Category Archives: Etymology

Is “to the manor born” an eggcorn?

From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 1, scene 4:
HORATIO: Is it a custom?
HAMLET: Ay, marry, is’t:
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honour’d in the breach than the observance.

When Hamlet described himself as “to the manner born”, what he meant was that he was destined to be suited to the custom in question by virtue of his birth (“I am native here”). Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in about 1600, and he probably coined (or at least first popularized) this phrase. Note, however, that there is no suggestion of high class or nobility in the original meaning of the expression; at that time, “to the manner born” could just as easily refer to someone of lowly status accustomed to the practices of his family business, or indeed to anyone destined by dint of their birth to certain thoughts or practices common to their circumstances. Thomas Hardy, writing about his hero the sheep-farmer Gabriel Oak in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), noted that “if occasion demanded he could do or think a thing with as mercurial a dash as can the men of towns who are more to the manner born.”

Class or status did creep in, however, when a similar expression, “to the manor born”, entered standard English in the mid-19th century. It means more or less the same as Shakespeare’s phrase, but the emphasis is on one’s nobility — rather than simply one’s birth — making you destined for a certain suitability, usually to the comforts or advantages of a privileged class. Whereas manner denoted simply customs or habit, its homophone manor signifies a mansion or estate associated with the wealthy or upper classes. The second phrase seems to have become more common and more standard than the original, at least in colloquial usage (and of course they’re more or less identical in spoken form), with the result that the two expressions have become virtually indistinguishable in their meaning; both now convey the sense of loftiness that was inherent only in the younger, newer expression.

Linguists and etymologists have long argued about the relationship between the two sayings: was the second one introduced as a spin-off of the first by accident or by design? Was it a deliberate play on words, with someone changing the spelling of “manner” to “manor” in order to introduce an extra element to the phrase, or even just as a pun? Or was this an example of what modern linguists call an “eggcorn”: an erroneous misspelling that comes into its own and eventually assumes its own slightly different meaning?

An eggcorn differs from a pun in that it begins as an error; much like its cousins the mondegreen and the malapropism, an eggcorn arises when someone hears and perceives a spoken word as either a homophone or a combination of words that sound similar, and the resulting misspelling assumes its own — often slightly eccentric — meaning. A classic eggcorn is the phrase “duck tape”, which sounds just like “duct tape” but can easily be — and evidently was — misheard at some point, taking on a new life of its own with its inadvertent new spelling.

To the Manor Born was a popular BBC sitcom broadcast in 1979. That it had such high ratings and was so apparent in the English culture of the time might help explain why this version of the phrase has became more standard in the vernacular than Shakespeare’s original — perhaps even more so in England than in the US?

Well, that’s my excuse, because I have to admit it: I thought that this was the original and only spelling and meaning of the phrase (and I watched the TV show). I was unaware that I’ve been using a pun or an eggcorn all these years, when I could have been quoting Shakespeare …

There’s nowt so queer as queer itself

a. b. c.

What do all the characters above have in common?* Nothing seems to link them, until you realize that they’ve all been described by the same word — somewhat iconically or significantly in each case — but they each represent a different sense of the word at different stages of its lifetime, which has been fairly tumultuous.

If you were to try and identify one word that symbolizes how very pliant, dynamic and versatile our language is, queer might just be it. A fascinating word with a long and colorful history and usage (as an adjective, noun and verb), it dates back to the beginning of the 16th century, has undergone several transformations in its 400 plus years — especially in the last two or three decades, was in disgrace for a long while, and is now experiencing something of a renaissance or reclamation process that is as bold and controversial as its definition has ever been. What other word is recognized in such a variety of senses — from antiquated poetic (in Hardy and Dickens, eg.) to outlawed insult to legit hipster category?

The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the birth of the English word queer to about 1500, with its meaning (adj) of “strange, peculiar, eccentric” from Scottish, perhaps from the Low German queer meaning “oblique, off-center,” related to the German quer, meaning “oblique, perverse, odd,” in turn from the Old High German twerh, “oblique”.

During the course of the 18th century, it acquired a new and associated sense — still as an adjective — of “feeling out of sorts, unwell, faint, giddy”. Charles Dickens, in his Pickwick Papers of 1837, wrote queasily of “legs shaky — head queer — round and round — earthquake sort of feeling — very.” From the late 18th century on, queer has also been used as a verb: first meaning “to puzzle, ridicule or cheat”, and then later, from about 1812, changing to mean “spoil or ruin”, or “to jeopardize”.

By the turn of the 20th century, the word had acquired firm connotations of sexual deviance, especially referring to the behavior of homosexual or effeminate males, and it’s difficult to determine exactly when queer moved from this loose meaning of kinky, aberrant or dissolute to the more specific sense of homosexual. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies this as happening just after the turn of the century, citing a 1914 article in the Los Angeles Times that described a club being “composed of the ‘queer’ people”, where “the ‘queer’ people have a good time”. The OED also quotes Arnold Bennett in 1915 talking about “an immense reunion of art students, painters, and queer people. Girls in fancy male costume, queer dancing, etc.” In my opinion this seems more in keeping with the earlier, unspecific sense of the word, and the Online Etymological Dictionary bears this out by claiming (without actual citations) that the first real use of queer in the sense of “homosexual” (as an adjective) was recorded in 1922, with the related noun following soon after in 1935.

The next few decades were dark days for the five-letter word, when it was used predominantly as a derogatory adjective (and noun) for homosexual men and women, and it was slowly but surely consigned to the linguistic gutter as politically incorrect, insulting, or just plain taboo. However, queer‘s sense of eccentric or unorthodox did linger for a while longer through the first half of the 20th century, and the verb meaning “to ruin or spoil” endures to this day — if somewhat archaically.

It was during the late 1980s that the tide started to turn, and then began what could be described as queer‘s identity crisis out of which it hasn’t yet emerged. Not surprisingly it reflects the immensely complicated and subtle issues of sexual and gender identity that many of those people defined by the word — either by others or by themselves — have struggled with historically. It was towards the end of the 20th century that queer started its re-appropriation as a term of self-identification by gay activists, who wrested it from the shadows where it had lurked for so long as an anti-gay epithet. In 1990, the LGBT community — galvanized by a newly-formed organization called Queer Nation — famously began this overt process of reclamation by distributing a flier called “Queers Read This” at that year’s New York Gay Pride Parade.

Emerging from this period of partial rehabilitation, queer is now used by some as a descriptive umbrella term — usually as an adjective, and primarily in a neutral or even a positive sense — for sexual and gender minorities who do not identify themselves as heterosexual, hetero-normative, or gender-binary; it encompasses (but isn’t necessarily confined to) gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people, and is used as a self-defining label actively and predominantly by a younger demographic. People who see themselves as this kind of queer are turning their backs on the conformist values of the gay mainstream and prefer the more unconstrained definition (or non-definition) of sexuality and gender.

The word has come to have strong socio-political overtones, as it is commonly adopted by activists and people who positively reject and might even feel oppressed by the traditional and distinct sexual identities that have been so dogged by prejudice over the decades. As is the case for so many re-appropriated words like it (see Glossophilia’s earlier post on this subject), queer remains an offensive insult to a large number of people to whom the modern catch-all might apply — especially when it’s used by heterosexuals. For older members of the LGBT community who remember the historically pejorative meaning of queer well, it can be associated with extreme political correctness or political radicalism, or is simply a piece of disagreeable slang used by a self-conscious youth movement, and is therefore best avoided.

Despite its current status as controversial or ambiguous and its long history as a derogatory expression, and perhaps because of its growing acceptance as a reclaimed word, queer has managed to find a prominent place in popular culture and keeps a presence in common phraseology (see below), so much so that the word now has its own hip abbreviation: “Q”.

Queer in popular culture:

Queer Eye (originally called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy): an American reality TV series from 2003, based on the premise or understanding that gay men are superior to their straight counterparts in matters of fashion, style, personal grooming, interior design and culture.

Queer as Folk (see below); originally a UK TV series, then an American series

Queer Duck: an American animated TV series, and the first animated series to have homosexuality as its predominant theme

Queer in colloquialisms or phraseology:

“There’s nowt so queer as folk”: a Northern English expression meaning that people sometimes behave in the strangest ways. Although completely unrelated to homosexuality, this is the phrase on which the title of the TV series Queer as Folk (see above) was based.

“To queer the pitch”: according to PhraseFinder, its original meaning was to interfere with or spoil the business of a tradesman or showman (and the Online Etymology Dictionary confirms this sense from 1846 referring to the patter of a tradesman or showman, as in a “sales pitch”), and more recently it has meant “to spoil the business at hand”. (As noted above, queer meant “to spoil” from the early 19th century.) The phrase “to queer the pitch” was first recorded in the vernacular speech of 19th-century London, in The Swell’s Night Guide, 1846: “Nanty coming it on a pall, or wid cracking to queer a pitch.”

“In Queer Street”: was used in the UK to describe someone in financial trouble, as noted in the 1811 edition of Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

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* The “queer” characters illustrated above are:

a) Julie Jordan: “You’re a queer one, Julie Jordan” is a song about the main character in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s musical Carousel (written in 1945), referring to her non-conformist and somewhat enigmatic personality:

“You’re a queer one, Julie Jordan
You won’t ever tell a body what you think.
You’re as tight-lipped as an oyster,
And as silent as an old Sahara spink”

b) The characters in Queer as Folk: the first hour-long drama on American television (it began in 2000) to focus on and portray the lives of gay characters, following the trials and tribulations of five gay men and a lesbian couple in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

c) Dorothy’s friends: Polychrome (the rainbow’s daughter) remarks to the main character, Dorothy, in L. Frank Baum’s book The Road to Oz : “You have some queer friends, Dorothy.” (Her famous response is “The queerness does not matter, so long as they’re friends.”). I’ve often wondered why this isn’t offered as the origin of the euphemism “Friend of Dorothy” (or FOD) for gay people. Judy Garland, a gay icon (who famously portrayed Dorothy in the MGM movie The Wizard of Oz), and Dorothy Parker are usually cited as the names or explanations behind the expression.

You’re not just what you eat but also what you call the meals you eat

Is this breakfast, lunch, tea, supper or dinner? Could be any of them …

Staying on the food theme, let’s address the subject of what you call each of your meals and what this says about you (at least in England until fairly recently). Here, when someone invites you to “tea”, this can mean a couple of different things, depending largely on your host’s geographical location or social class: they could be inviting you for a cup of tea and a biscuit in the mid-afternoon, or they could be asking you to join them for their evening meal. It seems to be a peculiarly British phenomenon that you can tell a lot about someone’s social class — or where they come from — simply by what they call their meals (and also by what they call some of the rooms in their houses — but that’s for a separate discussion). Beware: this is something of a linguistic minefield …

Here’s a journey through a day’s repasts in England (at least as I understand them).

Morning: Breakfast: a morning meal, from break + fast, as in “breaking the nightly fast”. This is fairly standard throughout the UK and English-speaking countries.

Mid-morning: Elevenses: a snack eaten in the morning, usually biscuits or cake (a bit like tea in the afternoon). It’s an old-fashioned term – and is a curious “double plural” of the number eleven, at which time it’s usually taken. According to Merriam-Webster, it dates back to about 1819. Its use now is confined mainly to the elderly or when speaking in jest. Wikipedia reminds us that for elevenses, Winnie-the Pooh preferred honey on bread with condensed milk; Paddington Bear often took elevenses at the antique shop on the Portobello Road; and it’s a meal eaten by Tolkien’s Hobbits between second breakfast and luncheon.

Middle of the day: Lunch/luncheon or dinner. This is where social class distinctions begin to creep in. Dinner was historically the main and most formal meal of the day, and from the Middle Ages up until the 18th century it was usually taken at midday. As working men began to travel further away from home, and it became logistically more sensible for them to take a portable, lighter meal in the middle of the day, the main meal of the day shifted to the evening, still called dinner, and the midday meal, now lighter, came to be known as luncheon, or lunch for short. However, in northern England and among the working class, the word dinner is traditionally used for the midday meal even if it’s lighter and taken to or at school or work. Hence the enduring term “school dinner”, and the English “dinner ladies” who supervise schoolchildren while they scoff or throw around their midday meal. Lunch is otherwise now fairly standard for the midday meal — throughout the English-speaking world in fact. But luncheon is reserved for more formal occasions, and is used very rarely (and somewhat pretentiously) by the upper-middle and upper classes to describe their midday repast.

Mid-afternoon: Tea or low tea: a snack — usually consisting of biscuits, a small sandwich, and/or baked goods — and a cup of tea (or coffee), to tide oneself over and provide an energy boost between the midday and evening meals. For a brief social history of the meal known as tea, and to understand the distinction between “low tea” and “high tea”, see an earlier Glossophilia post on the subject. Although “low tea” is still used in some schools and establishments, the term is now virtually obsolete and wouldn’t be understood by most Brits.

Evening: Tea/high tea, supper or dinner. As explained above, dinner historically and traditionally refers to the most substantial and formal meal of the day, which in modern times is typically taken in the evening. However, as also mentioned above, English northerners and midlanders, as well as working-class Brits, still often refer to the midday meal as dinner and then to their evening meal as tea. This word evolves from the original “high tea”: a more substantial evening meal, usually consisting of “meat and two veg” (or a similar combination) put on the table at around 6 pm for the working man of the family to return home to. However, high tea wasn’t a meal of just the working class. The middle classes would sometimes take a form of high tea in the early evening – at five or six o’clock – replacing the later evening dinner, especially if there were evening entertainments planned (much like our modern pre-theater meal) or not enough staff on duty to cook or serve dinner.

Nowadays, supper, which has always described the last meal of the day, has come to replace dinner as the standard middle- or upper-class word for the evening meal, especially when referring to the informal meal eaten at home with family members. Dinner tends to be reserved for more formal occasions, such as when inviting guests for an evening meal (you invite people to dinner), eating out in restaurants (you meet or go out for dinner), or for official or celebratory events and occasions.

Late evening (before bed): Supper refers sometimes — in some parts of the UK and in working- or middle-class usage — to a late-evening snack (similar to afternoon tea in its constitution) that follows the main evening meal and is taken before retiring. I believe it has become a rather old-fashioned name, verging on obsolete, for this particular meal.

Confused? Because this verbal meal-maze has been so studied and picked over by social historians and linguists in recent years, it’s probably been affected by an increased self-consciousness — as well as by social (both upwards and downwards) and geographical mobility — so it’s less indicative of one’s social standing or location than it used to be, and meanwhile England continues to move in the direction of a classless society. But you still might want to be mindful of all this when you receive that tea invitation — especially if it’s from a kindly northern stranger for a 5.30pm start time …

Cat’s pajamas, bee’s knees and dog’s bollocks

“You’re the cat’s whiskers!” one of my colleagues said to me recently. And I realized I didn’t know exactly what he meant — and it wasn’t an expression I had ever heard said aloud, except in old movies or shows set in the 1920s.

It was during that time that a whole collection of American expressions were coined to mean “an outstanding or excellent person or thing”, with overtones of style, class or newness (thank you Max! — although I’m pretty sure there was a touch of irony in your compliment …). The fad was to use the names of animals, body-parts and clothes in peculiar combinations, such as the flea’s eyebrows, the canary’s tusks, the eel’s ankle, the elephant’s instep, the clam’s garter, the snake’s hips, the kipper’s knickers, the sardine’s whiskers and the pig’s wings. Whereas most of these nonsensical expressions disappeared relatively quickly, three feline-themed terms — “cat’s pajamas”, “cat’s whiskers” and “cat’s miaow” — managed to stick around and they remain in use today, as does the rather charming “bee’s knees”.

As old-fashioned and archaic as they might sound today, these phrases were considered modern, clever and rather daring by the free-spirited flappers of the roaring 20s and the emerging ‘cool cats’ of the jazz age who bandied these words about. (Pajamas, by the way, were a new and fashionable article of clothing in the 1920s and therefore suitably hip for inclusion in this mod lingo.) So popular were these expressions that by the late 1920s, the ‘cat’ ones were sometimes abbreviated to just “it’s the cat’s.” All American by origin, they soon caught on in England as well. The lexicographers William and Mary Morris suggest that the “cat” phrases might have originated earlier than the ’20s, since they were reportedly first heard in girls’ schools and women’s colleges earlier in the century — at which time the terms were considerably risqué.

It’s widely believed that Tad Dorgan, the American sportswriter and cartoonist, first coined all these expressions (especially the cat ones), or at least brought them into popular usage. Dorgan created or popularized a whole “slang vernacular”, introducing into standard English a slew of now common words and phrases such as dumbbell (a stupid person), for crying out loud (an expression of astonishment), hard-boiled (referring to a tough person), and “yes, we have no bananas”, which became the title of a popular song.

I’m guessing that “the bee’s knees”, another such term still in use, endured simply because of its tidy size and tidy rhyme. According to Oxford Dictionaries, it was first recorded in the late 18th century, when it meant “something very small and insignificant”. However, its meaning changed in the 1920s — presumably to match its fellow “animal-body-part” expressions so fashionable at the time — to denote excellence. Some speculate that it derives from a comical mispronunciation of the word business, but there’s no evidence to support this idea. According to the Phrase Finder, another theory is that “bee’s knees” might have been connected to Bee Jackson, a 1920s dancer from New York who was said to have helped to popularize the Charleston by introducing the dance form to Broadway in 1924 (she went on to become a celebrated Charleston champion); “Bee’s knees” must have been fairly impressive. However, the phrase was in use before 1924, so this is also an unlikely scenario.

The British expression “dog’s bollocks”, which is thought to have originated as a printer’s term for the typographical colon dash “:-” (as Eric Partridge noted in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English in 1949), is now widely used in the UK to mean the same as the “cat’s whiskers”. (Here’s another example of animal body-parts, with bollocks being the British slang for testicles.) The OED cites an early example of the canine term being used in the sleeve notes for the cassette tape recording of Peter Brewis’s play The Gambler: “They are of the opinion that, when it comes to Italian opera, Pavarotti is the dog’s bollocks.”

The American entree: a menu misnomer?

While we’re on the subject of food — and British-American differences in naming — let’s not forget meal parts and their monikers. In the UK, you can expect your restaurant menu to go something like this: first a starter, then a main (course), and finally a dessert, pudding, or sweet — or even afters. But an Englishman in an American restaurant might be forgiven for being confused by the entrée coming between the appetizer and the dessert: could this be a misnomer or mistranslation? (Entrée is a French word meaning “entry”, so it stands to reason that it should name the first, introductory, part of a multi-course meal.) No, there’s a perfectly good explanation for this menu curiosity …

Dan Jurafsky, on his Language of Food blog, gives a potted history of the entrée, explaining how when the word entered the English language (with the meaning of a meal part) in the mid-17th century, it actually represented the second or third dish served, not the first.

“The word entrée first appears in France in 1555. In the 16th century, a banquet began with a course called entrée de table (“entering to/of the table”) and ends with one called issue de table (“exiting the table”). … The entrée is the first course of the meal, there can be multiple entrées, and after the entrée comes the soup, one or more roasts, and then a final course.

“Over the next hundred years, this sequence began to shift slightly, with the most significant change being that by 1650 the soup was the first course, followed by the entrée.

“Let’s look at Le cuisinier françois, the famous 1651 cookbook that helped introduce modern French cuisine, to see what the word entrée meant at this time. An entrée was a hot meat dish, distinguished from the roast course. The roast course was a spit roast, usually of fowl or rabbit, while the entree was a more complicated ‘made dish’ of meat, often with a sauce, and something requiring some effort in the kitchen. The cookbook, recently translated as The French Cook, gives such lovely entrees as Ducks in Ragout, Sausages of Partridge White-Meat, a Daube of a Leg of Mutton, and Fricaseed Chicken. An entrée was not cold, nor was it composed of vegetables or eggs. (Dishes that were cold, or composed of vegetable, or eggs were called entremets, but that’s a story for another day). So the entrée in 1651 is a hot meat course eaten after the soup and before the roast.”

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We’re still hungry: what’s for pudding (or ‘pud’ for short)? And, more to the point, what is pudding?

Nowadays the word pudding describes mainly desserts, or the final (sweet) course of a meal, but it didn’t start out that way. Originally the name of a sausage made mostly of blood, it then denoted a range of savory dishes created the way the sausage was — with meat and other ingredients in a semi-liquid form encased and then steamed or boiled to solidify the contents. Only a few of those original savory puddings are still made and eaten today: black pudding (also known as blood sausage in the US) is eaten in Asia, Europe and the Americas; haggis, regarded as Scotland’s national dish, is banned in the U.S. but is still enjoyed in Scotland and by Scots around the world.

Eventually the word pudding (thought to be derived from the French word boudin, in turn from the Latin botellus, meaning “small sausage”) came to describe dessert items similar to their savory forebears in terms of their texture, presentation and cooking process; still scoffed down today are a range of stodgy items from treacle pudding to Christmas pudding. And let’s not forget that most infamous of British dessert puddings: the Spotted Dick …

In North America, pudding describes a milk-based “sweet” (that’s another British synonym for dessert, as well as being the Brits’ name for the confectionery that the Americans call candy), which resembles custards or mousses set with eggs or gelatin. Vanilla and chocolate puddings are U.S. dessert staples.

British pudding American pudding

Finally, here are a few menu miscellanies to note for kicks:

“with au jus (sauce)” (an Americanism): au jus is a French term meaning “with juice”, so “with au jus” means “with with juice”

“rice pilaf” (or “pilaf rice”): pilaf (pronounced pee-lahv, not pee-laff) means rice, so “rice pilaf” means “rice rice”

“shrimp scampi”: scampi means shrimp or prawns, so “shrimp scampi” means “shrimp shrimp”

“paninis”: the plural of panino (the Italian word for small bread roll) is panini. So there can’t be a plural of panini, which is already a plural in itself.

Finally, slightly off-topic, there’s a restaurant in Winnipeg called “Unburger” (sic). “UnBurger … sources only LOCAL meat and never freezes it.” I guess that makes it an “unburger”, right?

From Amharic to Zulu, bogus to zombie: the languages and words of Africa

I’ve just returned from Morocco, where I was struck by the country’s enthralling cultural diversity, which is reflected in and epitomized by its linguistic variety (there are three standard languages spoken there: French, English and Moroccan Arabic — and that’s just the locals talking, we’re not including the tourists…). The continent of Africa is home to more than 2,100 languages — some estimate more than 3,000, many of which are spoken around the world. About a hundred African languages are used for mass inter-ethnic communication; Arabic, Amharic, Berber, Hausa, Igbo, Oromo, Somali, Swahili and Yoruba are spoken by tens of millions of people. Nigeria alone has 500 languages. Most languages spoken in Africa belong to one of three large language families: Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo.

The Niger–Congo languages constitute Africa’s largest language family in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. The most widely spoken Niger–Congo languages by number of native speakers are Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Shona and Zulu. The most widely spoken by total number of speakers is Swahili. Although Swahili is the mother tongue to only about five million people, it is used as a lingua franca (a working, bridging or unifying language) in much of the southern half of East Africa; it serves as the official language of four nations — Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo — and is one of the official languages of the African Union. The total number of Swahili speakers exceeds 140 million.

More than 300 million people speak an Afroasiatic (also known as Hamito-Semitic) language; these are spoken predominantly in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel. The most widely spoken Afroasiatic language is Arabic.

Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by about 50 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, and extending through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa.

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Many words that we use on a daily basis are imports from the French language. Premiere, ballet, genre, unique, liaison, resume, and fiance are just a few examples. Although not nearly as numerous, there are several words in standard English that originated in Africa — including a few that are quite surprising. Did you know, for example, that bogus originally comes from the Hausa (West African) word boko-boko, meaning fake or fraudulent? Jumbo, meaning unusually large, comes originally (and via P.T. Barnum) from the Swahili jumbe or jambo, meaning elephant. And I had always assumed that tango was Spanish or Latin in origin, but it’s from an African word in the Niger-Congo family of languages meaning “to dance”.

Here are some other words that came from this most exotic and beautiful of continents:

banana: West African (possibly a Wolof word)

bozo: West African for “stupid”

dig (in the sense of to appreciate or understand): from the Wolof dega, used at the beginning of a sentence to mean either “look here” or “understand”

guys (informal word for people): David Dalby, founding director of the Linguasphere Observatory (a transnational linguistic research network), contends that there’s a direct connection between guys and the Wolof word gay, meaning person or fellow and always used in the plural form

jukebox: from juke, joog meaning “wicked, disorderly” in Gullah, probably from Wolof and Bambara dzug meaning “unsavory”

Okay: there are numerous theories about where this word — now used and understood all over the world — originated, but it’s widely believed that it might be from the Wolof expression “waw kay”, meaning “all correct”

tango: originally the name of an African-American drum dance, probably from a Niger-Congo language, eg. the Ibibio tamgu meaning “to dance”

tote: a popular theory is that this originated in West African languages: the Kikongo tota meaning “to pick up,” or the Kimbundu tuta meaning “carry, load,” related to Swahili tuta “pile up, carry”. (However, the OED disputes this etymology.)

safari: from the Swahili word meaning “to travel”

zombie: originally a Creole word “zobi”, of Bantu origin, from the Kikongo word zumbi, meaning “fetish”, and the Kimbundu word nzambi, meaning “god”, zombie was originally the name of a snake god. Zombie was first used in the 19th century to mean voodoo dead spirits. More recently it has taken on a new meaning of “automaton” or someone who looks like a robot or lifeless being.

Laines and twittens

Me in a twitten

During my weekend in Brighton, I’ve discovered two words from the old Sussex dialect that are still alive and well and being used in Brighton, Lewes and Cuckfield: laine and twitten. One of these has a similar meaning to lane, and you’ve probably guessed that it’s not the one you might think.

A visit to Brighton wouldn’t seem complete without a visit to the North Laine — a trendy bohemian shopping and eating area that isn’t actually part of the city’s famous Lanes (apart from anything, they’re spelled differently). Laine is an old Sussex word describing an open tract of land; it derives from an Anglo-Saxon legal term for a landholding — nothing to do with lanes or streets. The area now known as North Laine once represented five open farming plots that had probably existed as such since the Middle Ages. In fact, the original farmhouse is where Brighton’s famous Royal Pavilion, the palace built for the Prince Regent who would become King George IV, now stands.

Twitten is also from old Sussex dialect, dating back to the early 19th century, and it means a narrow path, passage or alleyway between two walls or hedges, usually leading into a courtyard, street or open area. There are a few very picturesque twittens dotted around Brighton and throughout East and West Sussex, some with quaint little houses on at least one side of the narrow alleyway. It has been suggested that the word derives from the Low German twiete, meaning “alley” or “lane”; Wiktionary proposes that it’s a corruption of betwixt and between. The word is included in William Douglas Parish’s A dictionary of the Sussex dialect and collection of provincialisms in use in the county of Sussex, published in 1875.

Other regional/quirky names for alleyways around England and Great Britain are twitchells (probably related to twittens) in north-west Essex, east Hertfordshire and Nottingham; chares in north-east England; jennels, gennels or ginnels in northern England — the latter sometimes roofed or covered; opes in Plymouth; jiggers or snickets in Liverpool; gitties (or jitties) in Derbyshire and Leicestershire; shuts in Shropshire; and vennels in Scotland. As recently as 1983, a Yorkshire writer named Mark W. Jones invented a new word, snickelway, by making a portmanteau of three words already mentioned: snicket, ginnel and alleyway: this neologism is now in regular local use.

Here are a bunch of what I might refer to as twitten: participants in Brighton’s annual Naked Bike Ride, which we stumbled upon in fairly frigid temperatures earlier today:

Meet the raisins

We had Chelsea buns for tea yesterday. While discussing its ingredients (and its curious name), my American-raised daughter asked slightly suspiciously, “What’s a sultana?” Good question. Even though I know what it looks and tastes like, I realized I had no idea what it actually is, or what makes it different from a raisin. (And if you’re wondering what a Chelsea bun is, keep reading …)

The sultana is a “white” (pale green) variety of seedless grape, also called a sultanina, a Thompson Seedless (in the U.S.), a Lady de Coverly (in England), and a Kishmish (in Turkey and Palestine). The sultana grape is nicknamed the “three-way grape” since it’s used for table grapes, raisins and wine. Because of its multi-functionality, it’s the most planted grape in California. It’s thought to have originated from either Constantinople or from the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire, from where the sultana raisin was originally and traditionally exported to the English-speaking world, some time in the 17th and 18th centuries. In some countries, namely Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, sultana is also the name of that particular type of raisin; in fact, in the UK, sultana usually refers to the dried fruit — which is basically a golden, plumper, rounder, more juicy version of the raisin (it’s treated with sulfur dioxide to maintain its color) — rather than to the variety of grape from which it’s made. However, in the U.S., raisin is a catch-all word for all dried grapes, making the word sultana unfamiliar to speakers of American English.

Another variety of raisin is the currant, made from the small, dried Black Corinth seedless grape, which is produced mainly in California and the Levant.* Currants — not to be confused with the berries called redcurrants or blackcurrants — are miniature raisins that are firm, dark in color and have a tart, tangy flavor; they are more often found in cooking and baking than their sweeter raisin cousins, which enjoy strutting their stuff as healthy snacks these days. The currant gets its name from Corinth, the port in Greece from which it originated.

For a comprehensive history of the raisin — and other dried fruits — check out the second chapter of Sun-maid’s rather delightful 100th anniversary book.

And back to the Chelsea bun: This classy-sounding treat is a type of currant bun — made of a rich yeast dough sweetened with brown sugar, cinnamon and spice mixtures, spread with butter, and rolled up with currants, lemon peel and dried fruits before being baked. (Americans: think cinnamon roll or cinnamon swirl, with less sugar and lots of raisins.) It was so named after the Bun House in Chelsea, a fashionable area of London, where the bun was first created in the 18th century. Favored and frequented by the British royalty of the time, the Bun House was demolished in 1839.

Are you now craving a Chelsea bun? Well, don’t fret: Fitzbillies, Cambridge’s oldest craft bakery and a veritable institution, is famous for its Chelsea buns and traditional cakes. And it ships all over the world. As it boasts on its website: “Our extra sticky Chelsea buns travel well – Sir Edmund Hillary took a box with him to Base Camp when he conquered Everest. They are packed in an airtight cellophane envelope and then into a stout corrugated mailing box. They should reach you in perfect condition for the final assault on the summit… or indeed your tea.”

Go scoff a Chelsea bun today.

* The Levant is “the crossroads of western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and northeast Africa”.

Back to Blighty

I’m going back to dear Old Blighty soon for my annual visit home. I always assumed (although I’m not sure why) that Blighty had something to do with the great Irish potato blight of the mid-19th century And being a British ex-pat, I’m someone who uses this affectionate term for my homeland frequently, without ever knowing where or how it originated. Then one of my American friends asked … Who knew that it actually comes from an Arabic word, by way of British India and the trenches of wartime France?

According to the OED, Blighty is British slang for Britain or England, or home. Used originally by soldiers during the First World War, it’s thought to have been uttered first on French battlefields some time in 1915. The word’s secondary meaning, which obviously developed out of the British soldiers’ yearning for their beloved Blighty, is “a wound securing return home” — ie. a wartime injury not mortal but sufficiently serious to merit being shipped back to Britain (and hence, sadly, often self-inflicted).

Blighty is a relic of British colonialism — specifically, British India: it derives from the Hindustani word vilayati (pronounced “bil-AH-ti” in many Indian dialects and languages) meaning “foreign”, which in turn comes from the Arabic/Urdu word wilayat, meaning “kingdom”, “state”, “ministry” or “province”.

In their 1886 dictionary, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C. Burnell explained how vilayati was adopted by the Anglo-Indians as a name for exotic foreign items, especially those brought to India by the British, such as the tomato (“vilayati baingan”, which translates as “foreign aubergine”) and soda-water (“vilayati pani”, or “foreign water”).

Fast forward about three decades, and Blighty was the British soldiers’ own corruption of the Anglo-Indian vilayati. Creeping into the vernacular of wartime England, it popped up regularly in songs — “There’s a ship that’s bound for Blighty”, “We wish we were in Blighty”, and “Take me back to dear old Blighty”, poetry, and other popular culture of the time. It endures today as an affectionate term used by British expats referring nostalgically to their homeland — now more commonly used with “Old” in front.

The Dead-Beat
He dropped, — – more sullenly than wearily,
Lay stupid like a cod, heavy like meat,
And none of us could kick him to his feet;
Just blinked at my revolver, blearily;
— Didn’t appear to know a war was on,
Or see the blasted trench at which he stared.
“I’ll do ’em in,” he whined,
“If this hand’s spared,
I’ll murder them, I will.”

A low voice said,
“It’s Blighty, p’raps, he sees;
his pluck’s all gone,
Dreaming of all the valiant, that aren’t dead:
Bold uncles, smiling ministerially;
Maybe his brave young wife, getting her fun
In some new home, improved materially.
It’s not these stiffs have crazed him;
nor the Hun.”

We sent him down at last, out of the way.
Unwounded; — – stout lad, too, before that strafe.
Malingering? Stretcher-bearers winked, “Not half!”

Next day I heard the Doc.’s well-whiskied laugh:
“That scum you sent last night soon died. Hooray!”

— Wilfred Owen

Reclaimed words

On the Facebook page of my younger daughter, who has just turned 20, one of her female friends has written her a birthday greeting that won’t raise any eyebrows in that particular FB friendship group: “Love you, beautiful betch!” (with betch being an alternative form or spelling of bitch). It’s a word young women are now using commonly as an affectionate term for each other — but I wouldn’t recommend that you adopt that particular term of endearment if you’re male or an older female: it’s probably just not going to fly. That’s because it’s a relatively recent “reclaimed (or re-appropriated) word”: one that was previously a slur or insult aimed at a particular target group (in this case, women) that has then been deliberately adopted and reappropriated by that very group and turned into an acceptable or even positive word. And sometimes — either for a period after its reappropriation or indefinitely — this new usage is permissible only to the target group in question. Hence only young women are allowed to call each other betch. A couple of other reclaimed words that fall into this category of restricted use are queer (to be discussed in a separate dedicated Glossophilia post), and more recently and still quite controversially, dyke and nigga.

It’s not hard to understand why reclaimed words abound in areas of life in which prejudice, bias, conflict and divergent points of view are rife. As the changing rules of political correctness (as well as fads and fashions) govern and police the constantly updated terminology of sexuality and gender, politics, and ideological and religious movements, so the lingo bends and adapts, sometimes producing these insults-turned-titles-of-honor as a means of deflating or exploiting the verbal bullying: as the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them. This is a linguistic phenomenon that dates back centuries; there are reclaimed words in modern usage that many might be surprised to learn started out as terms of mockery or insult.

Mormons, Shakers and Quakers were all derogatory terms for members of their respective religious movements before they became their standard colloquial names. The 18th-century British evangelist John Wesley was originally mocked by his fellow students at Oxford University for preaching a prescriptive “methodist” approach to his religious lifestyle, but he adopted the term as the name of his movement, which would eventually secure its place as a denomination in the Anglican Church.

In the sex and gender world, the waters can get very muddy. Both queer and gay have evolved through complicated mazes of meaning and innuendo, with queer still finding its way in the world of definition, identity and acceptability (as are many of those who identify themselves as such, although ironically the word’s most modern meaning is that of deliberately eluding identification or definition in terms of one’s sexual or gender orientation). Gay is now established as an acceptable synonym for homosexual, although it had pejorative overtones in its infancy (in the context of sexuality). However, it has recently developed an additional and quite separate meaning — used predominantly among young people — of general and unspecified disparagement (“oh, his outfit is just so gay”), which is thought by many to be homophobic, even though this new meaning is supposed to be unrelated to that of the reclaimed word. Like queer, gay is being reclaimed and then “dis”-claimed — batted back and forth across the net dividing PC from uncool. Dyke is another word in this area that might be in the process of being reclaimed, gaining ground in the gay community as a neutral word synonymous with lesbian, even though it is still considered insulting by most.

Tree-huggers, Tories and Yankees, all once terms of ridicule*, are now respectable nicknames used by self-respecting environmental activists, Conservative politicians and American citizens respectively — with barely a hint of irony. Nerds and geeks, who were social outcasts and the ultimate victims of bullying in their original incarnations, now wear their brains and smarts with fashionable pride, and often end up getting the girl. Even being a brat is something a few of us are happy to admit to, if we’re of the military or diplomatic variety.

* some would argue the third one still is, but that’s another (baseball) story …