.
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Back in 27 BC the Roman general Marcus Agrippa built a big temple on the edge of Rome and, in a fit of indecision, decided to dedicate it to all the gods at once. Six hundred years later the building was still standing and the Pope decided to turn it into a Christian church dedicated to St Mary and the Martyrs. Fourteen hundred years after that it’s still standing and still has its original roof. Technically it’s now called the Church of Saint Mary, but the tourists still call it the Pantheon, or All the Gods.
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The exact opposite of the Pantheon is Pandemonium, the place of all the demons. These days pandemonium is just a word we use to mean that everything is a bit chaotic, but originally it was a particular palace in Hell. It was one of the hundreds of English words that were invented by John Milton.
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However, it’s still the greatest epic in English, an achievement that’s largely due to its being almost the only epic in English that anybody has ever bothered writing, and certainly the only one that anyone has ever bothered reading.
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Milton adored inventing words. When he couldn’t find the right term he just made one up: impassive, obtrusive, jubilant, loquacious, unconvincing, Satanic, persona, fragrance, beleaguered, sensuous, undesirable, disregard, damp, criticise, irresponsible, lovelorn, exhilarating, sectarian, unaccountable, incidental and cooking.
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Awe-struck? He invented that one too, along with stunning and terrific.
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And, because he was a Puritan, he invented words for all the fun things of which he disapproved. Without dear old Milton we would have no debauchery, no depravity, no extravagance, in fact nothing enjoyable at all.
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Milton invented the word unintended.
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Etymologicon, meaning a book containing etymologies, first crops up in his essay on Nullities in Marriage.
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When all Hell breaks loose, that’s Paradise Lost, because when Satan escapes from Hell a curious angel asks him: Wherefore with thee Came not all Hell broke loose?
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We rely on Milton. For example, he invented space travel, or at least made it linguistically possible. The word space had been around for centuries, but it was Milton who first applied it to the vast voids between the stars. Satan comforts his fallen angels by telling them that though they have been banned from Heaven, Space may produce new worlds
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The word space had been around for centuries, but it was Milton who first applied it to the vast voids between the stars. Satan comforts his fallen angels by telling them that though they have been banned from Heaven, Space may produce new worlds
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Our word sky comes from the Viking word for cloud, but in England there’s simply no difference between the two concepts, and so the word changed its meaning because of the awful weather.
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We may dream of better things, but the word dream comes from the Anglo-Saxon for happiness. There’s a moral in that.
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Soon was the Anglo-Saxon word for now.
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It’s just that after a thousand years of people saying ‘I’ll do that soon’, soon has ended up meaning what it does today.
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If you were naughty it used to mean that you were a no-human. It comes from exactly the same root as nought or nothing. Now it just means that you’re mischievous.
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Probably the most damning word is probably. Two thousand years ago the Romans had the word probabilis. If something was probabilis then it could be proved by experiment, because the two words come
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Probably the most damning word is probably. Two thousand years ago the Romans had the word probabilis. If something was probabilis then it could be proved by experiment, because the two words come from the same root: probare.
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And absolutely any sane Roman would tell you that it was probabilis that the Sun went round the Earth. So by the time poor probably first turned up in English in 1387 it was already a poor, exhausted word whose best days were behind it, and only meant likely.
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All of which should explain why the test of a good dessert and the proof of a pudding is in the eating. It’s the old sense of prove.
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