"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.