Word Drops E-Book

Paul Anthony Jones

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 271

Beschreibung

If you're logofascinated, you are literally spellbound by language. This surprising compendium of 1,000 facts about words, language and etymology is here to inspire your curiosity and delight in discovery. In Word Drops, you can delve into a smattering of unexpected connections and weird juxtapositions, stumble upon a new or remarkable word, or learn of many a bizarre etymological quirk or tall tale. - Did you know that the bowl made by cupping your hands together is called a gowpen? - And speaking of bowls, the earliest known reference to bowling in English dates from 1555, when bowling alleys were banned by an Act of Parliament. - And that ties in nicely with the fact that the English called the Germans 'Alleymen' during the First World War. - But in Navajo, Germany is called Béésh Bich'ahii Bikéyah-or 'metal cap-wearer land'. Word Drops is a language fact book unlike any other, its linguistic tidbits all falling together into one long interconnected chain just like the example above with each fact neatly 'dropping' into place beside the next. What's more, throughout, footnotes are used to give some informative and intriguing background to some of the most bizarre facts, covering everything from traditional Inuit games to the origin of the Bellini cocktail, from the precise length of one 'jiffy' to what the Romans thought hoopoe birds ate, and from what to expect on a night out with Dr Johnson to Samuel Pepys's cure for a hangover. Want to know the longest palindrome in Morse code, or who The Great Masticator was? Curious to know what Norwegian steam is, or what a jäääär is? The answers are all here. For all of the logofascinated among us, this is an immensely pleasurable and unpredictable collection that is guaranteed to raise eyebrows (the literal meaning, incidentally, of supercilious).

Leseprobe

For Matthew and Anthony

Introduction

Tucked away alongside entries like logogram, logodaedalus (‘one who is cunning in words’) and the considerably less pleasant but no less evocative logodiarrhoea (‘a flux or flow or words’), the Oxford English Dictionary includes a brief entry dedicated to logofascinated – an adjective, it explains, meaning ‘fascinated by words’. Only one record of its use in print is provided, taken from a relatively little-known work by the Scottish author and translator Sir Thomas Urquhart dating from 1652. As a noted logodaedalus Urquhart himself presumably coined the word, in which case he probably intended it to bear out the original and now long-lost seventeenth-century meaning of fascinated as a synonym of ‘bewitched’ or ‘enchanted’. If you’re logofascinated, ultimately, you’re literally ‘spellbound’ by language.

Whatever its history and connotations may be, however – and despite its criminally infrequent use in print – there is little denying that logofascinated is an absolutely superb word. It neatly sums up that inherent curiosity with words and language that leads to much eyebrow-raising and appreciative head-tilting whenever we stumble upon some new or remarkable word, or learn of some bizarre etymological quirk or tall tale. My own ‘logofascination’ began as an eight-year-old, when I was given a fine-looking hardback dictionary for Christmas by my grandparents; by Boxing Day afternoon I had read it cover to cover, diligently devouring every page and dutifully taking note of any unfamiliar words encountered en route. Now, I openly admit that reading a dictionary cover to cover might not be everyone’s idea of a Christmas (or indeed any day) well spent – and in retrospect, that level of nerdishly obsessive logofascination probably outsteps even Urquhart’s original definition – but I can be consoled by the fact that, as a lover of language, I am by no means alone.

Two decades later, in December 2013, I set up a Twitter account called @HaggardHawks, through which I began tweeting word and language facts, strange and surprising etymologies, unusual and archaic words, and a daily Word of the Day pulled from one of the quirkier, dustier corners of the dictionary. Within a week, my handful of curious first followers had unexpectedly been joined by another hundred Twitterers who, like me, shared a common interest in the idiosyncrasies of our language. Within a month, that number had grown tenfold. Going into the New Year, Haggard Hawks – so-called, I should point out, as haggard was originally a falconer’s term describing a wild hawk – was profiled in The Huffington Post, named as one of Twitter’s best language accounts by Mental_Floss magazine, and added its 5,000th follower in the summer of 2014. As it continued to grow, Haggard Hawks soon established itself as a whole new project in its own right, demanding almost as much original research and organisation as the books I had previously written. But it seemed a shame to leave all this wonderful linguistic trivia in the electronic ether, and so a plan emerged to cherry-pick some of the best facts from its first semester and set them down in print; the book you now hold in your hands is ultimately the handsome offspring of @HaggardHawks.*

In compiling these early bare bones of Word Drops, however, it soon became apparent that clutches of tweeted trivia seemed somehow to work – or rather ‘drop’ – together. The fact that, for instance, the Jerusalem of ‘Jerusalem artichoke’ is actually girasole, the Italian word for ‘sunflower’, appeared to sit perfectly beside the old French idiom avoir un cœur d’artichaut, ‘to have a heart like an artichoke’, which describes someone who seems fickly to fall in love with everyone they meet. And speaking of artichokes, in Scots they were once nicknamed worry-baldies, which tied in nicely with phalacrophobia, the fear of going bald. In turn, phalacrophobia derives from the same root as phalacrocorax, the Latin name for the cormorant, which literally means ‘bald raven’. And a group of cormorants is called a gulp, incidentally, which also means ‘to swallow noisily’ – as do slonk, frample and gamf. But the opposite of all of those is probably fletcherisation, which means ‘chewing your food at least thirty times before swallowing’. I’ll stop there (you can see how that continues on page 168), but it was from word association chains just like these that Word Drops was born.

Before we begin – in the only place it would really be right to – let me take the opportunity to quickly but sincerely give thanks to all the followers of @HaggardHawks, without whom this project would likely never have come about. Thanks also to my agent, Andrew Lownie; to Jennie Condell, Pippa Crane and all at Elliott & Thompson; to my parents and expert proofreaders Leon and Maureen Jones; and to all of the centuries-spanning authors of the dictionaries and glossaries from which many of the most unlikely and unfamiliar of words listed here have been taken – a select list of their wonderful works is provided here for reference.

Paul Anthony Jones

November 2014

_____________

* Twitter lends itself brilliantly to trivia: the 140-character limit keeps facts brief yet digestible, succinct but no less informative. It can sometimes be just as frustrating, however, as some of the more intriguing words and trivia are obliged to stand alone while their equally fascinating back stories and explanations are left unsaid. Here in print though, this can be redressed: additional notes have been added throughout the book to fill in these blanks, providing welcome context, clarification and anecdotal evidence to bolster the bare facts.

Aardvark means ‘earth-pig’ in Afrikaans.

[The aardvark is a peculiar African mammal whose equally peculiar double-A name has earned it its prestigious position as the first animal in the dictionary. Spare a thought, then, for its alphabetical next-door neighbours, the aardwolf and aasvogel, who are pipped into second and third place: the aardwolf (literally the ‘earth-wolf’) is a small striped hyena that’s also known as the maanhaar, as if one set of double As wasn’t enough, while the aasvogel (or ‘carrion-bird’) is another name for the Cape vulture, one of Africa’s largest birds of prey. All three creatures take their names from Afrikaans, a South African language that developed from Dutch in the early 1700s.]

The Italian equivalent of ‘when pigs fly’ is quando voleranno gli asini – or ‘when donkeys fly’.

A cross between a female donkey and a male zebra is called a zedonk.

Hippotigrine means ‘zebra-like’ or ‘zebra-striped’.

An Old Testament description of a hippopotamus is thought to be the origin of the word behemoth.

[Behemoth derives from the Hebrew b’hemoth, which appears in the Book of Job 40:15–24 as the name of an enormous creature with ‘bones ... as strong as pieces of brass’ that ‘moveth his tail like a cedar’. Job’s description is so ambiguous that the true identity of his behemoth remains a mystery, and in the past suggestions have ranged from an elephant to a water buffalo to a crocodile to (among some Young Earth Creationists, at least) a gigantic dinosaur. But given that we are told that the behemoth, ‘lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed and fens’, where ‘he eateth grass as an ox’, and ‘can draw up [the river] Jordan into his mouth’, the most likely explanation is that he’s a hippopotamus.]

Hippocampus is the Greek word for ‘seahorse’.

[All mammalian brains contain two seahorse-shaped hippocampi (although some early anatomists thought they looked more like silkworms) that together play a part in various mental faculties like spatial awareness, memory and emotional response. Hippocampus is actually a compound of the Greek words for ‘horse’ (hippos) and ‘sea-monster’ (kampos), and was originally the name of a literal ‘sea-horse’ depicted in ancient artworks as a monstrous hybrid of a horse and a dolphin.]

Male seahorses are nicknamed sea-stallions.

Walrus means ‘whale-horse’.

Igunaujannguaq, or ‘frozen walrus carcass’, is a traditional Inuit game in which someone trying to remain as still as possible is handed from player to player.

[Suggesting a round of ‘frozen walrus carcass’ might not sound like the best way to wile away a lazy afternoon, but igunaujannguaq is nevertheless a popular game amongst the Nunavut Inuit of Canada. What few rules there are demand that the player acting as the ‘walrus’ should remain as stiff as possible (preferably with his or her feet fixed in place by those of a circle of players, so that they can pivot about their ankles), while the first player to drop the ‘walrus’ loses and becomes the next ‘carcass’.]

The game of Chinese whispers, in which a message is relayed secretly from player to player, was previously called ‘Russian scandal’.

Scandal derives from the Latin for ‘stumbling block’. In Ancient Greece, it was a trap for a wild animal.

In nineteenth-century American slang, a wolf-trap was a low-cost or corrupt casino.

Casino means ‘little house’ in Italian.

[Casino was first used in the mid-1700s to refer to a clubhouse where various musical acts and dances would be performed. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that it came to be used almost exclusively for a gambling house, with the shift in meaning probably partly motivated by a card game called cassino that was popular at the turn of the eighteenth century.

It might come as little surprise to find that the earliest record of a gambler’s casino in English also provides us the earliest reference to someone losing a vast amount of money in one: while holidaying in France on 15 August 1851, Effie Ruskin, the wife of the Victorian artist and critic John Ruskin, wrote home to England to report that Sir Robert Peel Jr, the eldest son of the former British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, had ‘lost in gambling at Chamouni [Chamonix] to the Master of the Casino 25,000 francs’.]

Roulette means ‘little wheel’ in French.

A wheeler is someone who attends an auction to bid on items merely to increase their sale price.

[Other names for a deceitful vendor’s associate include pot-plant, setter, showman, ampster and quhysselar, a Scots transmogrification wisseler, namely someone who changes money from one currency to another. Wheeler-dealer is a more recent invention dating from the early 1960s.]

A wheel-horse is the person who bears the greatest burden of a business or enterprise.

A horse’s-neck is a spirit (usually whisky or brandy) mixed with ginger ale and lemon.

To drown the miller means ‘to mix too much water into a drink’.

The Icelandic word for a hangover, timburmenn, means ‘carpenters’.

[Timburmenn literally means ‘timber-men’, but has come to refer to a hangover in Icelandic in the sense of a continuous hammering pain. Hangovers are apparently just as bad in Sweden, where the headache associated with drinking too much is called a kopparslagare, or a ‘coppersmith’. Elsewhere, in Germany a hangover is either a Kater, meaning ‘tomcat’, or a Katzenjammer, literally a ‘caterwauling’. The French talk of having a gueule de bois, or ‘wooden mouth’, after too much eau de vie, and in some parts of the Spanish-speaking world you might well wake up feeling like a guayabo, or a ‘guava tree’.]

There are no surnames in Icelandic.

[The second part of most native Icelanders’ names are patronymics rather than surnames, and so are based around their fathers’ names (or occasionally their mothers’) with the addition of either –son or –dóttir for a ‘son’ or ‘daughter’. Icelandic children ultimately tend to have different second names to their parents, and a person’s first name is usually seen as their most important – even the Icelandic phone book is listed by first rather than second name, with people’s occupations listed alongside their addresses to help differentiate between duplicates.]

The surname Kennedy means ‘ugly-head’.

[He topped a 2009 poll to be named the best-looking President in US history, but JFK’s surname is actually the Old Irish epithet ceannéidigh, derived from ceann, meaning ‘head’, and éidigh, meaning ‘ugly’.]

The Japanese word bushusuru means ‘to vomit in public’ – as President George Bush Sr did on a state visit to Japan in 1992.

[While attending a banquet in Tokyo with the Japanese Prime Minister, Miyazawa Kiichi, on 8 January 1992, President George H. W. Bush suddenly vomited before promptly passing out. The President had apparently taken ill earlier that day and had been advised by his doctor to remain in bed, but he decided to attend the banquet undaunted and as a result the whole unfortunate event – later blamed on a 24-hour stomach bug – was caught on camera and broadcast around the world. Newspapers from the time record how within days Japanese teenagers had coined bushusuru – literally ‘to do a Bush’.]

A maw-wallop is an unpleasant mixture of random foods or drinks consumed only to make someone sick.

Shakespeare used the word puking in As You Like It.

[Not only that, but Shakespeare used puking in one of his most celebrated speeches, the ‘All the world’s a stage’ monologue in As You Like It (II.vii). The speech famously compares a lifetime of events to the dramas acted out by players on a stage, beginning with ‘the infant, / Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms’, and ending with ‘second childishness’, and ‘mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’.]

Nauseous means ‘causing nausea’. Nauseated means ‘feeling sick’. So saying ‘I’m nauseous’ means ‘I’m making other people sick’.

A Roman vomitorium was an entrance to an amphitheatre, not a room in which diners intentionally made themselves sick.

[The idea that the Romans withdrew to a vomitorium after a feast for a bushusuru before recommencing eating is a twentieth-century myth, likely based on nothing more than the word vomitorium itself. In fact, the verb vomere was used to mean both ‘vomit’ and merely ‘expel’ or ‘stream out’ in Latin, and so a true vomitorium was merely the part of a public building through which an audience would ‘stream’ in or out.]

A dimachaerus was a gladiator with two swords. A laquearius was a gladiator with a lasso and a sword. A retiarius was a gladiator with a net and a trident.

[Gladiator simply means ‘sword-fighter’, and in Ancient Rome there were numerous different subtypes of gladiatorial fighter each named after their weapon of choice or their area of expertise. A scissor, for instance, was a gladiator armed with a dual-bladed, Y-shaped knife. A sagittarius was armed with a bow and arrow, sometimes on horseback. A bestiarius was a specialised ‘beast-fighter’, who would battle bears and lions rather than human opponents. And a cestus was a fist-fighter, armed with nothing more than a studded or spiked leather glove.]

Reticulated means ‘net-like’ – reticulated pythons are named after the net-like pattern on their scales.

Adders were originally called ‘nadders’. Umpires were originally called ‘numpires’. Aprons were originally called ‘naprons’.

[The initial Ns of ‘nadder’, ‘napron’ and ‘numpire’ were all lost in the early Middle Ages, when they were misguidedly altered to ‘an adder’, ‘an apron’ and ‘an umpire’. This process is called rebracketing or metanalysis, and also accounts for the initial Ns gained by words like nickname and newt when their earlier forms, ‘an eke-name’ and ‘an eute’, were similarly misread. A ‘numpire’, incidentally, was originally a nonper (i.e. ‘not-equal’), implying a third person brought in to judge between two others.]

Apron and napkin both mean ‘little tablecloth’.

A butcher’s table is called a shamble. A shambles was originally a meat market or street of butchers’ shops.

A cagbutcher is a butcher who sells poor quality meat from wild or diseased animals.

One theory claims that Eskimo means ‘eater of raw meat’.

[No one is entirely sure what the word Eskimo means, but the most widely held theory is that it comes from an Algonquin word, askipiw, meaning something like ‘eater of raw meat’, or ‘he eats it raw’. French settlers arriving in Canada in the sixteenth century would have picked this word up from the tribes they encountered on the coast, and ultimately used their Frenchified version of it, esquimaux, to describe the tribes that inhabited the colder regions further north. (Frenchified is a perfectly acceptable word dating back to the seventeenth century.)]

Acharnment is ruthless, unstoppable enthusiasm. It derives from a French word meaning ‘to give hounds a taste of meat before a hunt’.

In Malay, dogs say gong-gong. In Korean, they say meongmeong. In Mandarin, they say wang-wang.

A growlery is anywhere you like to retreat to when you’re ill or in a bad mood.

[It’ll come as little surprise to discover that such a superb word as growlery was coined by Charles Dickens, and first appeared in his novel Bleak House in 1853:

‘Sit down, my dear’, said Mr Jarndyce. ‘This, you must know, is the Growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.’

‘You must be here very seldom, sir,’ said I.

‘Oh, you don’t know me!’ he returned.]

Vernalagnia is a good mood brought on by the return of fine weather in the spring.

[Vernalagnia is the proper name for what is otherwise known as ‘spring fever’, a brighter and often romantic change of mood brought on by the change of season – or, as one nineteenth-century Dictionary of Americanisms put it, ‘the listless feeling caused by the first sudden increase of temperature in spring’. The root of the word is the Greek for ‘lust’, lagneia, from which are derived a whole host of less wholesome (often fairly niche) attractions and fetishes: iconolagnia is an attraction to semi-clad statues and figurines; an ecdemolagnic is someone who prefers being away from home to being in their own bedroom; and a tripsolagnic is someone who enjoys having their hair shampooed just that little bit too much.]

The opposite of hibernation is estivation – sleeping for an entire summer.

The place a hibernating animal sleeps is its hibernacle.

An expergefactor is anything that wakes you up in the morning.

Clinomania is an excessive desire to stay in bed. Dysania is an inability to get out of bed. Matutolypea is an early morning bad mood.

Antelucan means ‘occurring before dawn’. Crepuscular means ‘occurring at twilight’. Mesonoxian means ‘occurring at midnight’.

In Tudor England, midnight was also known as noontide.

‘To look for noon at 2 p.m.’ – chercher midi à quatorze heures – means ‘to make something more complicated’ in French.

Noon was originally 3 p.m.

[Noon is a corruption of the Latin word for ‘ninth’, novem, and originally referred to the ninth hour of the Roman day – reckoned by modern clocks to have been around 3 p.m. Noon was first used in this sense in the Old English period, before it finally came to refer to midday in the early Middle Ages. Precisely what motivated the change from 3 to 12 o’clock remains a mystery.]

In Canadian slang, someone who wastes time is called an afternoon farmer.

Earthling meant ‘ploughman’ in Old English.

An oxgang is an area of roughly 15–20 acres – the amount of farmland an ox can plough in one day.

Bucephalus, the name of Alexander the Great’s horse, means ‘ox-headed’.

The Albanian currency, the lek, is named after Alexander the Great.

The former Greek currency, the drachma, literally means ‘handful’.

The ‘bowl’ formed by cupping your hands is called a gowpen. The amount it holds is called a yepsen.

The earliest known reference to a bowling alley dates from 1555.

[Bowling was a hugely popular pastime in Tudor England, and even Henry VIII had an enormous 200-ft bowling alley installed at Hampton Court shortly after the birth of Edward VI. By the time Mary I came to the throne in 1553, however, the rowdy behaviour of bowlers, gamers and gamblers was beginning to prove a problem on the streets of London, and in 1555 an Act of Parliament (which provides the earliest known record of a bowling alley) was introduced that sought to repeal:

every License, Placard, or Grant made to any Person or Persons for the having, Maintenance, or keeping of any Bowling-allies, Dicing-houses, or other unlawful Games, prohibited by the laws and statutes of this Realm.]

During the First World War, Germans were nicknamed Alleymen.

[Alleyman is an anglicised version of the French name for Germany, Allemagne, which is in turn derived from the name of an ancient European tribe called the Alemanni. Its earliest use in print has been dated to 1915, but it’s likely the nickname was in use before then in the lyrics of wartime and trenches songs like this one:

I want to go home, I want to go home.I don’t want to be in the trenches no more,Where whizz-bangs and shrapnel, they whistle and roar.Take me over the sea, where the Alleyman can’t get at me.]

In Navajo, Germany is called Béésh Bich’ahii Bikéyah – or ‘metal cap-wearer land’.

The German word kummerspeck means ‘excess weight gained through comfort eating’. It literally means ‘grief-bacon’.

A rorschgramm is a butchers’ unit of weight equal to the amount of fat in one side of a fully-grown pig.

The French word for a pig’s snout is groin.

Pigs don’t oink in Czech, they say chro. In Albanian they say hunk. In Norwegian they say nøff.

Norwegian steam is an old American slang name for manpower or brute strength.

The engineer James Watt defined one horsepower as the amount of power needed to lift a weight of 33,000 lb by a height of 1 ft in one minute.

[In the late eighteenth century, engineers looking to market improvements in steam technology needed an easy means of demonstrating how their inventions compared to what was, at the time, the most widely used tool for heavy or demanding work: the horse. Watt’s horsepower unit was an attempt to do just that, and was based on his observation of a horse, that was able to lift 180 lbs, turning a 75 ft- circumference millwheel 144 times in one hour. This meant the wheel travelled 181 ft each minute, and given a pulling force of 180 lbs, enabled Watt to define the horse’s ‘power’ as roughly 33,000 foot-pounds-per-minute. One horsepower, ultimately, was the power required to match that of one horse and so raise a 33,000 lb load by 1 ft (or a 330 lb load by 100 ft, or a 33 lb load by 1,000 ft, and so on) in one minute. Nowadays, Watt’s calculations are considered somewhat optimistic (a horse could hardly be expected to pull with a 180 lb force continuously, and some explanations have suggested his estimations were as much as fifty per cent out), but his innovative horsepower unit nevertheless remains in use to this day.]

In the Middle Ages, seconds were known as ‘second minutes’.

The two dots written above the second vowel in words like ‘Zoë’ and ‘naïve’ is called a diaeresis.

[This double-dot diacritic is often wrongly referred to as an umlaut, which is an identical symbol used in a completely different way. Specifically, a diaeresis is used to show that the vowel in question needs to be pronounced independently from the one before it – thereby ensuring Zoë rhymes with ‘doughy’, not ‘toe’. Although its use is more complex, the umlaut is essentially used to show that the corresponding vowel has a different pronunciation than it would normally – so the ü of Zürich sounds like the u in ‘mute’, not the u in ‘but’.]

A æ u å æ ø i æ å means ‘I am on the island in the stream’ in Jysk, the dialect of Danish spoken in Jutland.

The longest English word comprised only of vowels is euouae, the name of a type of cadence in mediaeval plainsong.

[Euouae is hardly the most familiar or useful of words today (unless you’re sitting with a particularly unlucky collection of Scrabble tiles), nevertheless it refers to the standard pattern or cadence of notes that ended the Gloria Patri, a prayer that was popular in mediaeval plainsong. It’s derived from the alternating vowels of the prayer’s last two words, seculorum amen – and for precisely that reason some lexicographers class euouae as an abbreviation rather than a word in its own right. If so, then the longest vowel-only word becomes aieee, ‘a wailing exclamation of resignation’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary, followed by euoi, ‘a cry of impassioned rapture’.]

Aegilops, a type of eye ulcer, is the longest English word with its letters in alphabetical order.

[Words with their letters in alphabetical order aren’t actually as rare as this fairly peculiar example might suggest, and in fact a full list of them would include such familiar terms as accept, billowy, chilly, chimps, effort, floors and knotty. The longest word with its letters in reverse alphabetical order is spoonfeed, closely followed by trollied, sponged, spooked, sniffed and wronged.]

An abecedarian or an ABCdarian is someone who is learning the alphabet.

The Cambodian alphabet has seventy-four letters.

Four has four letters. It’s the only self-describing number in the English language.

[In some dialects of Middle English and Scots, the word for ‘one’ was reduced simply to o, or even ’n in some contexts, but these examples are so obsolete and unusual that they can be excluded here. Self-describing numbers in other languages, however, include u (Catalan); to (Danish, Norwegian); tre (Italian); vier (German); cinco (Spanish, Portuguese); hastąą (Navajo); septyni (Lithuanian); kekjamys (Komi, a language of northern Russia); bederatzi (Basque); and wumutirnra (Tiwi, an Aboriginal language spoken only on the Tiwi Islands off Australia’s north coast). As the numbers climb ever higher, self-describing numbers become understandably scarcer, but highest of all is probably the twenty-two-letter Zulu word for ‘twenty-two’, amashumi amabili nambili.]

A carfax is another name for a crossroads, or a place where four or more roads meet.

Trivia derives from a Latin word for a place where three roads meet.

[Via means ‘way’ in Latin, both in the sense of ‘by way of’ and ‘road’ or ‘pathway’, and so a trivium is literally a place where three roads or paths come together, and a quadrivium is a crossroads. These two terms came to be used metaphorically across mediaeval Europe for the two main branches of learning, known collectively as the Seven Liberal Arts: the quadrivium comprised the four so-called ‘mathematical sciences’ of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, and the trivium comprised grammar, rhetoric and logic. This latter group was seen as the lower or less important of the two, and hence trivia (the plural of trivium) eventually came to mean any inconsequential details or quaint titbits of information. Precisely like this one.]

An ambivium is a road or pathway that runs around something, rather than up to it.

To circumambulate means ‘to walk all the way around something, especially in order to fully appreciate or assess it’.

[The ‘circum’ of circumambulation is a Latin word meaning ‘around’ or ‘on all sides’, from which words like circumference and circumnavigate are likewise derived. To circumambulate ultimately means ‘to walk around’ something, but in practice the word is often used in religious and ceremonial contexts to refer to worshipers and devotees respectfully circling some kind of idol or symbol as part of a traditional ritual. In more figurative use, however, circumambulate can also be used to mean to talk long-windedly, or to procrastinate and beat about the bush.]

To walk Newgate fashion means ‘to walk hand in hand’, as inmates shackled together at London’s Newgate prison would once have done.

[A prison of some shape or form stood on the site of the ‘new gate’ in London’s Roman wall from 1188 until 1904. It was by all accounts an appalling place:

’tis impossible to describe the terror of my mind, when I was first brought in ... the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing, and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful crowd of afflicting things that I saw there, joined together to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself, and a kind of entrance to it.

— Moll Flanders (1722), Daniel Defoe

Originally built on the orders of Henry II, the first Newgate prison was destroyed by the Great Fire in 1666. Its replacement lasted another century, until it too was destroyed by riots in 1780. Undeterred, Newgate was reconstructed and reopened in 1782, just in time for London’s public gallows to be moved there from Tyburn in the city’s West End. This final incarnation of the prison, and its longstanding association with its scaffolds, is at the heart of most of the ‘Newgate’ phrases used in English: a Newgate fringe is a beard or curl of long hair that encircles the neck like a noose, while the Newgate hornpipe is the ‘dancing legs’ of a man being hanged. Newgate fashion is a much earlier expression however, first used by Shakespeare in Henry IV: Part 1.]

A panopticon is a circular prison arranged so that all of the inmates can be permanently observed from a central point.

[Panopticon means ‘all-seeing’ in Greek, and in the early 1700s was the name given to all sorts of optical devices, including several early picture-viewers and projectors. All that changed in 1787, when the English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham proposed his idea for an enormous circular prison that allowed for constant surveillance of its inmates, who would be held in isolation in scores of individual cells. He wrote in 1791:

In a Panopticon prison there ought not anywhere be a single foot square, on which man or boy shall be able to plant himself – no not for a moment – under any assurance of not being observed.

After a decade of campaigning, Bentham’s design was finally accepted in 1794 and plans were passed by Parliament to build a panopticon, acting as a new National Penitentiary, at Millbank in London. The plans, however, were abandoned in 1812 and the final building was not constructed to Bentham’s extraordinary specifications.]

The first treadmill was a vast man-powered mill designed to crush rocks and grind corn. It was used as a hard labour punishment in Victorian prisons.

Dumbbells were originally weighted ropes not bars, so-called because they resembled the ropes used to ring church bells.

Bellini cocktails are named after the Italian artist Giovanni Bellini, who used a similar peach colour in one of his paintings.

[A classic Bellini is a mix of sparkling wine and peach purée, which gives the drink its traditional orange colour. It was this that reminded the drink’s inventor, Giuseppe Cipriani, of a colour frequently used in the artist Bellini’s works – such as that of the robes worn by Moses in the Transfiguration of Christ (circa 1480) – and the name has remained in use ever since.]

Because its flowers change colour from one day to the next, the shrub Brunfelsia bonodora is nicknamed yesterday-today-tomorrow.

To perendinate is to put something off until the day after tomorrow.

The day after tomorrow is the other morrow.

In Urdu, the same word, kal, is used to mean both ‘tomorrow’ and ‘yesterday’.

Using the same word or phrase at the beginning and end of a sentence – like ‘the king is dead, long live the king’ – is called epanalepsis.

[Epanalepsis literally means ‘taking up again’ or ‘repetition’ in Greek, and is the same figure of speech that helps to make ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice’ such a memorable turn of phrase. It’s different from anadiplosis, in which a word or phrase is repeated at the end of one line and the beginning of the next, and anaphora, in which the same word or phrase is used at the beginning of a series clauses:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...

— A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens]

Checkmate derives from shah-mat, the Arabic for ‘the king is dead’.

[Remarkably, almost every use of the word check in English is somehow derived from chess. (In fact, the only one listed in the Oxford English Dictionary that isn’t is an eighteenth-century nickname for the wheatear, a bird of the flycatcher family.) Check itself was adopted from the French word for ‘chess’, eschec, and first appeared in the fourteenth century as a player’s call to his opponent that his king has been ‘checked’ and that he is in danger of losing the game. From this original meaning came check to mean ‘a stoppage’, ‘a reprimand’, ‘an obstruction’, ‘a restraint’, ‘a control’, ‘an assessment’, and ‘a proof of accuracy or legitimacy’ (from which cheque, in the financial sense, eventually emerged). As a verb – variously meaning ‘to stop’, ‘to block’, ‘to curb’, ‘to test’ or ‘to ensure’ – every use of check derives from its equivalent noun. And even exchequer can be traced back to a chessboard-patterned cloth on which mediaeval revenue-takers would count out and arrange their finances.]

A gambit is not just a gamble – it’s a type of chess opening in which a player must sacrifice a pawn in order to gain an advantage.

A woodpusher is a poor chess player.

Bishop is a drink of ‘wine and water, into which is put a roasted orange’.

[The description above is taken from Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), which stopped short of pointing out that bishop was apparently a favourite tipple of Samuel Johnson: