The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities E-Book

Paul Anthony Jones

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 519

Beschreibung

The ultimate gift for wordsmiths and lovers of language: a word for every day of the yearOpen the Cabinet to leap back in time, learn about linguistic trivia, follow a curious thread or wonder at the web of connections in the English language.1 January quaaltagh(n.) the first person you meet on New Year's Day1 April dorbellist(n.) a fool, a dull-witted dolt12 May word-grubber(n.) someone who uses obscure or difficult words in everyday conversation25 September theic(adj.) an excessive drinker of tea24 December doniferous(adj.) carrying a giftPaul Anthony Jones has unearthed a wealth of strange and forgotten words: illuminating some aspect of the day, or simply telling a cracking good yarn, each reveals a story. Written with a light touch that belies the depth of research it contains, this is both a fascinating compendium of etymology and a captivating historical miscellany. Dip into this beautiful book to be delighted and intrigued throughout the year.

Leseprobe

For Kevin, with thanks

Inhalt

Introduction

The Cabinet of Liguistic

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Wordfinder

INTRODUCTION:

A word for all occasions

London’s Haymarket Theatre was packed to the rafters on the evening of 16 January 1749. An excitable audience had filled it to capacity after an advert in a local newspaper had promised a performance by a conjuror apparently able to transport himself from centre stage and into an empty wine bottle on a table nearby. The feat sounded too incredible to be true, for the very good reason that it was. The advertisement was a hoax.

Precisely who perpetrated it remains debatable, but when it became clear that a teleporting conjuror was not going to perform that night, one of the Haymarket’s staff bravely came to the stage to explain that the performance would have to be cancelled – and in response the audience erupted into a furious riot that all but destroyed the theatre’s interior. But this curious event did have a silver lining, at least: it is the origin of the bizarre and seldom-used word bottle-conjuror, which remains in place in the dictionary as a byword for a hoaxing prankster or charlatan.

The tale of the bottle-conjuror is just one of an entire year’s worth of historical and etymological stories that fill the pages of this book: dip into this Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities every day of the year, and you’ll be met with a curious or meaningful historical anniversary and an equally curious or long-forgotten word of the day, picked from the more obscure corners of the dictionary.

On the day on which flirting was banned in New York City, for instance, you’ll discover why to sheep’s-eye someone once meant to look at them amorously. On the day on which a disillusioned San Franciscan declared himself Emperor of the United States, you’ll find the word mamamouchi, a term for someone who considers themselves more important than they truly are. And on the day on which George Frideric Handel completed his 259-page Messiah oratorio after twenty-four days of frenzied work, you’ll see why a French loanword, literally meaning ‘a small wooden barrow’, is used to refer to an intense period of work undertaken to meet a deadline. The English language, it seems, is vast enough to supply us with a word for all occasions – and this linguistic Wunderkammer (skip ahead to 7 June for that one . . .) is here to prove precisely that.

I have been raiding these troves of long-lost linguistic treasure since 2013, when the @HaggardHawks Twitter account tweeted its first few obscure words and language facts. And I’ve been tweeting daily nuggets of linguistic gold every day since, from random left-brain cluttering trivia (advance the letters of the word oui ten places through the alphabet and you’ll arrive at yes) to bizarre etymological curiosities (because you have to straddle it, bidet means ‘pony’ in French). But alongside all those, Haggard Hawks tweets a daily Word of the Day: a typically strange or long-forgotten word that it’s hoped you will never have heard of before and may, for whatever reason, wish to add to your daily vocabulary. And it is that which brings us to the book you’re now holding in your hands.

Partly a yearbook of obscure language and partly an annual of events and observances, by opening this Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities you’ll find both a word and a day to remember, every day of the year. Each one has its own dedicated entry here, on which a curious or notable event and an equally curious or notable word are both explored. And because there really is a word for all occasions, all 366 daily doses of linguistic interest tie in with each daily event, and vice versa.

So whatever date this book has found its way into your hands, let’s get right to it: there’s a whole year’s worth of linguistic curiosities waiting to be discovered.

quaaltagh(n.)

the first person you meet on New Year’s Day

Proving there really is a word for everything, your quaaltagh is the first person you meet on New Year’s Day morning.

If you think that word doesn’t look even remotely English, you’re right: quaaltagh (pronounced ‘quoll-tukh’, with a rasping ‘gh’ like the sound in loch) was borrowed into English from Manx, the Celtic language of the Isle of Man, in the early nineteenth century. Its roots lie in a Manx verb, quaail, meaning ‘to meet’ or ‘to assemble’, as it originally referred to a group of festive entertainers who would come together to gambol from door to door at Christmas or New Year singing songs and reciting poems. For all their efforts, these quaaltagh entertainers would be invited inside for food and drink before moving on to the next house on their route.

If, as was often enough the case, all of that happened early on the morning of 1 January, then there was a good chance that the leader of the quaaltagh would be the first-footer of each household. As a result, a tradition soon emerged that the identity of the quaaltagh could have a bearing on the events of the year to come: dark-haired men were said to bring good luck, while fair-haired or fair-complexioned men (or, worst of all, fair-haired women) were said to bring bad luck – a curious superstition said to have its origins in the damage once wreaked by fair-haired Viking invaders.

Eventually, the tradition of door-to-door New Year’s Day gambolling disappeared (presumably because everyone is feeling far too delicate the morning after the night before), but the tradition of the quaaltagh being your luck-bringing first encounter on the morning of New Year’s Day, either inside or outside your house, has remained in place in the dictionary.

fedifragous(adj.)

promise-breaking, oath-violating

If you made a New Year’s resolution only to ditch the gym for a box of chocolates or an afternoon in the pub on 2 January, then the word you might be looking for is fedifragous – a seventeenth-century adjective describing anything or anyone that breaks an oath or a promise, or reneges on an earlier agreement.

Fedifragous combines two Latin roots: foedus, meaning ‘treaty’ or ‘contract’, and frangere, meaning ‘to break’. Foedus is a common ancestor of a clutch of more familiar words like confederate, federal and federation, while it is from frangere that the likes of fragment, fragile and fraction are all descended – as well as an entire vocabulary’s worth of more obscure and equally broken words:

• confraction (n.) a smashing or crushing, a breaking up into small pieces

• effraction (n.) a burglary, a house-breaking

• effractive (adj.) describing anything broken off something larger

• irrefrangible (adj.) incapable of being broken

• ossifragous (adj.) powerful enough to break bone

Along similar lines, ossifrage – literally ‘bone-breaker’ – is an old name for the lammergeyer, an enormous mountain-dwelling eagle known for its habit of smashing bones by dropping them from a great height and then devouring the shards. And even the humble saxifrage plant can take its place on this list: its name derives from the Latin saxum, meaning ‘rock’ or ‘stone’, and literally means ‘stone-breaker’. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder would have you believe that this refers to the plant’s supposed effectiveness in treating kidney stones but, alas, it’s more likely to be a reference to the plant’s habit of growing in cracks and fissures in rocks.

eucatastrophe (n.)

a sudden and unexpected fortuitous event

If a catastrophe is an unexpected disaster, then a eucatastrophe is its opposite: using the same positive-forming prefix found in words like euphoria and euphonious, J. R. R. Tolkien coined the word eucatastrophe in 1944, defining it as ‘the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears’.

As well as being the author of The Hobbit (1937) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–55), Tolkien – born on 3 January 1892 – was a professor of English at Oxford University and an expert philologist and etymologist. Alongside his fiction, he compiled a dictionary of Middle English, completed his own translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and, following active service in the First World War, worked for a time on the very first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

As an expert in Germanic languages, Tolkien was tasked with researching a clutch of Germanic-origin words falling alphabetically between waggle and warlock at the OED – waistcoat, wake, walnut, wampum and wan among them. The verb want ended up being the longest entry he assembled (Tolkien eventually identified more than two dozen different definitions and sub-definitions of it) but oddly it was the walrus that proved the toughest etymological challenge. He discovered that the walrus’s original and long-forgotten English name, morse, is entirely unrelated to the word we use today, while the name walrus itself represents a metathesised (i.e. reordered) form of an Old Norse word, hrosshvalr, literally meaning ‘horse-whale’. Why replace one word for the other? And why rearrange the Norse word we ended up using? No one is entirely sure, and in fact the word posed such a problem that Tolkien continued to study and lecture on its origins long after he left the OED in 1920.

spike-bozzle(v.)

to sabotage; to ruin or render ineffective

The longest workers’ strike in history ended on 4 January 1961, when a band of disgruntled barbers’ assistants in Copenhagen, Denmark, finally returned to work after thirty-three years. By 5 January, presumably, every man in Copenhagen was imberbic (that is, beardless).

The act of downing tools has been known as striking since the mid 1700s, when supposedly dissatisfied sailors would show their refusal to go out to sea by lowering or ‘striking’ their sails. Strikes have also been known as steeks, stickouts, turn-outs and rag-outs down the centuries, while those who cross the picket lines have been known by an array of depreciative nicknames including dungs, scabs, ratters, snobs, knobs and knobsticks.

Disgruntled workers have been sabotaging their equipment in protest since the early 1800s: the word comes from sabot, a type of French wooden boot, and although linguistic folklore will have you believe that the original saboteurs threw their shoes into their machinery in protest, sadly there’s little evidence to back that story up. But why sabotage anything at all, of course, when you can spike-bozzle it?

A term originating during the First World War, spikebozzling originally referred to the practice of scuppering or completely destroying enemy aircraft or equipment. In that sense, it probably derives from the practice of ‘spiking’ a gun – that is, driving a nail into its mechanism to render it useless – perhaps combined with bamboozle or bumbaze, an eighteenth-century Scots word meaning ‘to confound’ or ‘to perplex’. By the mid 1900s, however, spike-bozzling was being used more broadly to refer to any attempt to ruin or render something ineffective, or else to upset another’s work or plans.

pontitecture(n.)

the building of bridges

If etymological legend is to be believed, both pontiff and pontifex – titles held by and used of the Pope – derive from the Latin word for ‘bridge’, pons. If that’s the case, then the pontiff is literally a ‘bridge-builder’ or ‘bridge-maker’, perhaps a figurative reference to his task of building spiritual bridges between heaven and earth, or else perhaps a literal reference to the papal blessings supposedly once bestowed on newly constructed bridges.

That Latin root, pons, crops up elsewhere in the dictionary in a handful of obscure words like pontage (a toll paid for the use or upkeep of a bridge), ponticello (the bridge of a stringed instrument), pont-levis (a drawbridge, or a term for a horse unseating its rider) and both transpontine and cispontine (adjectives describing things located on opposite sides of a bridge – flick ahead to 30 June for more on that).

Pons is also at the root of pontitecture, a term for the construction of bridges coined by a nineteenth-century Scottish scholar and businessman named Andrew Ure in 1853. ‘There is perhaps no other form of pontitecture’, Ure wrote in his Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures & Mines, ‘which can compete with the wrought-iron girder when the clear space exceeds 70 feet.’ Quite.

Ure’s term pontitecture – which he based straightforwardly enough on the same template as architecture – is also a fitting word for today: it was on 5 January 1933 that work began on the construction of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

recumbentibus(n.)

a powerful or knockout blow

The word recumbent, meaning ‘lying down’, derives from a Latin verb, recumbere, meaning ‘to recline’ or ‘to rest’. The less familiar verb recumb – ‘to rest’, ‘to rely upon’ – derives from the same root, as does the superb word recumbentibus, which was adopted directly into English from Latin in the early 1400s.

In its native Latin recumbentibus was used merely of the act of lounging or reclining, but when the word was adopted into English it was given a twist: English writers, no doubt familiar with the word from its appearance in several early Latin translations of the Bible, began to use it to refer to forceful, knockout or knockdown blows, strong enough to knock someone off their feet.

Had you some husband, and snapped at him thus, I wise he would give you a recumbentibus.

John Heywood, A Dialogue of Proverbs in the English Tongue (1546)

The word remained in use in that sense through to the late seventeenth century, before largely falling out of use. Nowadays, we tend only to refer to knockout blows as precisely that, but a strike strong enough to knock someone off their feet can also be called a purler (literally a ‘hurling’ or an ‘overturning’), a stramazoun (derived from an Italian word for a downward strike of a sword), and a sockdolager (flick ahead to 8 April for more on that).

With knockout blows in mind, the first documented boxing match in English history took place on 6 January 1681. According to a report in the London Protestant, Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle, arranged the fight between his butler and his butcher. The butcher, reportedly, was victorious.

translunary(adj.)

located beyond the moon

A lunatic was originally – and quite literally – someone whose bizarre behaviour was believed to be influenced by the moon: the word derives from the Latin word for ‘moon’, luna, which also crops up in lunacy, the deranged behaviour of a lunatic. Similarly, lunambulism is a nineteenth-century word for sleepwalking that supposedly is worsened by a full moon. A lunarnaut is an astronaut who has travelled to the moon, while an inhabitant of the moon, were one to exist, would be a lunarian. One lunation is the period of time between one full moon and the next. Anything described as novilunar or plenilunar takes place during a new or full moon, respectively. And while something that is circumlunar orbits or revolves around the moon, anything that is translunary is positioned beyond or on the other side of the moon.

Speaking of which, on 7 January 1610 the legendary astronomer Galileo Galilei wrote for the first time of a group of three ‘fixed stars’ he had observed close to Jupiter. In the weeks and months that followed, he not only discovered a fourth star to add to his list, but found that they were not ‘fixed’ as he had presumed, but instead appeared to be orbiting Jupiter. What he had observed were not stars, he finally determined, but the first natural satellites in astronomical history found to orbit a planet other than the earth.

sheep’s-eye(v.)

to look amorously at someone

On 8 January 1902, it was reported that a bill had been tabled in the New York State Assembly that sought to punish ‘any person who is intoxicated in a public place, or who shall by any offensive or disorderly act or language annoy or interfere with any person or persons’. Although the bill’s impenetrable legalese kept its rulings fairly vague, its architect, State Assemblyman Francis G. Landon, was less ambiguous when it came to explaining who he intended it to target. As he explained to the New York Morning Telegraph, ‘My bill is aimed at the flirters, gigglers, mashers, and makers of goo-goo eyes in public. We have all been disgusted with them . . . so they must be brought to their senses.’ Anyone caught in violation of Landon’s bill faced a $500 fine, or even up to a year in prison.

Remarkably, Landon’s bill was passed the following day. Even more remarkably, it has never been repealed – meaning flirting has officially been illegal in New York ever since.

Long before Landon’s goo-goo eyes, the flirters and romantics of sixteenth-century Europe had sheep’s-eyes. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to cast or throw a sheep’s-eye has been used to mean ‘to look lovingly, amorously, or longingly at someone’ since the early 1500s; almost three centuries later, in 1801, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the verb sheep’seye, meaning to do precisely that. Sheep’s eyes aren’t especially romantic of course (although there’s no accounting for taste) but the expression apparently alludes to the sheep’s dopey, wide-eyed appearance – the same appearance that is at the root of the expression to look sheepish.

Looking sheepish in New York, incidentally, is entirely legal.

manatine(adj.)

resembling a manatee

On 9 January 1493, shortly before embarking on the return journey from the Americas to Europe, Christopher Columbus wrote in his journals that ‘the admiral went to the Rio del Oro’, on modern-day Haiti, where ‘he saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea’.

‘They are not so beautiful as they are painted,’ Columbus continued, ‘though to some extent they have the form of a human face.’ As exciting a discovery as this would have been, unsurprisingly neither Columbus nor his admiral actually saw a mermaid that day. Instead, they saw a trio of manatees, the large plant-eating aquatic mammals that inhabit the warm seas and brackish rivers of the Caribbean and the Amazon.

In fact, the word manatee would not appear in English until almost fifty years after Columbus’s death, when an account of ‘those huge monsters of the sea’ known to the inhabitants of Central America as the ‘manati’ was published in 1555. Folk etymology would have you believe that the name derives from the Latin word for ‘hand’, manus – a reference to the manatee’s surprisingly hand-like flippers, which contain five bony ‘fingers’ and end in a set of short semi-circular fingernails used to grip the seabed as it feeds. But the truth is that manatee is actually derived from a local Carib word, manáti, meaning ‘breast’ or ‘udder’, as female manatees feed their young with a rich milk produced from teats below each of their flippers. Their surprisingly human-like habit of appearing to ‘cradle’ their offspring in their ‘arms’ as they feed could only have helped fuel the myth that they were mermaids, but despite all their human-like characteristics – and despite Columbus’s manatine description – the manatee’s closest living relative is actually the elephant.

love-libel(n.)

a love letter, a love note

Libel is the crime of publishing a written statement that damages another person’s reputation. A love-libel is a love letter or love note, the contents of which are hardly likely to be disparaging of the person on the receiving end. In both cases, libel is derived from libellus, a Latin word that literally means ‘little book’. That meaning was essentially still intact when the word first appeared in English in the thirteenth century as another word for a handwritten statement or document, and from there it came to mean a leaflet or a widely distributed pamphlet, before the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker coined the word love-libel – literally, ‘a handwritten admission of someone’s love’ – in 1602.

The crime of libel took a different route. In the medieval legal system, a libel was a formal document outlining the allegations raised against a plaintiff, but by the seventeenth century things had changed: thanks to the use of libel to refer to a publicly distributed document or pamphlet, in legal contexts libel had come to refer to the crime of publishing or circulating a defamatory statement. As that meaning began to take hold, all other meanings of the word quickly drifted into obscurity – including Dekker’s love-libel.

On the topic of which, on 10 January 1845 a brief letter was sent from Telegraph Cottage in Hatcham, Surrey, to 50 Wimpole Street in Marylebone, London. ‘I love your verses with all my heart,’ the letter began, ‘and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write.’ The note was the very first love letter sent by Robert Browning to his eventual wife Elizabeth Barrett, whose lengthy courtship via a total of 573 items of correspondence is one of English literature’s most enduringly romantic tales.

great-go(n.)

a national lottery

The very first state lottery in English history – the brainchild of Elizabeth I, no less – was drawn before an eager crowd assembled outside St Paul’s Cathedral on 11 January 1569. Ticket-holders had paid a whopping 10 shillings (equivalent to more than £100 today) to take part, but the prizes were incentive enough: £3,000 in cash, lush silken tapestries, huge quantities of gold and silver plate and ‘good linen’ were all up for grabs, while anyone lucky enough to afford a ticket was even granted temporary immunity from all but the most serious of crimes just for taking part. The stakes were considerable – but so was the debt Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had lumbered the country with, and her national lottery went some way towards plugging the hole in the national coffers.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, state lotteries known as great-goes – a reference to the earlier use of go to mean ‘a thief’s booty’ or ‘a prize catch’ – had become fairly common. (Even the construction of the original Westminster Bridge was partly funded by the sale of £625,000 worth of lottery tickets.) But for every state-organised great-go, there was a little-go – a corrupt ploy practised in the shadiest inns and gambling houses of eighteenth-century England. Aimed at fleecing money from anyone too credulous or too trusting to notice, little-goes involved players placing money on numbers drawn at random from dozens of numbered tiles placed in a bag, with the player whose number was picked first winning a jackpot. Knowing that the poorer-educated and least numerate participants would likely opt for lower numbers, the organisers of these little-goes would typically neglect to put any single-figure tiles in the bag, ensuring that while there was always at least one winner, there were always many more losers.

unriddleable(adj.)

unsolvable

When it first appeared in the language back in the Old English period, the word riddle was used in a number of different ways to mean ‘consideration’, ‘counsel’ or ‘discussion’, ‘interpretation’, ‘imagination’, or ‘conjecture’; despite appearances, it’s actually a distant etymological cousin of read. But over time, riddle came to be attached almost exclusively to problems or issues that require consideration or imagination – and, eventually, to intentionally puzzling statements or enigmatic brain-teasers, designed to be deliberately confusing.

Although it is seldom used in the same way today, riddle can also be used as a verb meaning either ‘to speak in or pose riddles’, or oppositely, ‘to solve puzzles’ or ‘to answer difficult questions’. It was this meaning that the English diarist John Evelyn had in mind when, in 1647, he wrote to a friend to discuss a meeting he had had with King Charles I. At the time the king was being held under house arrest by an increasingly powerful and belligerent parliament – and his trial and execution were two years away. ‘The king’s case’, Evelyn wrote, ‘is just like the disarmed man, who, whether he agrees that his antagonist shall keep his weapon or not, is forced to let him have it . . . I protest unto you, things were never more unriddleable than at this instant of time.’

Unriddleable ultimately means ‘unsolvable’, ‘impossible’ or ‘inescapable’ – and is an apt word for today, as it was on 12 January 1976 that crime writer and queen of the whodunnit Dame Agatha Christie died, aged eighty-five.

supervivant(n.)

a survivor

In January 1842, towards the end of the First Anglo-Afghan War, an eagle-eyed British Army officer stationed in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, watched in disbelief from the city walls as an exhausted, bloodstained man slowly emerged on horseback from a distant mountain pass. As his horse staggered closer to the city, it became clear that the man was wearing a British Army uniform, and a rescue party was promptly sent out to collect him.

The lone soldier was identified as thirty-year-old Scottish military surgeon William Brydon. He had set off from Kabul a week earlier as part of a vast assembly ejected from the city following a violent Afghan uprising. On the understanding that they would be guaranteed safe passage to Jalalabad, some 70 miles away, the group set off – but en route were massacred by Afghan tribesmen. Of the 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 civilians who departed Kabul, Brydon was the only survivor.

Brydon’s story of survival is an astonishing one: he had somehow escaped encounter after encounter with Afghan fighters, one of whom had brought his sword down so sharply on to Brydon’s head that a section of his skull had been cleaved clean away. Had he not stuffed a copy of Blackwell’s Magazine into his cap as insulation against the bitter cold, the blow would have assuredly killed him.

Brydon reached the relative safety of Jalalabad on the morning of 13 January 1842, often claiming to be the only survivor – or supervivant, a sixteenth-century word that literally means ‘one who outlives’ – of a disastrous chapter in history known as the Retreat from Kabul.

proditomania(n.)

the irrational belief that everyone around you is a traitor

Proditomania is the unnerving feeling that you’re surrounded by people out to get you. Coined in the late 1800s, it derives from the Latin verb prodere, meaning ‘to betray’ – as do the likes of prodition (a fifteenth-century word for treason or treachery), proditor (a traitor) and proditorious (an adjective describing traitorous or perfidious actions, or someone liable to give away secrets).

Any one of these would make an apt word for today, as it was on 14 January 1741 that the infamous traitor Benedict Arnold was born. A general in the American Revolutionary War, Arnold planned to surrender his fort at West Point in New York to the British, but as soon as his intentions were discovered he quit his post and was drafted into the British forces. As a result of his actions, Arnold’s name has entered the dictionary as a byword for anyone who commits equally treasonous or duplicitous actions – as have a handful of equally unsavoury characters:

• Catiline (n.) a word for a treasonous conspirator, named after a Roman senator who plotted to overthrow the Roman Republic in 63 BC

• Delilah (n.) a treacherous temptress, derived from the lover who betrayed Samson to the Philistines in the Old Testament

• quisling (n.), or quislingite, one who collaborates with an enemy, terms famously derived from Norwegian officer and Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling

• Sinon (n.) the name of the Greek warrior who coerced the Trojans into accepting the Trojan Horse has since become a byword for anyone who misleads others with lies or falsities

alamodic(adj.)

extremely fashionable, voguish

If something is à la mode, then it is in or of the very latest fashions or trends. Unsurprisingly that phrase is French, and was borrowed into English in the early 1600s – but it didn’t take long for English speakers to begin to tinker with it to develop their own anglicised derivatives.

By the mid 1600s, for instance, an alamode was a fashionable person or a fashionable catchphrase or remark, and later the name of a type of glossy black silk. And in the mid 1700s, a Latin-influenced adjective, alamodic, emerged to describe anything that represented the epitome of the very latest fashion.

There’s nothing wrong with being alamodic, of course – unless you happen to be luckless London haberdasher John Hetherington. On 15 January 1797, Hetherington wore a new black silk hat he had made that was noticeably and trendsettingly taller than any other. The Hatter’s Gazette reported that Hetherington set off from his shop on The Strand wearing ‘a tall structure having a shiny lustre, and calculated to frighten and intimidate people’. The report continued:

Several women fainted at the unusual sight, while children screamed, dogs yelped, and a younger son of Cordwainer Thomas, who was returning from a chandler’s shop, was thrown down by the crowd which had collected, and had his right arm broken.

Hetherington was arraigned before the Lord Mayor on a charge of breach of the peace and inciting a riot, but successfully defended himself by claiming he was merely ‘exercising a right to appear in a head-dress of his own design – a right not denied to any Englishman’.

bottle-conjuror(n.)

a prankster, a charlatan

In 1749, a tantalising advertisement appeared in several London newspapers:

At the New Theatre in the Hay-market, on Monday next, the 16th instant, to be seen, a person who performs the several most surprising things following, viz. . . . he presents you with a common wine bottle, . . .; this bottle is placed on a table in the middle of the stage, and he (without any equivocation) goes into it in sight of all the spectators, and sings in it; during his stay in the bottle any person may handle it, and see plainly that it does not exceed a common tavern bottle.

The theatre was packed to the rafters on the night of 16 January 1749 – but the conjuror failed to show up. The audience grew increasingly restless, and as an employee of the theatre bravely walked on to the stage to explain that everyone would be refunded, they erupted into a violent riot that gutted the theatre.

The identity of the conjuror who had claimed to be able to fit inside ‘a common tavern bottle’ is unknown, but popular legend claims that it was John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu, a notorious practical joker of whom his mother-in-law once wrote, ‘All his talents lie in things only natural in boys of fifteen years old – and he is about two and fifty.’ Montagu, if legend is to be believed, entered into a bet with his friends that he could fill a theatre with people, and concocted the bottle illusion as a means of grabbing the public’s attention.

No matter who the hoaxer was, however, the incident quickly led to the term bottle-conjuror becoming a byword for a fraudster or prankster in eighteenth-century English.

cadette(n.)

a younger sister or daughter

When the word cadet was first borrowed into English from French in the early seventeenth century, it originally referred to a younger son or brother. In that sense, it derives from capitellum, a diminutive of the Latin for ‘head’, caput, which literally makes a cadet a little or inferior leader – namely one forced to take a less important role than his superiors or older siblings. And if a cadet is a younger brother, then a cadette is a younger sister.

Appropriately enough, the youngest of the Brontë sisters, Anne, was born on 17 January 1820. Despite having a reputation as the quietest of the three girls, Anne was a fierce champion of her own work and fought against adverse circumstances her entire life. For one, it is believed that she likely suffered from a stammer or speech impediment: in 1848, she wrote to a friend that ‘you must know there is a lamentable deficiency in my organ of language which makes me almost as bad a hand at writing as talking, unless I have something particular to say’, while her older sister Charlotte expressed concern that it would be ‘the talking part’ that Anne would find difficult when she left home at nineteen to find work as a governess. Even once she had found employment, Anne found herself in charge of some appallingly spoiled and disobedient children, and was fired from her first job after raising concerns over the behaviour of the children in her care. Undaunted, she quickly found a second job (with twice the salary of her first) and channelled all of her experiences as a governess into her novels Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), both now considered classics of English literature.

mauka(adv.)

inland, heading away from the coast

On 18 January 1778, part way through his third round-the-world voyage, the English explorer James Cook made landfall at an isolated group of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He named them the Sandwich Islands, in honour of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich – but today, we know them as Hawaii.

To English speakers, the native Hawaiian language probably seems a little bizarre. At the time of Cook’s visit, it had no written form (and it took another five decades for American missionaries to develop a written Hawaiian alphabet so that they could publish a Hawaiian translation of the Bible). Even then, the Hawaiian alphabet only has thirteen recognisable letters: the consonants H, K, L, M, N, P and W; the five vowels A, E, I, O and U; and the ’okina, an apostrophe-like symbol used to represent a unique sound made by stopping the airflow at the back of the throat. Those relatively limited resources mean that Hawaiian words – a handful of which have ended up in English dictionaries – can appear very peculiar indeed:

• aa (n.) a rough volcanic lava

• heiau (n.) a temple

• humuhumunukunukuapuaa (n.) a Hawaiian reef triggerfish

• iiwi (n.) a species of Hawaiian honey-creeper bird

• pupu (n.) a savoury appetiser

Hawaiian is also unusual in that it has no equivalents of left and right when giving directions. Instead, showing just how important the islands are to the islanders, Hawaiian directions are given using one of two words: makai, meaning ‘seaward’ or ‘in the direction of the coast’, and mauka, meaning ‘inland’, or ‘in the direction of the mountains’.

raven-messenger(n.)

someone who turns up too late to be of use

According to the Book of Genesis, the raven was the first animal released from Noah’s Ark after the Great Flood. Although accounts of the story differ, the raven is typically said not to have returned to Noah immediately, but instead ‘went forth to and fro until the waters were dried up from off the earth’. When the raven failed to return, Noah released a dove, which happily flew back to the Ark with an olive leaf in its bill to show that the floodwaters had finally abated.

This episode is the origin of raven-messenger, an ancient expression referring to someone – and, in particular, someone bearing news or an important message – who does not return when required, or arrives too late to be of any use. Raven-messengers like these are also known as corbies or corbie-messengers, a Scots dialect term derived from the French word for ‘raven’, corbeau.

The earliest raven-messenger we know about comes from the Cursor Mundi, an enormous Middle English account of the history of the world thought to have been written sometime around the early fourteenth century. According to its author, the reason Noah’s raven failed to return was that it found some carrion floating on the surface of the water. As a result, ‘that messenger’, the Cursor Mundi explains, ‘that dwells long in his journey . . . may be called, with reason clear, one of the raven messengers’.

And, fittingly, it was on 19 January 1809 that the American horror writer and author of ‘The Raven’, Edgar Allan Poe, was born in Boston.

antimetabole(n.)

the repetition, in a transposed order, of words or phrases in successive clauses

Derived from the Greek for ‘turning in the opposite direction’, an antimetabole is a figure of speech in which a pair of words or phrases is repeated in successive clauses, but in an inverted order. So, ‘when the going gets tough’, as everyone knows, ‘the tough get going’.

A construction like this is also known as a chiasmus, a similar figure of speech that takes its name from the X-shaped Greek letter chi in reference to its criss-crossing structure. But strictly speaking, in a chiasmus the elements being inverted do not necessarily have to match: the structure and grammar of the sentence, as well as the spelling or meaning of the words involved, can all be played around with to create a rhythmically balanced and near parallel structure. Or, in the words of George Carlin, ‘Don’t sweat the petty things, and don’t pet the sweaty things.’

Ultimately, an antimetabole is a stricter, more precise version of chiasmus, but one that nevertheless produces very effective results. So, ‘you can take the man out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the man’. As the Three Witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth have it, ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair.’ In the words of Benjamin Franklin, ‘We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.’ And as President John F. Kennedy memorably said in his inaugural address, delivered on 20 January 1961: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’

Rasputinism(n.)

corrupting influence, especially over a government for political gain

The Russian mystic and itinerant monk Grigori Rasputin, known for his creeping influence over Tsar Nicholas II, was born in western Siberia on 21 January 1869.

Rasputin’s involvement in the tsar’s court began in 1906, when he was hired as a faith healer by Nicholas’s wife Alexandra to help treat their young son Alexei’s haemophilia. Out of gratitude, the emperor and his wife came to regard Rasputin as a prophet or mystic of extraordinary power, and as respect for him grew in the tsar’s court, so too did the influence Rasputin could wield over the decisions made and enacted by Nicholas.

By the time Russia became embroiled in the First World War, however, Rasputin had come to be regarded with mounting suspicion, and when Nicholas left St Petersburg to direct the Russian army in the increasingly bloody conflict, the way was paved for Rasputin’s downfall. Left to their own devices, he and Alexandra – a German-born granddaughter of Queen Victoria, accused by some of being a German double agent – became increasingly unpopular, and as the Russian war effort began to falter, Rasputin was assassinated on 30 December 1916 by a group of Russian noblemen who had come to violently oppose his influence.

Quite how much influence Rasputin genuinely had in Nicholas’s court is debatable. Nevertheless, the stories that have since emerged of his supposed mystical corruption of the tsar and his family have led to the coining of the word Rasputinism, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the exercise of corrupting influence over a government or ruler’.

manubiary(n.)

plundering

After the Roman army had finished plundering its way through its latest conquest, the time came to divide up the spoils of war. Those in charge were traditionally given their own share of the booty known as the manubiae, a word thought to derive from the Latin for ‘hand’, manus, in the sense that it was handed over to the triumphant generals personally.

Quite how much cash the manubiae corresponded to is unknown, but given that some commanders reportedly used the money to fund infrastructure projects, construct buildings or roads or even organise sporting events in their own honour, we can presume that it was often fairly sizeable. Either way, the generals were nevertheless permitted to do with it whatever they wished – with most opting simply to distribute small amounts of cash among the troops under their control. The custom eventually fell into disuse, and as the empire and the role and power of the emperor grew ever greater, it became customary for the spoils of war to come under the exclusive control of the emperor himself.

It’s from the Ancient Roman manubiae that the English language has gained both the adjective manubial, describing anything that has been plundered or pillaged (in Roman architecture a manubial column was one on which the trophies and spoils of war could be displayed) and manubiary, a seventeenth-century word for the act of plundering or spoliation, or else for someone who makes a living by plundering or robbing. Case in point: Captain William Kidd, the Scottish sailor and pirate-hunter-turned-pirate, who was born on 22 January 1645.

ice-legs(n.)

the ability to keep your balance on ice

Sailors have been successfully earning their sea-legs since the early eighteenth century. Based on that, the ability to keep yourself upright while walking on ice or frozen ground has been known as your ice-legs since the mid nineteenth century, when the English journalist William Blanchard Jerrold, while on a trip to Sweden in 1854, wrote, ‘It is difficult to gain sea-legs, but to accomplish ice-legs is yet more difficult’. Ice-legs is a perfectly suitable word for the middle of winter, but there’s another reason why it should so suit today’s date: the extraordinary Battle of Texel was fought on 23 January 1795.

A key engagement in the War of the First Coalition (a five-year conflict between France and much of the rest of Europe), the Battle of Texel began with a fleet of fourteen Dutch ships becoming trapped in sea ice off the coast of the Netherlands in the winter of 1795. Despite their precarious position, the fleet knew that the surrounding ice would protect them from attack – but late on the night of 23 January, a cavalry regiment of French Hussars decided to prove them wrong.

Muffling their horses’ hooves with fabric, the Hussars made their way out into the middle of the frozen sea and launched a surprise attack, successfully taking all fourteen ships without the loss of a single man. The Battle of Texel remains perhaps the only example of a naval battle fought between warships and cavalry in all military history – and is an extraordinary testament to the French troops’ ice-legs.

transmural(adj.)

situated beyond or on the other side of a wall

A mural is an artwork painted directly on to a wall, while a mural tree is a fruit tree or vine that grows against a wall, and a mural crown was a trophy once bestowed on the first Roman soldier to scale the wall of the besieged city. For all those reasons, it’s easy to see why the word mural itself should derive from the Latin word for ‘wall’, murus – but it’s certainly not the only English word to share that derivation.

An antemural, for instance, is an outbuilding or fortification, lying outside the walls of a town or city; somewhere described as intramural, oppositely, lies inside a city’s walls. The adjective intermural describes the space formed between adjacent walls, or else anywhere situated between or bounded by two walls. To immure someone is to imprison or confine them or, quite literally, to wall them up. And murage was a tax or levy once used to fund the building or upkeep of the walls of a town or city.

One final word for this list: transmural, an adjective describing anywhere lying beyond or on the opposite side of a wall. Coined in the mid nineteenth century, transmural was originally used specifically in reference to lands lying on the northern side of Hadrian’s Wall, the 84-mile Roman wall constructed between the Tyne and the Solway Firth during the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian in the second century ad; it was on 24 January 76 ad that the future emperor Hadrian was born in Hispania, the Roman region corresponding to modern-day Spain.

syne(adv.)

since, thereupon

The Scottish poet Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, on 25 January 1759.

Burns’s use of his native Scots vocabulary in his poetry – combined with the enormous popularity of his writing since the nineteenth century – has led to a number of the Scots dialect words he used being introduced to the English language. Jaunter (‘idle chatter’), blastie (‘an ugly little creature’), forjeskit (‘tired out’), crousely (‘confidently, boldly’), mixty-maxty (‘jumbled, muddled’), blirt (‘an outburst of tears’), drappie (‘a little drop’) and branky (‘gaudy, ostentatious’) are just some of the terms Burns’s poetry has helped to introduce to the dictionary. But of all his contributions, perhaps one word – or rather three – stands out above all others.

Burns wrote the Yuletide ballad ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in 1788, basing its lyrics on an earlier Scots folk song dating from the seventeenth century. The poem’s retrospective theme celebrating enduring friendships and relationships soon made it popular around Christmas and New Year, and before long reciting the poem (or, rather, singing it to the melody of an old Scots folk tune) had become a New Year tradition. As well known as the poem is, however, Burns’s often impenetrable Scots vocabulary means that many New Year revellers might not be too sure of what they’re singing. Auld means ‘old’ of course, and lang simply means ‘long’ – but syne?

Essentially, syne means ‘since’, but from its earliest recorded appearance in the language in the fourteenth century it has been variously used to mean ‘thereupon’, ‘immediately afterwards’, ‘subsequently’ and even ‘moreover’ or ‘furthermore’. Ultimately auld lang syne can be roughly said to mean ‘old times’ or ‘times gone by’.

griph(n.)

a puzzle, a brainteaser

‘Nothing is more attractive to intelligent people than an honest, challenging problem.’ So wrote the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli in 1696.

Bernoulli had devised a mathematical puzzle he hoped would challenge the greatest minds of the day: given two points, A and B, assign a path to a moving body, M, along which it will arrive at B, starting from A and falling by its own gravity, in the least possible time. To the not-so-mathematically-well-versed, Bernoulli’s problem is best understood by imagining a ball rolling down the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. The ball will make it from one corner to the other by gravity alone – but there is a faster route.

Bernoulli originally set a six-month time limit on his challenge, but it soon proved so tricky that he was compelled to extend that by another year. It was in that time, on 26 January 1697, that a copy found its way to Sir Isaac Newton. He solved the puzzle that evening.

An especially challenging puzzle or riddle like this can be called a griph. That word dates from the early 1600s in English, but it has its origins in a Greek word for a fishing creel, gryphos, in an imaginative reference to the words of a riddle being intricately woven together like the reeds of a basket. One question remains, though: what was the answer to Bernoulli’s griph?

As Newton realised, the fastest route from A to B is not a straight line but rather a curve sweeping steeply down from A and extending outside the bottom of the triangle before curving back to B. Mathematicians now know this type of curve as a brachistochrone – a name derived from the Greek for ‘the shortest time’.

nyctograph(n.)

a device for writing at night

Lewis Carroll was born on 27 January 1832.

Well known for his playful and inventive use of language, Carroll is responsible for introducing a clutch of typically idiosyncratic words to the language, such as unbirthday, manxome (‘fearsome, monstrous’) and snicker-snack (‘a snipping sound’). He also created a great many so-called ‘portmanteau’ words combining elements of two existing words, like chortle (chuckle + snort), frumious ( fuming + furious) and galumph (gallop + triumph). And even the use of the word portmanteau (originally a type of suitcase) to describe words like these is Carroll’s idea: as Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), ‘You see it’s like a portmanteau: there are two meanings packed up into one word.’

But not all of Carroll’s inventions were quite so frivolous – and nor were they all linguistic.

In 1891, Carroll invented the nyctograph, a device consisting of a flat board with a series of quarter-inch squares cut into it that could be used, letter by letter, to guide his pen as he wrote in the dark. Carroll even invented an encrypted alphabet just for the purpose: ‘I tried rows of square holes,’ he wrote, ‘but the letters were still apt to be illegible. Then I said to myself, “Why not invent a square alphabet, using only dots at the corners, and lines along the sides?”’

Carroll kept the device inside a notebook in his bed. ‘If I wake and think of something I wish to record,’ he later explained, ‘[I] draw from under the pillow a small memorandum book containing my nyctograph, write a few lines, or even a few pages . . . replace the book, and go to sleep again.’

mulctable(adj.)

punishable, deserving of a fine or penalty

As a noun, a mulct is a fine or penalty imposed for an offence. As a verb, it can be used to mean both ‘to impose a financial penalty’ and ‘to extract money from someone by fraudulent means’ – in other words, precisely the kind of behaviour that might deserve a penalty. So how did the word come to have two such opposing meanings?

Of the two, the sense of a fine or penalty is older: mulct derives from multa, a Latin word for a monetary penalty, and it’s from there that the word was adopted into English in the early 1500s. This meaning remains in place in English (mostly in legal contexts), but it is the use of mulct to mean ‘to swindle’ or ‘defraud’ that is now the more established sense. It developed in the mid 1800s, perhaps merely as an extension of the original meaning (in the sense of obtaining money from someone), or perhaps through the influence of milk, which has been used figuratively since the sixteenth century to mean ‘to defraud’ or ‘exploit’. Or perhaps this meaning developed because those on the receiving end of a fine or penalty are not always so agreeable, and might consider themselves the victim of an unduly harsh or even fraudulent system. Whatever the motivation for the change, behaviour that is mulctable is nevertheless deserving of a fine or penalty.

On 28 January 1896, appropriately enough, a gentleman named Walter Arnold found himself on the receiving end of the world’s first speeding fine. According to a report in the London Daily News, Arnold had been caught driving his ‘horse-less carriage’ at 8 mph and for his recklessness was fined 4 pounds, 7 shillings.

zalabiya(n.)

an ancient Persian dessert of fried and sweetened batter

On 29 January 1924, an American inventor named Carl R. Taylor patented a device for, as he explained it, transforming ‘thin, freshly baked wafers, while still hot, into cone-shaped containers’: the ice-cream cone was born.

According to culinary folklore, however, the story of the ice-cream cone isn’t quite as straightforward as Taylor’s patent application might suggest – and, in fact, its origins lie in an ancient wafer-like pastry known as zalabiya.

The earliest recipe for making zalabiya has been unearthed in a medieval cookbook published in Baghdad sometime in the tenth century. From there, the recipe travelled far and wide across the Middle East and into Africa, central Asia and the Far East, so that today variations of zalabiya are one of the most popular sweet snacks everywhere from Tunisia (where they’re known as zlebia) to Azerbaijan (zülbiya), India ( jilapi) and the Philippines ( jalebie). And from there the recipe finally made its way across the Atlantic Ocean.

Brothers Frank and Robert Menches were running an ice-cream stand at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair when they ran out of bowls in which to serve it. As luck would have it, just a few stands away a Syrian chef named Ernest A. Hamwi was selling zalabiya, and, spotting the brothers’ predicament, began rolling his wafers into cones that could then be used to hold a single dollop of ice cream. As luck would have it, Carl R. Taylor was reportedly one of the Menches’ customers – and the rest is ice-cream history.

acephalous(adj.)

leaderless

The Greek word for ‘head’, kephale, crops up in a number of English words, the vast majority of which are medical or biological terms like cephalalgy (a headache), cephalopod (a creature like a squid or octopus) and encephalitis (inflammation of the brain).

Elsewhere in the dictionary, something that is cynocephalous has the head of a dog; something that is criocephalous has the head of a ram; and a cebocephalic statue has the head of a monkey. An anacephalaeosis – literally ‘back to the head’ – is a recapitulation or restatement of the main points of an argument. A polycephalist is someone who acknowledges more than one ruler or superior. An autocephalous church or organisation is one that governs itself. And, should you ever need it, cephalonomancy was an ancient form of divination in which a donkey’s head would be observed boiling over a fire: while the head boiled away, a list of phrases (or, as was often the case, the names of accused criminals) would be read aloud, and any cracking or movement of the skull while a name was spoken was taken as a sure sign of guilt.

One last ‘head’ word in the dictionary is acephalous. Although it literally means ‘headless’, when it was first borrowed into English from French in the early 1700s acephalous referred to a country or organisation that has no clear leader or chief. Oddly, both meanings come into play today: it was on 30 January 1649 that King Charles I was beheaded on a charge of treason, leaving Britain kingless and in the hands of Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarians.

Euroclydon(n.)

a huge storm

It’s fair to say that January isn’t too well known for its good weather, but the hurricane-like storm that struck the North Sea on 31 January 1953 was almost unimaginably destructive. A combination of a spring high tide and an enormous cyclonic windstorm pushed sea levels along the coasts of the UK, Netherlands and Belgium to more than 18 feet above sea level in places, flooding an area of land the size of Cheshire and killing more than 2,500 people. The disaster led to all the nations involved greatly improving their coastal and flood defences, while the British investigation into the disaster eventually led to the construction of the Thames Barrier in London.

So great was the 1953 disaster that the word storm seems not to do it justice. Instead, it was a Euroclydon – a vast tempest named after just such a storm that, according to the New Testament, was encountered by St Paul on his journey from Jerusalem to Rome:

And when the Southern wind blew softly, they supposing to attain their purpose, loosed nearer, and sailed by Crete. But anon after, there arose by it a stormy wind called Euroclydon. And when the ship was caught, and could not resist the wind, we let her go, and were carried away.

Acts 25:13–15

The name Euroclydon (pronounced ‘you-rok-li-don’) combines Greek words meaning ‘the east wind’, euros, and ‘a wave’ or ‘billow’, klydon. Since its first appearance in English in the sixteenth century, it has come to be used allusively to refer to any great wind storm or gale.

calepin(n.)

a dictionary, a book of authority or reference

Ambrogio Calepino, known as ‘Calepinus’, was a sixteenth-century Italian friar and scholar who published a landmark dictionary of Latin in 1502. Calepinus’ dictionary soon established itself as the go-to reference work for Renaissance writers, and over the years that followed, it was steadily expanded until an edition translating Latin words into eleven different languages was published in 1590. So important was Calepinus’ work that, by the end of the century, the word calepin had been adopted into English as a byword for any reference book considered the best of its type.

Of similar importance, the very first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary went on sale on 1 February 1884. Work had started on the dictionary in 1879, when it was originally predicted that this new comprehensive dictionary of the English language would take ten years to complete and be published steadily across four individual volumes. Five years later, senior editor James Murray and his team of researchers had only reached the word ant. Clearly, this was to be a much larger project than they could ever have envisaged.

After the A–Ant volume of 1884, a further 124 individual instalments or ‘fascicles’ of the dictionary were published over the decades to come, not necessarily in alphabetical order, but rather in the order they were completed. The final instalment – covering all the words from wise to wyzen – appeared in 1928. A supplementary volume filling in any remaining gaps appeared in 1933 to complete the first full edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

naufrague(n.)

a shipwrecked person, a castaway

On 2 February 1709, explorers William Dampier and Woodes Rogers were sailing their ships, the Duke and Duchess, through the seemingly uninhabited Juan Fernández Islands off the west coast of South America, when Rogers noticed a fire blazing on the cliffs of the easternmost island, Más a Tierra. He quickly assembled a landing party – who, to their surprise, were met by a Scottish man named Alexander Selkirk.

Selkirk explained that he had once been sailing master of a ship called the Cinque Ports, but after the ship’s captain had died, Selkirk found himself at odds with his successor, twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Thomas Stradling. The pair had argued over the seaworthiness of the ship, and once they had rounded Cape Horn, Selkirk refused to go on until the ship was repaired; Stradling took him at his word, and abandoned him on an island 400 miles off the Chilean coast.

Despite the punishment, Selkirk actually fared reasonably well on the island: he caught wild goats for food, and even helped restore the health of Captain Rogers’ crew, who were beginning to suffer from scurvy after months at sea. (The Cinque Ports, meanwhile, went on to sink off the coast of Colombia just weeks later, with the loss of most of her crew.)

A shipwrecked person like Selkirk – or, ironically, Captain Stradling – is properly known as a naufrague, a seventeenth-century word borrowed from Spanish that has its roots in the Latin word for a shipwreck, naufragium. Sadly, that word did not appear in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the story of a shipwrecked castaway that Selkirk’s real-life experiences are said to have inspired.

twankle(v.)

to play idly on a musical instrument

If you’ve ever had a piano lesson, chances are you can still pick out a tune. But even if you haven’t, you still might know how to play one piece of music in particular: ‘The Celebrated Chop Waltz’, better known as ‘Chopsticks’, was published for the first time on 3 February 1877.

Written by a British composer named Euphemia Allen – who was aged just sixteen at the time – the ‘Chop Waltz’ is a simple waltz for piano that Allen published under the pseudonym ‘Arthur de Lulli’. No doubt thanks to its simplicity, its catchy but uncomplicated melody and the fact that Allen wrote both solo and duet arrangements of it, the ‘Chop Waltz’ soon proved immensely popular among piano players. Before long, composers as renowned as Franz Liszt and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov were writing their own variations of it, and ‘Chopsticks’ is now arguably one of the most recognisable of all easy piano pieces – the perfect piece to twankle with while casually sitting at a piano.

According to the English Dialect Dictionary (Vol.VI, 1905), to twankle is ‘to twang with the fingers on a music instrument’. In fact, that’s just one word for it: absentmindedly strumming or playing an instrument is also known as twiddling, twangling, tootling, noodling, plunking, thrummling and tudeling (the latter of which, perhaps rather aptly, has its origins in a German word, dudeln, meaning ‘to perform badly’).

luition(n.)

the payment of a ransom

When it first appeared in the language in the thirteenth century, the word ransom referred to a payment made to escape a penalty or else to secure a pardon for an offence. In that sense, it derives via French from the same Latin root as words like redeem and redemption; in fact, redeem once meant ‘to save someone’s life by paying a ransom’. It took almost another century for the more familiar meaning of the word ransom – a payment made to secure the safe release of something – to develop, with a reference to some houses in the city of Canterbury being seized and held to ‘great ransom’ listed in a document dating from the early 1300s.

The act of paying a ransom is called luition. It dates from the seventeenth century, and derives from another Latin root, luere, meaning ‘to pay’ or ‘to recompense’. A king’s ransom, meanwhile, has been a proverbially colossal amount of cash since the late 1400s – and, oddly, both of these relate to today’s events.

On his way back from the Crusades in 1192, the English King Richard I was captured and then given to Henry VI of Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor, who had him imprisoned. Henry desperately needed cash to strengthen his armies and defences, so he held Richard to ransom for a colossal 150,000 marks – equivalent to almost three times the annual income of the English crown. Clearly, something drastic had to be done to secure the king’s safe return, so back in England taxes were raised and gold and silver was seized – even from the churches – until finally, on 4 February 1194, the ransom was paid and King Richard was released to return home.

propinque(adj.)

approximate, approaching accuracy

There’s a reason why the expression to square the circle is used to refer to tasks that are near impossible: in 1882, the mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann proved that squaring a circle – that is, producing a square with the same area as a circle using only a compass and a straight edge – is literally impossible. But that didn’t deter American physician and amateur mathematician Edward J. Goodwin, who in 1894 published a proof in which he claimed to have done the (quite literally) impossible. The only problem was that in solving the unsolvable, Goodwin had redefined the irrational constant pi