"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 18/12/17 (riding a croggy)

I had a nice e-mail from Christine Craigie, who said, "My cousines talk of riding croggy for fun when the two of them ride on a bike together. Where does this term come from?" It's a great example from English dialect which, contrary to everything we believe, is actually quite well and in quite robust health. Wonderful, wonderful words are falling out of use. They all seen to collect around certain themes, which is quite interesting as well - left-handedness being one of them. Believe it or not, children's games and particularly this idea of riding two on a bike is another one. Dozens of a local versions of them so there is riding backie, dinky, seaty, piggy and croggy, which I love. That's still use in Midlands, especially in Nottinghamshire and Teesside as well. The difference here is that riding croggy, you're riding on the crossbar. You're not riding behind the rider. It may have come north all the way from Cornwall where a croggan is a limpet shell. So the idea is that you've got two riders and one is clinging really tightly to the other, which I think is beautiful. It may simply be CRO from crossbar. That's a more prosaic version, but I like a limpet explanation but, as I say, it's just one of so many words for riding on a bike this day. A lot of fun. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 15/12/17 (nailing your colours to the mast)

Thanks to John Barringer, who e-mailed in to ask for the story behind "nailing your colours to the mast", which is to declare your intentions very openly and also the idea that you will hold on to those beliefs intil the end, and there is a lovely story behind it. A little bit grisly, perhaps, because it goes back to a very famous 17th-century naval battle, and in those days colours, or flags - it's another word for flags - were struck or lowered to show surrender in a battle, but it was also a custom in warfare for one ship to direct its cannon fire at the opponent's ship's mast, so to disable it completely. Sometimes if all of the ship's masts were broken, the captain then had no alternative. He was completely lost. But if there was a little bit left, sometimes they would hoist the colours onto the remnants of the ship's rigging - in other words, they would literally nail their colours to the mast, as I say, quite literally. But there is a specific event involved and that is exploits of the crew of the ship called the Venerable, which is at the Battle of Camperdown, and that was a naval engagement that took place in 1797. It was between English and Dutch ships during the French Revolutionary Wars. Camperdown, because it was near Kamperduin in Holland. And the Venerable was under the command of the captain Adam Duncan. He led the fleet, the entire fleet, and it didn't go very well, the battle, at the beginning, so the main mast was struck and the blue standard, the Admiral, the blue flag, was brought down in the process, which could mean, as they say, that everything was over, but that's when history became an adventure story. Step forward the intrepid sailor called Jack Crawford. He climbed what was left of the mast - ans there wasn't very much left, a very, very precarious job - and nailed it back to where it was visible to the rest of the fleet, to show thst they hadn't surrended. It provided crucial in the battle. Duncan's fleet was victorious in the end and many saw Camperdown to be the end of dominance of the Dutch and the beginning of Britannia ruling the waves. Crawford returned home to Sunderland. He was an absolute national hero and, for years after, the bravery of those English sailors bacame the yardstick against which anything else was measured, so a very literal a nailing colour to the mast, all thanks to the sailor Jack Crawford. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 14/12/17 (to have someone over the barrel, laughing stock, going commando)

Three auestions from three viewers, and I always love getting questions, so thank you to everyone who's sending them in. The first is from Alex Smith, who asked, where the phrase "to have someone over the barrel" comes from. It's American, and first appeared around sort of 1950s, 1960s. And it refers, we think, to the actual situation of somebody being leant over the barrel. Two situations, one is to empty the lungs of someone who'd been close to drowing. And we have lots of records saying that this actually took place, this method of clearing the lungs. Or it was a form of punishment, often aboard a ship. Similar to flogging, in other words. Either way, that position of helplessness transferred over into this idiom, and thtat's why we still talk of that today.  John Winter asks - similar theme of helplessness - why do we call somebody a laughing stock? That goes back to the use of stock, something solid that you can fix something to. So a stump, or it's related to stick, in fact. And the idea that you are the butt of a joke, really, you're at the end of a joke. And speaking of butts - this is probably the worst link I've ever made - Victoria Morsman asked about going commando and where that phrase comes from. The simple answer is not completely sure, but we do know that many commandos and people in the special forces do go without underpants. Do you know this phrase, to go commando? Two senses - it can mean to toughen up, if you go commando, and that was its first sense, actually, but it nowdays means not to wear any underwear. Thst's to go commando. And certanly, within the special forces, especially if, people in Vietnam, for example, if they were spending long periods in wet, jungle conditions, wearing underpants could be deeply uncomfortable. I won't go into it, but fungal infection and things, apparently, come to mind. And that may have been when it started to creep into English. But it really was propelled in the 1970s, when it became a part of college slang, and then a famous episode of Friends has Joey and Rachel going commando, and that's when it became really popular. Thanks for sending them in. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 13/12/17 (proverb, when in Rome)

Today I have a proverb for you. And proverbs are often some of the oldest things in the language. In Europe many of them go back to the Bible, which not only coined quite a lot of them but also popularised them as it was distributed around the Europe. And proverb itself comes from pro, to put forth, and verbum, meaning the word. So you were literally spreading the word. And the word is usually a moral or a reflection of culture or experience of some kind. So they tell you an awful lot, a little snapshot, if you like, in a word or in a phrase. And the proverd I'm going to talk about today is "when in Rome". It's usually shortened to "when in Rome". Of course, it's "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". And this one of the oldest. It was an admonition to travellers, really, to observe the local custom whenever you go there. And it's believed to have originated in a letter written by St Ambrose. And he was a fourth-century Bishop of Milan. And translated from Latin, his advice reads, "When you are at Rome, live the Roman style. When you are elswhere, live as they live elsewhere". Those words were part of a letter written in LAtin in about AD387 to St Augustine. And St Augustine was in Rome and was really confused about the right day for fasting, because he knew that the Roman church had decreed that Saterdat was a day sat aside for fasting. But in Milan, where he resided, there was no such requirement at all, so he didn't quite to know which custom to follow. It obviously varied from city to city. So he consulted the wise St Ambrose, who replied with that advice - "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". And that's exactly what he did. Not only that. He gave us some words that became enshrined in our memory pretty much for ever. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 12/12/17 (ackronym, backronym, tip)

I'm going to talk about acromyms today. It comes from Greek akron, meaning summit, because you take the tip for each lettet for an acronym and make a word out of it. It is related to an acropolis, which is city built on a hill, acne, acrobit, actobat as well - performing high up. And there is such a thing as a backronym. Because acronyms essentially are taking the first letter ag a number of words, as I say, and making up a plausible word out of them, backronyms are when people take a word and think, "Oh, that must be an acronym" and they make up a story to fit that particular word. Many, many stories suggesting that "tip" is an acronym for "To Insure Promptness", and the idea is that in the 18th-century London, coffeehouses, when these coffeehouses were all the rage,  customers would drop coins into a box when they came in, and the box would be labelled "To Insure Promptness". Lovely story, but sadly no evidence at all exists for that. In fact, it all began with the criminal underworld, like so many words in English, in the 17th century - so rogues' cant as we called it - and tipping someone the wink, which we still use today. It means to give somebody a heads-up.  Tip is probably the root of giving a piece of advice, giving a tip to somebody. And tip then simply meant to allow or to give. And that sense of giving then translated over to tipping someone a shilling, giving someone a shilling as a result of good service, or to reward them in some way. And that is how we ended up with the modern meaning of giving someone a tip at the end, perhaps, of a good meal. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 11/12/17 (letting hair down, get in someone's hair, split hairs, hairy, hair of the dog)

I'm going to talk about hair and the numerous expressions in English involving hair. And I'm going to start with letting your hair down, which seems quite obvious, really, on the face of it. But actually, in the 19th century, it was letting down the back hair. And it involved not the hair on your back, but these very elaborate tresses of hair that, of course, women would wear in these days. And only in the informal, relaxed atmosphere of the home were they able tolet these tresses down. And when you get in someone's hair, you're being an annoyance. Not quite sure about this one, but we think it's due to the irritation of head lice, that was the original meaning. So not a particularly pleasant one there. People who split hairs quibble over insignificant details. And that image, between painstackingly dividing a single hair, which of course is almost impossible, and making small and slightly over-refined distinctions, has been around for centuries. In fact, Shakespeare used it. In King Henry IV he writes, "I'll cavil on a ninth part of a hair', meaning, "I'll argue over everything", a tiny portion. And then we have hairy. If we describe something as hairy, it's quite scary - you might have a hairy flight, for example. That sense of hairy is probably simply a version of hair-rising, makes your hair stand on end. Which is also, of course, behind horrible and horror. It goes back to a Latin word meaning stand on end, with the idea that your hair bristle at the sight of something truly terrifying. But possibly my favourite origin, one of my favourite origins in English, totally, actially, the hair of the dog. We talk about that when we have a tipple the morning after the night before, in order trying to try and cure a hangover.  It goes back to the full expression, the hair of the dog that  bit you, and that goes back quite a long way to people who were perhaps bitten by rabid dog, and the belief that if you could chase that dog down, pull out a bit of its hair, make a poultice out of the hair and put it over the wound, it would cure your rabies. And? of course, over time, that was metaphorically then applied to alcohol. But it begut with something very, very literal, and very real hairs of an actual dog. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 08/12/17 (prefix ortho-)

I have a prefix, which sounds on the face of it very boring. And lexicographers love prefixes and knowing your prefixes allows you to open a whole new world of words and to realise where they came from, especially if you know your classics. This prefix is ortho-. And ortho- heads up a whole host, a family of modern English words. It means straight or perpendicular. It's Greek-based. Metaphorical, too, it can imply integrity, correctness or standard, in some way. And there are many, many medical, zoological, botanical terms, that have this at the beginning. So, Orthoptera is a family of insects including grasshoppers and locusts and various other insects that have stright wings. So, that ortho- means straight in there already. That one's a bit obscure, maybe. But there are so many other words including ortho-, which once you understand that straightness, they make absolute sense. So, orthodondist is somebody who will straighten your teeth, the -dontist part obviously meaning teeth. So, they are a tooth straighteher. An orthopaedist, on the other hand,  if you talk about orthopaedics, the person who deals with abnormalities in bones anf joints, especially in children, and the -paedist comes from the Greek for child but etymologically, they are really concerned with the straight development of children's bones, so, again, that idea of straightness. And orthodox, somebody who has an orthodox opinion conforms to the standard, if you like. They are perhaps more conventional in their beliefs and subscribe to a particularly standard  type of doctrine related to whatever it is, whether it's religion or a custom. So, orthodoxy, appearing in English in the 1500s, means literally a straight or correct opinion. So that ortho-, simply meaning straight, will give you a way into so many words that on the face of it look actually very difficult but they're not!

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 07/12/17 (covfefe)

This year, on the long list of Oxford's Word of the Year was one word that is a very rare example of a new coinage that achieved huge currency everywhere without anyone have a clue what it meant. And it goes back to 30th May when late at night on social media President Trump made one of the most famous typos of all time. He did what he often does at odd hours - he sent a tweet. This one was a bit pizzling. It said, "Despite the constant negative press covfefe" And everyone thought, "Ok, five minutes later he'ii delete it, he'll realise". But he didn't. And it stayed there for a very long time. Ensue complete chaos as people were desperately trying to wonder what it meant, but to have a bit of fun with it as well, of course. Some people made political statements, so one cola company said, "We have no plans to add covfefe to our cola.If you want the taste of incopetence, there are other sodas available". And then there was also a train company that said, "Due to covfefe on the line, our trains will be running a bit late today". And so it went on, everyone having a bit of fun with it. Nobody knows what it means. His Chief of Staff said that it actually did mean something and the President knew exactly what it was. But who knows? And other people say that it played to the greatest strenght of the internet, which was given meaning to be meaningless. But whatever covfefe means, if it gets in the dictionary, I will be fascinated to know what its definition is. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 06/12/17 (cold feet)

I have cold feet for you today. Cold feet is when you have loss of nerve or a loss of confidence, which certanly you can't afford to have in the circus. No-one is quite sure what inspired the idiom but ther's lots and lots of theories, as always with quite tricky word origins. We do know it's been in use since the 19th century, so it's been around for a while, and there is probably, we think, a military history to it because combat soldiers whose feet were frozen or even numbed with fear, or eho got a trench foot due to horrible, horible conditions in the threnchesans unsutable footwear, were exempted from battle. And sometimes they were exempted from battle because, as it would say on the medical statement, they had cold feet. It's quite possible that over time that saying became associated with a loos of nerve and eventually cowardice. But there is another account that might explain why it became so popular, and that a novel in the 19th century by the German writer Fritz Reuter. And, loosing his money and his nerve in a high-stakes game of cards, one of the novel's characters apparently say he has cold feet, and he uses thet as an excuse to withdraw from the game. But all the other players are highly suspicious of this and think it has absolutely nothing to do with his retreat, he was simply fearful of losing the game, losing more money. And so, hence, he lost his nerve by saying he had cold feet. If you want a really prosaic theory it's simply that if you are absolutely paralysed with fear, the physical response is blood rushing from the extremities leaving you feet cold. So that's the third, a little bit technical, expldndtion. But I think the military one is probably the best. As I say, it goes back pre-20th, it was recorded qiuite a long time before that, but carried on through as an excuse for cowardice. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 05/12/17 (ghost words in dictionary)

I mentioned yesterday I was going to look at what lexicographers get up to. Not in their spare time but the mistakes sometines that happen or deliberate coinages, that sort of thing. Today I thought I would talk about mistakes because one question that we're often asked is, " Do you ever slip up and does the wrong word get into dictionary?" The answer is definitely yes. There are some quite famous examples to prove it. They're called ghost words, these kind of words, and either arrive through accident, so it can be a printer's error or it can be dictionary compiler's error. Or sometime they're deliberate. I'll give you a few examples of the errors. Sometimes the definition is just wonderful. If you look at Samuel Johnson's dictionary, he had "foupe" with the great definition "to drive with a sudden impetuosity". Which is just brilliant. Unfortunately he had misread a long S for an F and it was "soupe". But foupe went in the dictionary for quite a long time until we realised that he'd made a mistake. But possibly most famous lexicoghaphical error of the 20th century, and that was the appearance of the word "dord", which appeared in Webster's New International Dictionary. This is looking back to the 1930s. It was listed as a noun with pronunciation meaning density.In those days, dictionaries were comppiled not on computers but through index cards that would be filed in quite elaborate filing systems. This index card has got misplaced from the abbreviation section to the word section and it was supposed to read "D or d"as an abbreviation for density. But people read it all as one word, it became dord and again that survived in the dictionary for a very, very long time until someone spotted it. So the simple answer is we do mistakes. I/m not sure about any in here but I'm sure I'll come across one at some point. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 04/12/17 (phubbing)

I thought I'd talk over the next couple of days about the troubles that lexicographers sometimes get themselves in. One of the most common questions that you get asked if you work in dictionaries is, "How do I get my new word into the dictionary? You know, can I get it in? Here it is. It's brilliant." And the answer is always no. Of cource, if a word is used often enoughover a certain period of time, then it stands a good chance of going into the dictionary, but not until then, so we don't listen to petitions. But it turns out, if it's an inside job, you might get a word in. In 2013, a movement sprang up in Australia that carried the slogan, "Stop phubbing". Phabbing was a blend of phone snubbing, in other words, you are snubbing someone by just looking at your screen. The word just took off, literally. And it was only probably a couple of months later, after the advertising agency had really propelled this into the language, that Macquarie Dictionaries owned up and said it was all part of a dictionary campaign to update your dictionary and it was a completely made-up word by a group of linguists in an office somewhere and they had done what we always say is impossible. But eventually we all had to eat our words because if you look in the Oxford Dictionary here online, you will find that phubbing is in and it's one of the very, very few examples of a word that has been artificially created and has succesfully gone into the dictionary. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 01/12/17 (words from root "anthropos")

Today I/m going to unpick a set of words that all come from a common root and it's a beutiful root, it's Greek, anthropos, which mean humankind so man, woman, a human being and it turns out it's the mother of a very large family of words in Ehglish. The most obvious one probably is anthropology which is, of course, the science of human beings, so it's a study of its customs, their beliefs and their physical characteristics, but that's not the only one, by any means. For example, if we assign human emotions and human attributes to animals or to inanimate objects, we're anthropomorphising them. Cartoons like Finding Nemo, Jungle Book, etc, do this all the time aut also in English and language when we talk about the hands of the time or the eye of the storm, that's what we're doing. We're anthropomorphising. There's also a great term, resistentialism, which is a much newer coinage and that's the belief that inanimate objects really have it in you so that if you toast lands butter down, which it always does, that is resistentialism, or if you bump into a sofa, it's the sofa fault, etc. Anyway, that's nothing to do with mankind, I just like that word. Anthropocentric means centring on human beings so that's the belief that human and humanity stands at the centre of everything, and everything revolves around us. But finaly we come to misanthrope, and a misanthrope again has that anthropos within it, the mankind, and it also has the Greek word for hate, miseo, so, a misanthrope, really, is a cynical, unfortunate, absolute hater of humankind. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 30/11/17 (Dutch words: boss, snoop, booze, brandy, gin, cruise, yacht, cookie, bumpkin)

I talked quite recently about enmity between the English and the Dutch, which has resulted in all sorts of rather unflattering idioms to do with the Dutch, including Dutch courage. But, in fact, we do owe an awful lot to the Dutch in a good way, because they gave us so many words that have come into our language and which have lost their Dutch ancestry, mostly because of the way we pronounce them. So, just to give you a bit of  an example, if I asked you, "Is your boss a bit gruff?" Maybe he is a bit prone to snooping. Or you might to go for a booze cruise on his yacht. That contain at least half a dozen words that came over from the Netherlands. The boss of all Dutch words probably is the boss, it's from their word baas, meaning master. It travelled into the USA at the beginning of the 19th century, and it was very much restricted to workmen's slang, so it wasn't used at all in the current, modern context until quite recently. But if he's addicted to snooping, he's not actually spying, as we might thing today. The original meaning of snoop, from the Dutch snoepen, was to eat on the sly by sneaking bits of food out and eating them when no-one was looking. Something kids like to do all the time. I mentioned booze - very, very much a Dutch word, where it meant to drink to excess. It was spelt rather differently, as you might imagine. And you booze of chioce might be brandy, that was originally brandewine from the Dutch brandewijn, which was burnt wine. Burning, because when you burn the alcohol off, and condences back as brandy, basically. Some strong alcohol. Gin is flavoured with juniper berries, and it was traditionally made in the Netherlands. So we have them to thank for our gin and tonics as well. In the early 18th century, it was spelt genever. To do eith juniper. But because people associated this eith the Swiss city, it was colled Holland's genever instead. So, for a long time, if you wnted a gin and tonic, you eould ask for Holland's and tonic. Many, many words to do with the sea and sailing - perhaps because all the Dutch wars that went on on the sea - travelled across the North Sea to Britain. I mentioned cruise, that comes from their word to cross. And a jaghtschip as a fast pirate ship, originally, and we get yacht from there. And finally, worda for items of food. You might think that a cookie is quintessencially American, but, in fact, it started off as a Dutch koekje, which was a little cake. And that's how it travelled into English originally, before it became biscuit that we know today.  Cabbage salad, coleslaw of course, and gherkin also. But probably my favourite is a bumpkin, because in Dutch, a boomken is a little tree or a little barrel, and either way, it began as an insult for a short, stout, rather dumpy man. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 29/11/17 (libel, pamphlet)

Two book-related words today. I'm going to start with something you really don't want in your life, that's libel in any kind. That is a written defamatory statement about you or information about you, as opposed to slander, which is always spoken. Libel goes back to the Latin "libellus", which meant a little book. "Liber" was a book, it gave us library, too. That just what it was originally. It was a very short essey or a treatise on some praticular subject, but it move onto encompass a leaflet or a pamphlet that was a circulated to lots and lots of people. Because of political pressures of the day, very often they would contain quite vehement and agressive attacks on the government and they were often defamatory. So defamatory in fact, that that's where we got, from libellus, that little book, the idea of libel. I mentioned a pamphlet that was distributed around, and I love the story of pamphlet, because it's so far removed from the meaning it has today. Not all of us will appreciate the pamphlets popping through our letterebox most days, but it originated in the late 1300s, it's very, very old. It meant again a small treatise or another work, consisting of pages without covers. But its origin is quite wonderful. It comes from Pamphilet, which was a French title of a completely anonymus but extremely popular 12th-century comic love poem. It was written in Latin - Pamphilus, seu de Amore, or Pamphilus on love. Pamphilus was the name of the hero, who got his name from Pamphilus, maning "beloved by all" in Greek. Don't quite know the subject of the poem, but I do know it was insredibly popular. Pamphilus then produced Pamphilet, a little edition of Pamphilus, if you like. As I say, it was so popular, it was widely copied and passed around from person to person in a form of a very thin leaflet. So from that hero of an extremely popular love poem, we get a very prosaic word pamphlet today. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 28/11/17 (beat about the bush, drew onto red herring)

A couple of viewers have e-mailed in, including Ann and John Berry, to ask what we're doing when we beat about the bush - why do we beat about the bush? And English is full of hunting metaphors. It was a highly important aristocratic pursuit, whether or not we agree with it nowdays. But to beat about the bush is from hunting - from bird hunting, in fact. And it is simply, as you might guess, some of the participants rousing the birds by beating the bushes and cousing them to fly off so that others can catch the quarry in nets. Of course, today, still, grouse hunting and other forms of hunt still use this method of beating, and they have beaters. It drew me onto red herring, because red herring has been - I suppose inevitably - one of the main sources of red herrings in etymology throuhout the ages. We've never been quite sure where it comes from, and there have been so many guesses. But we think we have now cracked it. It goes back to William Cobbett, who was a radical journalist. HAted the English political system, which he lampooned and called "the Old Corruption". He was deeply out of love with politics of his day, which is in the 19th century, and he wrote a story - perhaps fictional, we're not sure - in a political weekly about how, as a boy, he had managed to deflect hounds from chasing a hare by dragging a red herring, ie a highly smoked herring, across the trail. The reason he told this story is he wanted to use it as a metaphor to really give the press a hard time, because thay'd allowed itself... or they'd allowed themselves to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon, a different one to the one we know, which made the press take their eye off very important domestic matters, and he said that they had deliberately created this red herring in order to deflect interest in what was really going on at home. And, of course, we talk about political red herrings to this day, and the phrase simply slipped into the mainstream from there. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 27/11/17 (tommyrot, codswallop, jack brew, bags of mystery)

A lovely member of our studio audience ask the other day where "tommyrot" comes from, which is a slightly old-fashioned term now for complete nonsense. And English is just full of so many words to do with nonsense. You have twaddle, and you have bankum and poppycock and balderdash. And if you looked at the historical thesaurus, you would probably find 100 or 200 words, which probably reflects perhaps slightly badly on the English temperament. We had codswallop as well, which is one of big mysteries of English etymology. We think it goes back tpo Hiram Codd, who invented a special bottle to contain fizzy drinks. And because beer drinkers used to call weak beer, if you like, wallop, it was a bit of scathing criticism of what was contained in these bottles. Copswallop, perhaps, goes back to Hiram Codd. Bot to tommyrot. Tommyrot is actually a World War I term. Tommy was very much the name for your traditional generic soldier. It was used - in a very good way, it was a very, very positive way - but rot, obviously wasn't very positive. And it was bread, it was a soldiers' rations. And soldiers have a great way of pocking fun at the food, which isn't by all accounts, always particularly nice. So "jack brew", one of my favourite terms, is a cup of tea that you make for yourself but not for anyone else. Of "bags of mystery", is an old term for sausages which soldiers have adopted, because you never know what's in them. I quite like that one. And tommyrot simply was your soldiers' rations. Tommy Atkins, as I say, was a general term for an honest, private soldier, but it's as simple as it gets. It was just a rather nasty food  that you would eat out in the field by your traditional Tommy. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 23/11/17 (Heath Robinson)

Thanks to John Shepherd who sent an e-mail saying, "Was there ever a real Heath Robinson?" And Heath Robinson is a slightly old-fashioned saying now, and it describes anything that is impractical, eccentric, sometimes ingeniously so, or sometimes it looks as if it's about to fall apart. But we might call some contraption or other, "That's a bit..." We might say, "That's a bit Heath Robinson". It all goes back to an illustrator and cartoonist who was called William Heath Robinson, who was alive from 1872 to 1944. And he delighted in sketching extremely unlikely looking machine which is capable of doing incredibly quirky, irregular jobs, so they were absolutely wonderful. But he meant, really, to be quite satirical, so he was poking fun at the supposedly labour saving inventions that were really all the rage at the beginning of the 20th century. And so he specialised in drawing these ludicrously overcomplicated devices that would... you know, were designed, really, to produce some kind of simple conclusion, but, as I say, went all the way round the houses to do it. So I thought I'd give you some examples because they were lovely. There was a multi-movement tabby silencer, ehich automatically threw water at sereneding cats, a bedside bomb extinguisher, a resuscitator for stale scones. He didn't however, design anything that could solve friendish maths calculations, and that's, of course, that cos he hadn't met Rachel. But had he met Rachel, it would have been a cartoon of her. But Heath Robinson, if you have a chance to look at his cartoons, they're really special. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 20/11/17 (discipline, procrastination, peredination, deadline)

I thought a little bit about the vocabulary of discipline and its enemy, which is usually procrastination in my case. But to start with, discipline, you need to be a disciple, really, to acquire a discipline, so to acquire learning in some way, because that word discipline comes from yhe Latin disciplinus, a disciple, so a learner, which, of course, in ancient times was all-important. So important, in fact, that the word school comes from a Greek word meaning leisure because it was thought to be so enjoyable to acquire a new knowledge. I'm not sure schoolchildren today would agree with that. But in other words, a period od apprenticeship is often necessary to produce good quality work, hence the learning idea of discipline. But as I say there are many enemies to that all around us. And I mentioned procrastination, and that it has at its heart cras, meaning tomorrow. So the idea was in Latin, that you were putting something off until next day. If you want to put something off until the day after tomorrow, that is known as perendination, which is also to perendinate - it's quite a useful word in my vocabulary. What's needed, then, is the opposite of all of these, is to knuckle down and ironically that comes from play, not from work, it's a geme of marbles, ehen to knuckle down is literally to put your knuckles down to the ground in order to shoot better. And finally, if you were like Douglas Adams, who famously said, "I love a good deadline. I love the wooshing sound they mke as they go by", it's worth remembering that the first deadlines were lines drown around military prisons beyond which you could be shotif you tried to escape. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 22/11/17 (nationalities' stereotypes)

I had an e-mail in from Eddie Klose. I think it's a German surename. But he asked, "Why do we introduce nationalities into our phrases?" So, why do we talk about French leave, Dutch courage, Russian roulette, etc? And the answer is really that languege can be very effective in reinforcing steretypes. And they're not usually particularly nice stereotypes. So, I'll start with the Dutch. It's quite a well-known story, I think, a lot of people know now why we talk about Dutch courage, etc, but it's worse repeating. They're not very flattering, any of idioms relating to the Dutch. Dutch courage, we know, the only time, the implication is, that the Dutch are ever brave is when they've drink a lot. Double Dutch became a byword for gibberish. To be Dutch buttocked wasn't a particularly positive thing, that meant you had a very large behind. Onto the French, excuse my French,  we still do actually often put it alongside language that would otherwise be seen as being vulgar or obscene. And finally, Russian ruolette, that's slightly different, because Russian roulette isn't really a slur. It goes back to a novel of 1937, and a military situation, as you would expect. "Did you ever hear of Russian roulette? With the Russian army in Romania around 1917, some of officers would suddenly pull out her revolver,  remove a cartridge, spin a cylindre, snap it back in place, put it to his head and pull the trigger. So they've been doing  that for a very long time, probably did originate in Russian military camps. But to answer Eddie's question, with all of these, no matter which wat you look at it, it all goes back to something rather unpleasant. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 21/11/17 (crotchety, being cross)

A couple of questions from viewers, for which, thank you. The first comes from Dave Leonard who asked where the word crotchety come from. And the one that I'm going to follow up with is from Colin Curtis who asks, "Why do we talk about being cross?" So they  were obviously both writting on a particularly cantankerous day. But I'll start with the crotchety. And it seems strange, but crotchety has a link with both handicraft and also a ball game, and I'll explain. Crochet meant in French a hook of a shepherd's crook and you can still find it in French today to mean a hockey stick, but, of course, crochet, as it would be in English, is, for us, a handicraft in which yarn is made into fabric with a hooked needle. So, the lawn game that is called croquet is also linked to this because you drive a ball through hooks or hoops in order to play the game. That, two, originated in France and then became very popular with the English aristocracy. So, this is a slightly winding thread that I'm weaving here, but the French word, if you go back to that crochet, shepherd's hook, etc, it's also the source for the musical note the crotchet, simply because of its shape - it almost resembles a shepherd's crook of a hook. And that, in turn, gave us crotchety, because it was some sort og perverse, slightly hooked belief, if you like, a sort of twisted turn of mind and then of course, you're so twisted that you're actually positively angry. Onto cross, that is even more productive in English and we have the Vikings to thank for thst, and the Romans. The Vikings brought us kross, with a K, the Romans gave us a crux, of course, and that crux is behind crucial, crucible - which was the hight light originally that shown in front of crucafix... And excruciating which reffered to torture on the cross. But to come to Colin's question, cross, meaning annoyed, goes back to the 17th century and it's actually from the high seas, to do with a crosswind. It's a wind blowing across the bow of your ship, rather then from behind. So it's an adverse, contrary or opposite wind, bot one that you will particularly like, and might leave you annoyed or bad-tempered. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 17/11/17 (curator, manicure, accurate, secure)

I'm going to talk about single word, which is curator. When we think of curators, we tend to think of museums, somebody who organises and selects, perhaps displays things. But you can curate content on the web now, so it's taking on new senses as technology develops. But unsurprasingly perhaps, we have to look back to the ancient for its origin, for there, a curator was someone with incredibly heavy responsibilities who was in charge of pretty much all public works. So if you're looking back to ancient Rome, there were curatores, as they were called, of olive oil supplies, corn supplies, food for the people, the rivers, public funds, public buindings, roads... Not taxes - they were left to somebody else - but almost any public administrative role that you can think of was under the jurisdiction of the curatores. It all goes back to cura, which in Latin meant care. If you think about it, it pops up in so many places in English. So we have a manicure, which is the care for the manus, the hand. Accurate, means done with care and if you are secure, then you are free of care. So lots and lots of places that that word, from curator and cura comes into English and it goes to show the Romans did an awful lot of us, really. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 16/11/17 (nightmare, fury, rage)

Perhaps a slightly disturbing origin of words today, cos I'm going to talk about the terrifying images that lie behind both nightmare and fury. It'a just after lunch, so we should be OK for a while, hopefully. But nightmare, people often think it refers to a female horse, that kind of mare. But in fact, it comes from a Germanis folklore in which a mare was a female spirit, or a goblin, or even an incubus - incubus meant "to lie upon", and that's exactly what they did, because they would sit, so the legent went, upon the sleeper's chest, constricting it so much that they felt like they were suffocating, and in the process given them incredibly bad dreams. Some nightmares were thought to be fatal, because of this suffocation process, so all sort of things, natural phenomena, illnesses, et cetera, were blamed on these horrible female spirits. Onto more horrible female spirits, in fact, because the Furies were probably the most scariest thing in the nightscape of Greek mythology. They were called the Erinyes and they were born of the blood drops from Uranus, they had snakes famously coiled it their hair and they roamed the land, avenging, it was said, perjury, murder, all sorts of crimes that been committed, for people. They were thought to be so sort of wrathful and full of rage, that rage eventually came over to us as well, via a very complicated route, but the French "rage" which gave us rage, goes back to the Latin rabies, meaning frenzy or ferocity, which is of course wherewe get our medical term today. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 15/11/17 (adoption, fertility, ferry, felicity, feminine)

I've been reading a great book written by Peter Jones who is very much interested in bringing the classics to everybody, because not only linguistically do we owe the classics a lot, but also just in culture, as well. So I'm going to talk about the Romans again. In Roman time, whatever a father's special qualities, the key to a successful family was the wife's capacity to produce children. That was just all-important. I suppose in some cultures, not much has changed. But fertility itself comes from the Latin fero, meaning I carry. It's linked to ferry, and indeed the fare that you might pat to travel in the ferry. And they all very relevant to a fertile woman. But this is because of her depended the continuation, not just of the family, but of citizen children, and so the Roman states and of the gods that they worshipped, et cetera, so it was this very complicated interwoven thing that was all-important. And the word for blessed, felix, which of course gave us felicity and felicitous, applied to her. But if you go all the way back to thst very ancient root, you'll find it's linked to femina, so we get feminine from that - that was a woman. Fecundus, which means fecund. And foetus, as well. They're all linked, they all go back to the same ancient root, meaning to suckle. But I thought I'd mentioned that link with foetus, because you know the word effete? We talk about something over-refined today as being slightly effete or maybe just a little bit feeble, but actually, for the Romans, that was the worst fate of all, because it literally meant out-wombed. It's linked to foetus, it means worn out by bearing too many children, so a woman would be effete, essencially barren, because she had just produced too many offspring. But onto a slightly happier nite, when it comes to children - if children were lacking or didn't quite have the qualities that were hoped for, they were adopted quite regularly from otheh families to ensure the survival of the line. But I menyioned this because adoption, if you look back to its root in Latin, it's actually really lovely, because it means to choose to come to. So you were choosing someone to come to your family, which I think is a really nice way of looking at it. And it was all about, as I say, helping the family to succeed, and often it wasn't babies that came over, but it was adults, ao adults would be adopted into a family, and Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Hadrian, so many people were adopted into another family in order to keep up the power, if the womb of the all-important mother hadn't quite done its job. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 14/11/17 (nasty, nest, nostalgia)

I'm going to look at three words which on the face of it have absolutely nothing in common, but there is a link, sometimes a tiny, tiny link, between them. And I'm going to start off with nasty and nest. Because in the language trade they might be possibly, we think, be doublets. In other words, they share a common route. So the came into English via a different language, which happens all the time. But they may come from the ancient, ancient language that I often mention, of Indo-European, which was the mother of so many languages, and a root meaning nest. It seems a bit of leap of imagination to link the two, but it seems that the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons may have noticed that the place where birds sit, as Chris Packham will tell you, can get extremely foul.  And it may be that thanks to this observation, nasty rather than nesty, came into English to refer to something as disgusting and filthy, as a birds' nest. For that was the original meaning, something really repellent. But as for nests, I saw the word nestalgia recently, which is a jokey blend or portmanreau, meaning a longing for bed. When we think of nostalgia, which has a curious history itself, it was coined in 1668, and if was part of dissertation by a Swiss scholar who wanted to translate the native German, Heimweh, which translates as home-woe, longing for home. Fernweh is the longing for faraway places. But he took it from the Greek, the scholar, from the Greek, algos, meaning pain or grief, and nostos, meaning homecoming. So quite a beautiful word. But not beatiful in its consequences, because for a long time it was listed as an endemic disease in many medical manuals, because it was thought that when all these depressing symptoms came together, they actually could be fatal in the wrong person. And in the American Civil War it was cited as a serious medical problem. It was said that some 2 588 cases of nostalgia were reported, and 13 deaths. The idea, I guess, is that if your morale is low, then so is youe immunity. Today, nostalgia thankfuly  has a far more wistful sense, it's a longing for something lost, usually something evanescent. And it's deffinitely a long way from nasty. But those three words have a curious link. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 13/11/17 (Echo, Pan)

On Friday I talked about the origins of ditto, the ditto punctuation marks, which are, if you like, written echoes of what somebody else has said before or indeed what you have said before. So I thought I would talk about the history of echo because I think Margaret would be like this one. She probably knows it all already, but it's very much indebted to Greek mythology, which of course we've heard about today. It goes back to another nymph, in fact. Echo was a mountain nymph known as an oread and it's said that the goddess Hera really didn't like the way that Echo used to gossip and chat the whole time and so she deprived her of speech, apart to the ability to repeat what other people had said to her. So that was Hera's revenge for somebody who was a bit of a tittle-tattle. So poor Echo, who had already had a pretty tough time, then fell in love with the handsome Narcissus who, of course, was only in love with himself and so he didn't return her love. And when he rejected her, she wasted away with grief until there was hothing left of her but her voice. And of course Narcissus himself pined away by worshipping the reflection of himself in the pool. It's said where he died, the Narcissus flowers sprang, which is really quite sweet story. But back to Echo, there's a different story of Echo in which she was loved by the God Pan, but she turned him down so the tables were turned, if you like. In revenge, it's said Pan drove a group of shepherds mad and made them tear her to pieces in an incredibly brutal way. It said that the fragments of her flesh were buried in the earth including her voice which could still imitate other sounds. So poor Echo had an incredibly hard time of it. If you wand to look linguistically, "eche" in the Greek meant sound, simply, so that is probably where it came from, but the mythology obviously so much more colourful. And talking about Pan, the spurned lover in this one. Pan is, of course, behind panic because he was a mischievious thing. He would hide in the forest and makes all sorts of eerie, terrifying noises to frighten passers-by, which is where we get panic from today. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 10/11/17 (ditto)

I'm going to start with the origin of ditto, because we use ditto quite a lot when we want to echo someone's feeling or thoughts, or where we want to aviod repeating the same word - s oto aviod repetition. But where does it actually come from? We have to look back to 17th-century Italian, when ditto meant "in the aforesaid month". So it was used to avoid repeating a month. So quite a specialist sense. But English merchants picked it up and started used it in accounts ans lists. And actually 18th-century tailors picked it up as well, and it was shorthand for "the same material". So "sute of dittos" was a sute that was the same material and the same colour throughout. And that was a standard term in the clothing trade. But before we had the ditto marks that we know today, those double apostrophes, the word ditto was used itself. So that would be what was read out if they were repeating something that was written down. And only fairly recently did it settle on, as I say, those double aphostrophe marks. But where does ditto itself comes from? It's a Tuscan dialect word, "detto" - "I said", which ultimately goes back to the Latin dictus, and of course dictus gave us a diction, dictum, dictation and, of course, dictionary, as well. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 09/11/17 (tomboy, tom cat, waghalter)

We are with Tom Adams. He e-mailed in and said, why is a boyish girl called a tomboy?  In other words, is there any reason why Tom is the name used to describe masculine qualities, if you like. And you find it in tom cat as well, so he was wondering about that. So I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary and the first mentioned of tomboy is from a comedy performed in 1556, so we going back a long way. And the quotation is, "Is all your delight and joy in whisking and ramping abroad like a tomboy?" But there were no girls in the offing here. This was said to a boy, so the tomboy was in fact male, rather than female. And that's because the original meaning of the word was of a rude, boisterious boy or a rapscallion. Or indeed a waghalter. A waghalter was a mischievous joker, so mischievous that in the grim humour of the times, he was thought to be fit for the gallows ans that's actually where we get wag today for a comedian. Going back to tomboy, within a few dacades, it had flipped gender and  had taken on the meaning of a female who behaves like that spirited boy. Defined in the dictionary like a wild, romping girl. Gender switches or a gender fluidity like these are not uncommon at all in the history of English, so you will find, for example, the first harlot was a man. The feirst meaning of punk was a promiscuous woman. Of course nowdays it can be either sex, a punk. A punk rocker. And even girls could apply to both sexies when it first came around, so it's quite common in English to find these sort of flips. But the Tom part of the equation, I think that it what Tom Adams actually was wondering about. And you will find that in tom cat, tomfoolery, "Tom, Dick and Harry", and that's because the name was simply used as a generic label for the common man, if you like, the man of the people. It wasn't just a Tom, JAck was also used in this way, if you think about jack of all trades or a lumberjack, and the idea is that there were the ordinary man and just used, as I say, as a generic name. But quite why we have tomboy and not tomgirl is always a bit of mistery. And anyway, we might want to forget the whole idea of tomboy these days because girls can do anything, as we know. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 07/11/17 (attercop, haggersnash, cobweb, spinster)

This one is for Alison, who's written a book about spiders for children and how we should all embrace the spider, quite literally. And I wa salso talking quite recently about all the words in the dictionary for a curmudgeon, or somebody who's just quite sulky. And in there, you might also put attercop, and that was an old nickname for somebody who wasn't just sulky but was also quite spiteful with it - haggersnash was another word for them, so just slightly mean-spirited - was an attercop, which is ufair on the spider, because attercop actually was the word for spider before spider came along. And it's made up of atter, meaning poison, and coppe, which was the name for a head, so literally it was a poison head, because all spiders at that time were thought to be highly venomous, which is a little bit mean. But that attercop, the atter somehow, the poison bit, fell off and cop, the head bit, became the word for a spider for some time. And that how we came came to have our cobweb. I'm often asked about those because they were the webs of a cop, that word for a spider, and eventually the P became a B and we are stuck with cobwebs today. But wventually, the attercop became a spider. That comes from the old English word for spin, a much more neutral term, which means that the spinster and a spider intimately linked. Spinster actually, of course, to do with the fact that women used to spin for a living. Often if they didn't have a husband to rely on, they would just have to rely on the income from spinning and so it came to mean a slightly derogatoey term for a prim, unmarried woman, that was a spinster. Unlike the bachelor, who was a young knight, he had a far better deal. But, yes, spiders, we had some very strange beliefs, but I think, you know, we are much more neutral about them today, hopefully, certanly linguistically speaking and we should definitely embrace them. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 08/11/17 (Greenland)

I have to thank fellow linguist Kory Stamper. She works for the American dictionary company, Merriam-Webster, and she tells a really good tale. So thic is one that she tells. And it's basically about why Greenland is called Greenland. Because it's not exactly a grassy plain, and it seems a bit of an odd choice. Start with Iceland. The name of Iceland is fairly self-explanatory - a land covered in glaciers. And that was colonised in the ninth century by the Vikings. But there was an ulterior motive there because the Norse settlers didn't want anyone else to come. So they wanted to make it sound as unappealing as possible, as cold and barren as the name suggests. Nonetheless, Norse people - they didn't mind Norse people going there - flocked to the island, daspite the fact it was small and it had very, very little arable land. But bacause it was smal and because there wasn't too much land to g oaround, it led many, many squables between these settlers. And many people were banished from the country for being too argumentative, essentially. And one of those was Eric Thorvaldsson, otherwise known as Eric the Red. He was banished from the country. He haeded west and he landed at a huge landmass which he decided to then go and explore. He spent several winters there and decided he quite liked it, and it would be a good place for him, being in exile, to set up shop, if you like. So he returned home, probably in secret, to Iceland, where everything began, and tried to lure his friends away because he wanted to make a small settlement there. But whereas Iceland was named in order to deter people, Greenland was named for the very opposite reason. He thought, they're never going to come if I tell them exactly whit it is like. It's pretty unappealing and it is pretty cold." So he called it Greenland, because, as a Norse saga goes, "Men will greatly desire to go there if the land has a good name". So nothing to do with the fact that there was anything green there. It was all a marketing exercise. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 06/11/17 (mardy, grouch, grumpy, fussbudget)

I was really privileged earlier this year to do a bit of work on an initiative between the Oxford English Dictionary and National Poetry Day and the experience was to find poets who would write about local words. And so a shortlist was made of some of our favourite local words and one of the words was one of my favourites which is mardy, and that's become quite national now as an adjective for meaning sulky or moody, but very much associated with the North ans the Midlands originally. And particullarly in Nottinghampshire, in fact, the first refference that we have of it is from 1882 and a glossary that says "a crosspatchy child in Nottinghapshire is called a mardy child". Ans so I thought I would look at the lexicon for curmudgeons today cos there are so many words in the English language to describe curmudgeons. Sadly we don't know where curmudgeons itself comes from, it's one of the big mysteries. But to go back to mardy, it is simply a spelling, a different spelling for marred, which, in term, if you mar something, you spoil it and we talk about spoilt child so it's as simple as that, really. But whot about grouch? That goes back to a variant of grudge, and in fact grouse as well, if you grouse about something, then you moan about it. That goes back to a Norman French word, so perhaps the Norman aristocrats after 1066 could be a little bit grouchy sometimes. Grumpy, you can first find grumpy in the expression "grumps and humps". You've got the grumps and humps on and both of them represent the sound of discontent. And, finally, two of my favourites, a fussbudget is a surly, sulky fusspot, basically, and an old word for a person filled like a bag with a sort of discintent, if you like. And, finally, if you are really melancholy and a little bit mardy, then you also have the mubblefubbles, which is just the most brilliant wors for somebody, as I say, who's just perhaps on a Monday morning not quite with it and a little bit irritable. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 01/11/17 (doggone, zounds, gadzooks, gorblimey, deuce and dickens, mince)

Thank you to Mtthew Barnes, who e-mailed in and said, "Couid you explain how we ended up with the expression "doggone""? You have to say that with a bad Anerican accent, really - doggone. Where does it come from? And so most of us would associate doggone, as I say, with America and perhaps slightly vexed cowboys in Hollywood westerns. And from its very earliest days, it goes back to the mid-1800s, it's been used to express annoyance, ecpecially in the phrase, "Well I'll be doggone". And dogs don't really come into it at all. I don't think Matthew will be surprised by that. The expression is simply what's known as a minced oath. In other words, it's a euphemism for a swear word or a profanity in some kind. Ans doggone is simply a politer way of saying goddammit, with "dog" operating here as back slang for God. Back slang is when a word is usually just simply spelt backwards, like yob for boy, etc. But in past centuries, there was a lot of oath mincing going on in English, because direct references to God were considered profane, and of course still are for some people too. So, the old-fashioned exclamation, zounds or zoonds, which you will find in comics quite often, is the euphemism for God's wounds, or by God's wounds, reffering to the stigmata of Christ. And gadzooks was a softening of  by God's hooks, which is an allusion to the nails of the cross. And there are so many more, and don't always involve Jesus or Christ. Many do, like jeepers creepers, Jiminy Cricket, beggora, etc, but for Peter's sake, that's another one that we think of, that was St. Peter who was being reffered to there. Gorblimey we know was God blind me. That was a euphemism for that. Deuce and dickens - what the deuse?, what the dickens? - both euphenism for the  Devil. But I mentioned that word minced oath, which is linguistic term for what these are, and they're called that because to mince your words means to cut them short. Mince goes back to the Latin minutus, which gave us minute obviously, but meaning small. And to mince one's words, we have Shakespeare to thank for exact expression. It goes back to Genry V, and Henry says to his French princess, "I know no ways to mince it in love, but directly to say I love you". And from that it was to speak candidly and fully, not mincing your words, not mincing youe oaths at all, but to give them in full without any cutting up at all. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 03/11/17 (rule of thumb)

I had a e-mail in from Dominic Wilson, who asked, where does the phrase "rule of thumb" originate? And there's a popular and really unpleasant story attached to this expression, which came about in around the 17th century, namely that it reffered to the law that allowed a husband to beat his wife, provided that the stick he used was no thicker that his thumb. And we do know around this time that men were allowed to punish his wives to a resonable degree. Women were seen as the weaker vessels, as being intellectually and phisically inferior, and in law, in fact, a married couple were seen as one entity in which the husband had all the rights and horrible punishments were arount at the time though, something called the scold's bridle, which was said to put on any wife who excessively nagged her husband and it was an incredibly barbarous thing which had a bit on it, sometimes the bit had spikes, that would pierce the tongue and the palate, so really pretty horrible. And I say "reasonable extent", as I say, that wasn't really explained in law, but thankfully there was a little bit of light in that one woman who was killed with a pestle, believe it or not, by her husband, was deemed finally to have been unlawfully killed and her husband was condemned for murder. So we do know that this was all around at the time, but thankfully, there was no such ruling allowing a husband to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. It's never been found in the law books, but the story did become urban myth, even at the time, so you can find lots of contemporary cartoons satirising the judge who was said to have been responsible, who was called Sir Francis Buller. He was quite draconian in his sentences, it has to be said, and he was much criticised by other judges at the time for being hasty and prejudiced. But, as I said, he didn't really , if you look at his history, pass this particular law, but in this case we should be grateful that the origin of the expression is much less colourful than that. It simply reffers to the use of the thumb for measuring things. It's a spit ans sawdust approximation of measurement, and in textile trade, we still have that, for example, so a thumb's breadthis the practiceof allowing a thumb in addition to each yard of cloth measured. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 02/11/17 (villa, village and villain)

Thank you to Christine Robinson, who e-mailed in Sothampton, who is wondering if words like villa, village and villain all have a common origin. And Christine is spot-on. There is a common root. Let's go back to a villa first. That comes frome the Latin for a small country seat, country being an operative word there. And it reflected the fact that for the ancient Romans and Greeks, a villa wasn't just a single residence, it was a country mansion with lots and lots of building attached, so farm building and lots of houses on its estates. As you can imagine, these were occupied by people of some noble birth, some nobility and wealth. But collectively, these buildings - it's a hamlet, if you like, it was pretty much a small hamlet - constituted what they called the villaticum. And over the centuries, this passed into Italian as  villaggio - a G had crept in somehow, we're not quite sure how - and a word that travelled across various countries and tongues until, of course, it arrived in English as  village, reflecting the fact, that it was all these buildings together. Now - to that last in the trio - that's villa and village - the villain. In medieval English, a villain was simply a feudal tenant who was attached to a nobleman's villa. It was a kind of tied serfdom, if you like. In medieval times, most ordinary citizens were villeins. You'll fing that sense retained today with the E-I-N instead of A-I-N. Historians would call them villeins in that sense. They had a fairly toughlife. They had to work incredibly hard. And if you look back to the Roman times, a decree was passed that they weren't actually allowed to leave the estate at any point, apart from to go to war or to deliver a very important message. Otherwise they were not allowed to leave the land. And this was because of a fear that food production would decline if peasants were alowed to travel freely, or if these villeins were allowed to travel freely. Because country dwellers - and these villas were in the country, as I say - were often regarded as bumpkins or yokels, et cetera, they were seen as being uneducated. And not just that, sometimes they were seen as having criminal intent. And that's how our modern sense of villain crept in. The idea was they didn't have much money, and so they had to steal or do other nefarious things in order to make a living. So, villa, village and villain - Christine is absolutely right - they all share a common ancestry. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 31/10/17 (barmy, balmy)

I had a nice e-mail in from Tom Dixon. He said, "Why is BARMY and BALMY used interchangeably?" So balmy with the L, and barmy with the R. He said, "I always thought balmy reffered to weather". He's absolutely right. Balmy of weather with the L is a correct adjective, but for centuries, we've been using the two in parallel to mean also somebody who's a little bit foolish, a little bit mad, if you like, if they're a bit barmy. So I thought I would give you the origin of those two words cos they are very different, but they're quite informative, I think. If you take the balmy,the weather with the L, that goes back to balm in the 13th century, ehich is an aromatic substamce consisting of resins that are mixed with oil. Much prised for their medicinal properties as well as their fragrance. It was widly prised for treating wounds. It's been used in many military endeavours.  Used to soothe and to heal and also used to preserve the dead many centuries ago. Of course, we preserve, if you excuse the pun, the balm in embalming. We use the same resin to preserve the daed. On to the weather, though. If something is balmy, it's soothing or gentle, so you've got this idea of something that heals wounds, that calms things down. And mild, gentle weather, perhaps soothing weather, if you like, hence was called balmy quite early on. But that sense of mad or slightly crazy crept in about three centuries ago, so it was there quite early on, and perhaps people were thinking that old people, particularly, were a bit foppish, a bit mild-mannered, a little bit soft in the head, perhaps that was the link there. But barmy is the correct adjective to use if you do want to say somebody is a little bit foolish. It's used rather affectionately these days. That goes back to the froth in the head of beer.  That is called barm. It's part of fermentation process and, again, a couple of centuries ago, inmates in lunatic assylum were said to be frothing in the mouth so much, so exited and excitable that they were said to be barmy just like that froth in the head of beer. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 30/10/17 (Gotham and knickers)

I'm going to tell a story that draws an unlikely link between Gotham City, of the Batman movies, and ladies' underwear. It goes bach, believe it or not, to a sleepy little village in Nottinghamshire, which got by the name of Gotham. And in the medieval period, the people of Gotham, they got a bit of reputation for being very, very foolish. But it may all have been a slightly subtle ruse, because at the time, King John - who was a villain in all the Robin Hood stories - wanted to built a public highway through the village of Gotham, and thix didn't go down very well with the villagers. So they may have wanted to feign madness, because at this time madness  thought to be highly contagious.   So, clearly, if they were thought to be mad, then King John would not want to go anywhere near them. And the ruse worked, it didn't go through and it remained a slightly sleepy village. If you go forward a few centuries from that time, and you'll find somebody called Washington Irving. And Washington Irving was living in New York, and he worked on a satirical magazine, which was called Salmagundi. And in one of the issues, he reffered to New York as Gotham, and he spelt it in the same was as Gotham. And he knew - he knew his history clearly - because he was inplying that, actually, anyone who wanted to live in New York mast be just slightly foolish and a little bit mad. It was picked up, it seems, in the 1930s by the creators of Batman, who remembered the satirical magaxine ans thought it was the perfect name for New York City. Whether or not they knew the foolish connotation or not, who knows? Anyway to finish off with the ladies' underwear, Washington Irving was also, through his character Dietrich Knickerbocker, the one who gave us the knickerbockers. Because the characters, the Dutch settlers in New York, wore these particular trousers. Knickerbocker, many, many centuries later, was then shortened to knickers. So, Gotham in Batman has, yes, some very tenuous link with a pair of ladies' knickers. But I like the story. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 27/10/17 (cliffhanger, end up on the cutting-room floor, being in the can, silver screen

I've been browsing through the Oxford Dictionary's blog, which I recommended quite often, just a free site with lots of lovely facts and stories about the English language. And thix one remind me of all the words that have passed into English from movies and movie-making, film-making. Since its inception in the early 20th century, lota and lots of worda have travelled into English. Cliffhanger - that of course came from shots of people literally hanging onto a cliff by their fingertips, becamr a famous film with Sylvester Stallone as well. Something might end up on the cutting-room floor, we might just say that, that obviously refers back to parts of the film that were literally cut out from the reel and discarded onto the floor. We talk about things being in the can, reffering to the canister in which a film reel is held once editing is complete. But there's one that took me by surprise and I didn't know this one, and I love it. We talk about the silver screen - that goes back to people first visiting the pictures, as they well called, and movie screens were coated with reflective metallic paint, so it resulted in a really highly reflective silver surface to better display the projected images, so from the screen projector. And, obviously, as technologies moved on, then that died out. So there you go, just the smattering of words that have passed into English from the cinema. But I like silver screen, I didn't realise it was literally silver to being with. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 26/10/17 (handsome)

I had an e-mail from Moira. Didn't want to give her last name. But Moira is a keen viewer of Coundown, so thanks for writing in. And she wanted to know what the "hand" is doing in "handsome". It's a good question. Again, it's one of those words that you don't usually question. And the earliest evidence for it is surprisingly early - it's 1440. And it's an English-to-Latin bilingual dictionary for kids. And it says, "Handsum, of esy to hond werke"- hand work - "manualis". That was the Latin translation. And essentially, they were saying that something handsome was easy to control or... or handleable, if you like. So, how do you go from something that's easy to handle to striking? Well, it's a kind of... process that happens a lot in English, really. If you thing about something that's easy to use, as I say, a sort of malleable in some way, that it makes life a lot easier. It's sutable for a particular job, it makes life agreeable and pleasant. And handsome slipped into English really to mean well proportioned and elegant arount the 16th century. So things could be particularly handsome because they looked nice as well as being sutable for a particular job. And of course these things nice and thn people could start to look nice, too, and it was Spenser, Edmund Spenser, who was one of the first to use it in his famous Faerie Queene. And then Shakespeare, who loved his Spenser, use it in Richard III in one of his big rants. He talks about "a handsome stripling". So, it's a long, long journey that handsome has taken through the ages. But "hand" is still preserved there, really, if you think about sort of manual work and how that was its original meaning. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 25/10/17 (going for a Burton)

Well, I mentioned yesterday, talking about aviation slang and the words and expressions that have come from the skies, so we talk about "going for a Burton" or "gone for a Burton", which is one of the phrases that attracts most debate, probably, in ethymological circles. Lots and lots of theories abound for this one. What we do know is that it definetily does go back to the RAF, which was a home for a lot of slang, actually, in current English. It means, if you've gone for a Burton in the RAF, it means you have been killed, sadly. So, ruined or destroyed. But of course, we use it slightly more figuratively now, to mean, it's just... it's broken. So you might say, "My laptop has gone for a Burton". But what is the Burton and where did the phrase begin? Well, two main theories. I have to say, there are many, many more, but two main ones which hold most water... which is slightly inappropriate pun for the skies. But they both demonstrate tha black humour, really, that is needed to deal with the fact that during the World Wars, aviators did die, obviously, in some of the horrible dogfights that took place up there. The first involves the English town of Burton-upon-Trent, which is known for its brewing industry. And a Burton came to refer to a type of delicious ale. And when an aviator crashed into the sea, which is known, of course, as "the drink", informally, the idea was that the person was aabsent because they'd gone for a pint of beer. So it was a nice, friendly, slightly affectionate euphemism for an aviator that had died in action. The second one involves a very famous family of tailors called Montague Barton. Burton's, of course, you can still find, I think, in high streets today. But if an airman went for a Burton, he'd died and gone to be fitted for a wooden suit. That was the idea. So, again, a lot of black humour there, that he'd got a wooden overcoat, if you like, ie a coffin because he'd died, again, in action. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 24/10/17 (leading edge, pushing the envelope, flat spin)

I've been talking recently about words that began their life at sea. So, many, many words in English have nautical origins behind them. So, I thought I would look at aviation today. So, words and expressions that were born in the skies. We're going to is start with "leading edge". We talking about something that is leading edge, it's at the vanguard of development, it's right there at the forefront. It was, to be fair, first found on the seas as well, but when it came into aviation terminology, it meant the foremost edge of an aerofoil, especially a wing or again a propeller blade. There's another one which again you might think of as management speak and that's "pushing the envelope". Slightly annoying, pushing the envelope, but it means to extend the boundaries of what's possible, thinking outside the box, if you like. That goes back to 1940s, where in aviation parlance, an envelope or flight envelope, the definition is a set of limiting combinations of speed and altitude or speed and range possible for a particular aircraft of aircraft engine. And so, to push that envelope is to test it beyond its limits, almost, which of course is an important thing when you researching an aeronautical capabilities. Finally, we talk about being in a "flat spin", often, these days, if we're really agitated or slightly panicked about something. Probably, you can guess this one. It does go back to a serious situation for the pilot which may well lead to a sense of panic, and that's the aircraft descending whilist staying almost horizontal. Not a very nice experience at all. That goes back to 1917. So, all of those began in the skies. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 23/10/17 (cut and run, copper bottom, up sticks)

I've been looking at words and expressions that began at sea, so I'm going to have three expressions, very quickly, for you today that began at sea. The first is to "cut and run". If you cut and run, you make a swift exit, usually from a tricky situation. In the age of sail, however, it meant something very different and much more literal, because a captain's options were very limited if an enemy ship came up to it and it was at anchor. Obviously, he didn't have very much time to move, so if the situation was very, very urgent and staying put would lead to a loss of life, then the captain might deside it was safer and more prudent in fact just to cut the anchor cable and to leg it, living to fight another day, and that's exactly what cutting and run meant. It was the literal cutting of the anchor cable. So that's cut and run. Copper bottom, we talk about giving a "copper-bottomed assurance", a "copper-bottomed guarantee", which is cast-iron, if you like, to use another expression. And those two goes back not to sturdy saucepans, but to sea, and the use a copper to cover the bottom of wooden ships, and it was done specifically to protect ships from a really pesky mollusc that was called the teredo, or, in fact, is called the teredo, and it drills into wood. Copper also prevented shells and weeds accumulating on the bottom, which also hampered a boat's progress. But then it slipped into mainstream language, meaning something that was secure and sound because it had that copper bottom. And finally, to "up sticks", this was a bit of a surprise to me, that too goes back to a ship where the sticks in fact are either masts or the portion of a mast. A mast can often be unshipped, ie, removed from their regular or a fixed position when the ship's at anchor, but when you want to prepare the ship to set off, again, the mast, or masts, the sticks, in other words, must be upped. In other words they must be set up, and once that happens, the ship is ready to sail away. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 20/10/17 (swinging the lead, marine)

I don't suppose anyone's ever accused you of swinging the lead. I think probably not. But if they had, they would've been accusing you of being a sriker basically, a lazy malingerer, and the British idiom, definitely British, it's first founded in the Army slang, so during the First World War, but it probably came onshore via the vital Naval activity which is depth sounding, so measuring the depth of water in which a ship stands or floats, if you like. So masuring between the ship and the seabed or river bottom. And these were in the days before sonar transformed the entire exercise. Soa lead was a very large lump of lead that was suspended from a rope and that was known in full as a lead line, and it was lobbed from the side by the leadsman and it came to reat on the seabed. And it had markers, knots, or different sort of measurements, if you like, so that the leadsmen could gauge just how far the ship was from the sea bottom and it would ensure, of course, that the vessel didn't run aground, which was incredibly important. That lead was incredibly heavy, so it could weight anything from 9 lb to 32 lb. So particularly in rough weather, if you can imagine, that was a pretty demanding task. So that all seems a bit puzzling. Why then did such a difficult task come to mean something that involved, you know, somebody being lazy, basically. Well, it's probably because in some cases, the leadsman, instead of dropping the weight right to the seabed, would shrink his duty and just swing it over the side and then sort of happily sit there, if you like, without giving the exact measurement. But more likely the meaning stemmed from the rivalries, traditional rivalry between the Army and the Navy, because when I had to research my book, and I spoke with sailors and soldiers, they had such joking acronyms for ewach other and the ones that the Army insists on for any marine is that "marine" itself is an acronym for Muscles Are Required, Intelligence Not Expected. So, swinging the lead, yes, something you,ve never, never done, but it's a really good expression, I think, for somebody, who's just really bunking off and not pulling their weight. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 19/10/17 (brass monkey)

Anyone investigating the origins of words will quite often refer to a certain body that operates under the acronym CANOE. And CANOE stands for Committee to Ascribe a Nautical Origin to Everything. That's because so many words in English are said to have begun their lives on the high seas and, as you can probably tell, not all of them are true. But one of the most hotly disputed stories of all involves the saying brass monkeys. If you talk about brass monkeys weather, it's incredibly cold and in full, the expression is to freeze the balls of brass monkey. It's said to come frome triangles that supported large kind of pyramid-style stacks of iron candles that were held on sailing ships - military sailing ships. But the plot does thicken a little bit, because we do know a naval cannon itself was known as a monkey and the boys that loaded the cannons, the cannons on naval ships were called powder monkeys. So a nautical origin is just about possible, but where it gets confusing  is that the cannonballs came along after a whole line of other sayings involving brass monkey. Most of them involve extremes of hot or cold weather. So you would have, "It's hot enough to singe the hair off a brass monkey", "hot enough to burn the ears off a brass monkey", you could also talk the legs, not off the donkey, but off of  brass monkey. You might not have the brains of a brass monkey, or you could touch the heart of a brass monkey if you did something very, very kind. There's a whole line of expressions involving this brass figure. Which means in the end, with all those bodily references, that the balls in question are simply testicles with an added punning referense to those monkeys that I mentioned, which were the cannons on naval ship. So the sea does come into itsomewhere, but it's a very, very thick plot that you have to really kind of get into to find out the thruth. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 18/10/17 (spitting image)

I had an e-mail from Jen Dalton, so thanks to Jen, she asked where spitting image comes from because she's often told that she's the spitting image of her sister. It's evolved through various incarnation over the centuries so it's pretty old, this one, but they all convey the idea of an exact likeness to someone or something else. First emerged in the early 1800s, because people would describe a child particularly as the spit of their mother or father. In other words, they looked so identical it's almost as though they've been spat directly out of their parents' mouth. A very direct image, if you like, a little bit crude, maybe. And a little later, this idea of spit was combined with image, that's just for added emphasis. So there was a Victorian romance, for example, which goes, "She's just like the poor lady that's dead and gone, the spit and image she is". And that same phrase, spit and image, if you said it very quickly, it sounds a little bit like spitten image and spitten was the old past tense of spit. So today we say spat, but in the olden days it was spitten. And that in turn was then misheard as spitting, so it's basically sort of trips of the ear, if you like, we hear something and then we register that in writing and that's, of course, where the expression remains today. But it was literally as though somebody has been spat out of somebody else's mouth,  and I hope that answers Jen's question. Spitting image was ones spitten image. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 17/10/17 (Cedric, Fiona, Jessica, Kim, Pamela, Vanessa)

I'm going to look to first names that have come from literature cos very often we know about words that were coined by various authora and dramatists. Shakespeare, we know, was a prolific coiner or at least populariser of new words but we're less, perhaps, familial with the first names, the baby names, if you like, that come from our authors. So this is... I have to credit the Oxford Dictionaries Blog, which I love. Free site you can just go and browse. Wonderful origins like this. The first one is Cedric. Not so much used nowdays, but Sir Walter Scott invented that for a character in Ivanhoe, his 1820 novel, and he apparently based it on Cedric, and he was an Anglo-Saxon king form the sixth century, so he had to look a very long way back. Fiona was invented by the Scottish poet, James Macleod. It's thought to be an English version, if you like, of the Gaelis worf meaning white or fair haired. That's quite nice. Jessica. We have to thank Shakespeare for the popularity of this one. He calls Shylock's daughter in The Merchant of Venice Jessica, possibly modelled after Iscah in the Bible, which means to behold, which is quite nice as well. Kim. This male name, and it was a male name at the time, was popularised by Rudyard Kipling in his novel, of course, Kim. And he took this as a shortening of his character's name which was Kimball. Kimberly has a completely different origin - that comes from a palace name in Norfolk. But we have Rudyard Kipling to thank for man being called Kim. Pamela was from Philip Sidney. He invented that for a 16th-century work - Arcadia. And finally, I like this one, cos it's very romantic - Vanessa. It's a poetic invention. It'a very clever as well because it was penned by Jonathan Swift who wrote an autobiographical poem, Cadenus and Vanessa, and it was about his relationship with Esther Vanhomrigh and he created the name, so it was slightly coded by taking the Van of her last name and combining with Essa, a pet form of Esther. So he was a very first person to coin the word Vanessa, which I think is quite lovely. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 16/10/17 (pedant, naughty, nice)

You know, how much I love reading dictionaries. And the reason is that the most of the words in everyday English have been in and sometimes out of circulation for centuries, and if you read something like the Oxford English Dictionary, a historical dictionary, you can see the story of a word right from its birth to its current meaning, and so many of them have been around for centuries. But there have been some very startling twists along the way. So a "pedant", in the 16th century, that was a schoolmaster, simply. But do you remember those ads for cream cake in the '80s, '90s and the slogan was "Naughty but nice"? It was a line that was writing bu Salman Rushdie, who used to be a copywriter. Well, those two words, "noughty" and "nice", have undergone a really long journey. So if you go back to the 14th century, "naughty" had a very, vety different meaning, and it draws on that word "nought". In other words, it was someboby who had nothing, they were paupers, they were just impoverished in every way. And that idea of being a pauper turned to somebody who was morally bad and wicked, in other words, they were poor in virtue. They had no good qualities at all. So you can see that that one's brcome much more diluted over time and now "noughty" 's a lottle bit mischievous, if yuo're describing a child. And "nice" is another really odd one. Goes back to the Latin "nescius", meaning ignorant. And it was "ne-", meaning not, the negative, and "scius" there is linked to science, it was all about knowledge, so it was somebody who had no knowledge. And as a result they were foolish of silly. So a very different maening of "nice" to today. It then encompassed so many different qualities like cowardice or laziness, etc. But eventually, in the Middle Ages, it took on shyness and reserve. That meand somebody who did not neccessarily know a lot - still going back to that root - but were somehow quite shy and reserved with it. And those were seen to be very, very nice qualities - "nice" - and it's how we ended up with "nice" today. Although, it may gone full circle, because if you call someone "nice" of a pair of throusers "nice" those days, it doesn't always meanthat it's particularly gushing compliment. But those are just a few of the examples of thing that have just come such a long way. And who knows, they may still evolve over the next 100 or 200 years. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 13/10/17 (calumny, chalenge, gladiator, gladioli, knife)

Today we have trolling and online abuse. But if you goes back to the Middle Ages, if you heaped calumny on head of a man by exposing him to slander or false accusations, which was calumny means, he would probably in all likelihood challenge you to a duel. And in that collection of words that we've just spoken there, you can see directly how one word can actually spawn another, which is obviously how English evolves. Because the term calumny actually gave birth to the word challenge. They both goes back to the same, calumnia, the Latin root, simply because slander and lies so often led to a deadly duel. Duel, incidentally, goes back to duellum, which was a fancy form of Latin, bellum, meaning war. So it's linked to being belligerent and bellicose. But two opponents in an argument, in a duel, might also take to the sword, and if they decided to formalise it, maybe with a little bit belligerence, to fencing. And we actually take a few words from fencing as well, including foible. A fouble is a weak point of a sword. The strong point is the forte. But we get that directly from fencing. But lots of other words in English from sword. Gladiator, because the Romans' word for sword was gladius. And the wild lilies that are the gladioli as well, because of their sword-shaped leaves. And finally the Saxons were warriours with knives because the old Norse, sax, meant a short sword or a dagger. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 12/10/17 (falcone, tercel, lore)

I went to a National Trust house quite recently, and they had a falconry display, and it remind me again of all the terms that we have in English that came from this sport that was so popular in medieval times. Particularly after the Normans came over, and the Normans aristocracy broughn falconry with them. Knowledge of its vocabulary was seen as a real mark of the elite, if you like. It was a real badge of a social status. So much so, in fact, that one person described it as, "distinguishing a gentleman from a yeoman, and a yeoman from a villein". The villeins beign the servants that were attached to a villa, originally. But I just thought I'd give you  a quick whizz through some of the terms that comes from there. First of all, falcone itself goes back to the Latin for a sickle, because the sharpeness of the blade was said to be similar to the bird's hooked talons, if you like. The peregrine and peregrine falcon, that's from the Latin for piligrim, because they were often tracked on migration, as they were travelling, rather than in the nest. The male bird is called the tercel, and it goes back to the Latin tertius, meaning a third, either because the male is the third smaller then the female or, according to the legend,  the third egg in the clatch was said to produce a male bird. But perhaps the most surprising term of all from falcony rerers to a bunch of feathers with a bit of meat attached to a long string which was swund around the head of the falconer in order to recall the hawk. That's known as the lure. As I say, desined to attract the falcon so that it always returns. And a Norman nobleman would have called it "a lure". And of course that's where we get the idea of something that's powerfully appealing of mysteriously attrective today, the "allure' that has spilled into English mainstream. It goes all the wat back to falconry. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 11/10/17(argy-bargy, hoity-toity)

I had an e-mail from Geoffrey Davies who asked, "Where does the term agry-bagry comes from? I get a bargy bit, but why argy?" And it's a good question. And it's an example of what linguists call, and I've mentioned it on the show before, a reduplicative compound. It's a combination of words that echo each other, that rhyme in some way. And often one of this word has very little inherent sense, and it is simply added on to provide a bit of a sound effect, if you like. English is asolutely full of concoctitions like this. Higgledy-piggledy. Shilly-shally. Helter-skelter. Hugger-mugger. Roly-poly. Hioty-toity. Hoity-toity is a good one, becuse to hoit was an old verb for indulgigng in riotous mirth. It's a great definitionin the dictionary, which I quite like. But back to argy-bargy... It's actually the argy element, that carries the sense of the word, not the bargy, as Geoffrey thought. It's a variation on argle, which was a Scottish dialect form of argue, and has been around since the 16th century. And to argle-bargle became a sort of joking reference, really, to bandying words in a very stubborn, obstinate argument over something. And the bargle was there simply to add a rhyming element, but perhaps that element of pushing and shoving and barging somebody around, whether literally or metaphorically, but it all goes back to argy-bargy, which I almost like better then argy-bargy. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 10/10/17 (lieutenant, could, pease)

I have to thank Kevin Loughran, I think is how he pronunces his name. He e-mailed in to say, "Is that any reason, historical or otherwise, why we pronounced lieutenant with an F sound?" It's some of the big riddles of English. It's true. In the normal British pronunciation, of course, we do say "leff-tenant"whereas in America they say "lou-tenant", which seems much more plausible. WE're not completely sure where the British pronunciation came in but our most plausible guess, really, is that at some point before the 19th century, when it began to change, the U at the end of the Old French, lieu, was read and pronounced as a V. This may have been done simply because it was easier to pronounce because lieu doesn't exactly trip off the English tongue. But it may also have been done in error. Vere often these errors happen by association. There was another word around at the same time and that was lief, and that was used as a term of address, particularly towards a superior. So it may be that somehow in the heads of English speakers the lief got mixed up with the lieu and the "leff" crept in to the lieutenant. So I hope that answers Kevin's question. As I say we can't be completely sure, but that's our best guess. I talked about mistakes in English etymology, which that may have been an example of. There are quite a few, in fact. The could in the past tense of can, that never had an L originally. That just crept because shall ans will kept their Ls in the past tense so we shoved one in could, as well. Similarly, pease, we used to have pease pudding. We thoughtif you have a lot of pease, you must be able to have one pea. So we kind of invented our own singularity in that case. So many, many examples in English where we've got someone slighlty wrong in the past and we're left with a result.