"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 12/03/18 (milkshake duck)

We've been talking about animals a lot over the last few days with Liz. And, of course, we used animals for metaphores in English all the time. We pig out on something. We duck to aviod the ball. We're looking foxy, perhaps. Or toadying up, which we've had today, toadying. But bird feature quite a lot as well. I've talked before on Countdown about how pedigree goes back to the pie de grue in French, the foot of crane, because the lines of descent of family trees look a little bit like a crane's foot. One of my favourite ethymologies, that one. But there was one very unexpected one last year, and it seems to be staying the course. I'm not sure you'll be familiar with it, Nick, but it's milkshake duck. It was s result of social media, and it was a tweet by the tweeter Pixelated Boat. And it was, "The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck", this is how it went, "a lovely duck that drinks milkshake". So, really nice, happy image. And then, "Oh, apologies, we regrad to inform you that the duck is racist". And the gist of the joke, essentially, is that people can become incredibly famous very, very quickly on the internet, which we've all witnessed, and wildly popular, but then very often they are exposed for being, could be homofobic, could be racist - for rather unpleasant attributes. And milkshake ducks are exactlt that. They are internet stars, if you like, who quickly fall out of favour because of their offensive actions. 2017 saw very many of those. People who absolutely went viral and then people startred to look into their past. What was happening was people were going through endless years of social media posts etc, trying to find, trying to catch someone out, if you like. So a lot of people saw it as a real sign of schadenfreude. But who knew that a molkshake-drinking duck would join all that words together like pedigree and cranberry, etc? And maybe one day will also go into the English dictionary. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 09/03/18 (newfangled)

I have a tweet form Jake Isham who wondered where newfangled comes from. What's the "fangled" in newfangled, and what is it all about? It's a good question. Its source its a really, really old verb, fang, which meant... And this is in the ninth century, so going back a long way. In fact, you can still find it in some dialects today. It meant to grasp, or to seize, or to catch, and it comes from a Germanic word, fangen, to catch. So newfangled really emerged... First of all, it was newfangle, I have to say, as something that was newly seized, if you like. So it was something that was novelty, so it was kind of cought on to, or latched on to, because it seemed new and exiting, and we all know all about that. So you'll find lots and lots of proverb warning people away from looking at newfanglers, cos they were sort of  fripperies, or trumperies, as they used to be called as well. The first citation of newfangled, the adjective with an -ed, is from A Disputation of Purgatory, and that was a polemic written in 1531 by English Protestant writer who was called John Frith. And he said, "Let us see and examine more of this newfangled philosophy". He came unstuck because he was quiestioning the belief in purgatory and ended up being burned at the stake for it. But newfangled clearly wasn't taken particularly well when he was talken about purgatory. Just to say, that fang, that fangen, that fang word meaning to capture or sieze also, of course, gave us fang, meaning a sharp tooth. It went on a long journey from something that was caught, it was applied to prey, and then to the teeth that did that catching and did that eating of the prey. So, strangely, strange to think that newfangled and teeth and canines of the animals comes together, but they do in that single word. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 08/03/18 (the whole nine yards)

I have a big ethymological mystery. It's a phrase or expression, that's attracted more conjecture, possibly, than almost any other - apart from "cloud nine" - any other idiom that I can find. And that's "the whole nine yards". So many theories abound for this one. I thought I would whizz through a few of them, and then maybe point to one that could be the best explanation of it, although we're still not completely sure. One is that the whole nine yardswas a rubbush required to fill a whole dustbin lorry, or that it was the standard amount of cloth needed.  Now, cloth certainly was made originally in multiples of three. So the whole nine yards was said to be a standard measurement, perhaps to make a three-piece suit. So that is sounds quite plausible. The volume or size required for a rich man's grave, which is quite an interesting one. There are some records showing that, if you were wealthy, you might be able to afford nine yards of earth around you, or at least of space around you, which is a little bit morbid. So many. One of the most plausibe ones, actually, is because it came about pretty much in print after World War II, is that, during World War II, the 50-calibre machinegun ammunition belts could be let our exactly nine yards. So it's said that each soldiers would say to each other, "Give them a full nine yards," for the enemy. So that one is definitely close to the top of plausible ones. But, intriguingly, fairly recently, some new evidence has come to light, and that's about some jargon in the space programme in the 1960s. And there was the article "How To Talk Rocket". So it was a glossary of, as I say, jargon that was spoken by astronauts, and its defined the whole nine yards as an item-by-item report on a new project. And the conjecture is that that the report would have been written on folded stacks of perforated printer paper that could be let out the whole nine yards. But who knows? Perhaps it did originated with NASA. Only time will tell. I won't say, "Watch this space", and use a very bad pun. But that could be the origin of it. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 02/03/18 (talk of the devil)

I have a look behind the phrase "talk of the devil, which we bandy aroung these days. Talk of the devil is said when someone arrives at a scene just as they are being spoken of. Nothing sinister about it, as I say, we tend to use it fairly playfully these days. And, yet, if you look back over its history you will see that it wasn't used light-heartedly at all. The full form, ans you are probably familiar with this too, was "speak of the devil and he will appear". And it originated in England. You will find it not just in Old English texts but in Latin texts as well. The firsr record that we have were in around the 1666, which is quite appropriate. The English say, "talk of the devil and he is presently at your elbow", and a book of proverbs from the same time was, "talk of the devil and see his horns". Now, around this time you could still refer to the devil. Shakespeare did it lots, for example. So, in The Comedy Of  Errors you will find, "Marry, he must have a long spoon, that must eat with the devil". But, for the most part, there was an incredibly strong superstitious belief that it was really dangerous to mention the devil by name. And, even the clergy got in on the act too. The Dean of Westminster, 1856, a man called Richard Trench, wrote, "talk of the devil and he is bound to appear containts a very needful warning about curiosity of evil". So lots and lots of warnings there. And it was rather like mentioning God in public. You did everything you could to avoid it, which is why we have so many minced oaths which I often talk about on the programme. Things like gadzooks for God's hooks, the hails of crucifix, Gordon Bennet, cor blimey, Jiminy Cricket for Jesus Christ, etc. We have a lot of those. We also brought in quite a lot of euphenisms for the devil too, so "what the dickens" has nothing to do with Charles Dickens and everything to do with the devil. It goes back to the 16th century, probably the play on a popular surename of the times, Dickens, but it was used as a substitute for the devil. We have The Prince of Darkness, of course. We have the horned one and we have old Nick. And old Nick, there are two theories about this. One is that it goes back to the word "iniquity", and it is a shortening of that, inequity meaning evil. Or, that it comes from the first name of Machiavelli, Niccolo. Machiavelli, of course, wrote The Prince in which he said that some, in order to gain power some unethical methods were just about all right but people exaggerated this claim and saw it as justification for evil. So it's possible that Old Nick comes from that too. Yes, when you say talk of the devil these days, just have a think about how serious it was many, many centuries ago when you did absolutely everything you could, not just to avoid the devil but also his name. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 01/03/18 (People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones)

I am going to look at the strange story behind a proverb, and that proverb is, "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones". In other words, beware of criticing someone if you youself to exactly the same criticism. It makes transparent sense, if you excuse the pun, but there is actually an interesting story behind it. First of all, it started off as something a little bit different. It warned against throwing stones atan enemy whose head was made of glass. That's how in was in Chaucer's day, and then it crossed over to houses, when the use of glass in domestic architecture was really increasing. This is around the 17th century, when it is really came to the fore, when the rich were afforded the luxury of fully glazed houses and windows. The poor still had to make do with no windows at all or wooden shutters, etc. But it was a real indicator of wealth if you could afford glass. Thomas More in his Utopia wrote of a land where windows are made of glass to allow light in an the wind with it. Worth remembering that "window" goes back to "vindauga", which is a very old word, meaning the eye of the wind, which I always think is quite beautiful. Anyway, in Elizabethan England, glass window were still a luxury, so much so if you look at the wills of the time, you'll find  that windows were bequeathed to heirs, cos glass was seen as being so valuable. That gives you a little background to the story, to the proverb, but it doesn't tell you the whole story. The reason why its began to involve glass houses may lie in the exploits of the Duke of Buckingham. He was a favourite and possible lover of James I, and James I call hin Steenie, after St Stephen, who had the face of an angel, so he was very enamoured of him, and when the Scottish-born king acceded to the throne in Britain... in England in 1603, it's said that London was flooded with Scotsmen, and at this time, JAmes I didn't have a very good relationship whith the Scotich nobility. He thought they were always trying to do him down, and he wanted to ingratiate himself with the English nobility. So the Duke of Buckingham, on his behalf, really, mounted a campaign of harassment against all these Scots who'd arriver in the capital city, and that included hiring mobs to go and throw objects at their windows at night, causing a complete havoc. Unsurprisingly, the Scots retaliated and it was completely chaos, but they went to the duke's house, which was known as the Glass House cos it had so many windows, and they did exactly the same thing. They threw stones, anything they coulf find, at the windows and smashed them in the process, and it's said that ehen Buckingham then complaine to the king, His Majesty is said to have uttered the lines, "Steenie, Steenie, those lived in glass houses, should be careful how they fling stones". 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 28/02/18 (literally, enormity, mediocre)

I'm going to talk about words which have almost completely lost their original meaning. So pedants would say, and I use pedant in a neutral sense, possibly, would say that we're using them in the wrong way but English, as we know, moves very quickly. So we can't always have what we want. "Literally" - our floor manager was saying how much he hates the use of literally to mean figuratively, so the complete opposite. Unfortunately, that version is now in the dictionary, much to a lot of people's disgust. not the primary meaning but one that is  used in informal speach. Enormity is another one that we use in a wrong way. I say it wrong in inverted commas. Enormity first meant something that was really wicked or vicious in some way. That's because a norma was a carpenter's square. So anything that was normal confirmed to absolutely perfect angles. It was correct, it was stright and it followed convention, if you like. Enormous then started to mean something that was abnormal and because it was abnormal, as I say, it was wicked and completely wrong. It's only much, much later that it began to mean something that was large in size but enormity has kept that bad meaning. So, strictly speaking, we should talk about enormousness if we are talking about the greatness of size of something. But the one I was going to concentrate on was mediocre. Because, mediocre, if we talk about the quiality of something being mediocre at best, it's never going to be very good. It's become byword for shoddy. But actually simply meant originally something that was of moderate quality. So it was neither all the way p, hor all the way down. It was borrowed from Latin, it came over with the Norman conquerors. It meant at a middle height. The "medi" meant medium and "ocris" meant actually ragged mountain, which means, in fact, that mediocre is linked ethymologically to a whole host of English words. We've got Acacia tree with its sharp thorns. Acerbic acid. Acme, the summit of something. Acne - spots which look perhaps like a little mountains on the skin. Acrobat, acropolis, acronym. Aglet, the tip of a shoelace. But if we were to stay true to the heart with mediocre, we would be using that for something that's OK. It's just your standerd quality - neinter good, nor bad. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 27/02/18 (flower names: anemone, hyacinth, cowslip, foxglove, iris, marigold-calendula, pansy)

I'm going round some flowers today and it was prompted by Charlotte Littlefair from Newcastle upon Tyne. She says she's a keen gardener and she says, "Please, could you shed some lights on the origin of common flower nemes? I once stumbled across the French for dandelion, "pissenlit" and was reminded of the old wives' tale that they make people wet the bed". And it's true, they are diuretics. She says, "Dandelion sounds like "dans le lit", in the bed. Is there a connection?" Um, sadly, not. It comes from "dent de lion", a lion's tooth,because the leaves of the dandeloin a shaped a little bit like a lion's tooth - at least that's what they thought in the Middle Ages. Um, flowers themselves, an antology was originally a bouquet of flowers. I'm going to give you a little bit of anthology of names of flowers, very quickly. Adonis was a Greek youth who was so handsome that even Aphrodite, who was the goddes of love, fell madly in love with him. And he was kiled in a boar hunt. She was so stricken with grief that the gods of the lower world allowed him to come up and share part of the year, each year with her. And from his blood, from Adonis' blood, sprang an anemone which is Greek for wind, which is a very beautiful story. I think I told before the story of Hayacinthus, who was loved by Apollo but killed accidentally by a discus, and from his blood Apollo caused a hyacinth to spring each yaer. So, two beautiful myths that lie buhind two flower names. The other extreme, the cowslip, Old English this time, very unromantic. It means cow slime or dung because the cowslip grows especially well in pastures. Apologies for that one. The foxglove is quite nice one, used for heart disease. But the blossomes look a little like the empty fingers of a glove, and the "fox" might be a refference to folk, fairy folk, because it was believed that these were the gloves of fairies, which is quite sweet. Iris - named after the Greek goddes of the rainbow. Marigold - named after Virgin Mary and the colour gold. And the botanical name of marygold, I should just say, is calendula. That comes from the Roman kalends, the first of the month. So named because like a little calendar, they bloom each month, which is quite pretty. And, finally, pansy, which Charlotte also mentioned in her e-mail, which is very pretty. A poetic mind once fancied that the dainty flowers had a thoughtful, pensive face. It gies back to the French pensee, meaning thought. And Ophelia, of course, famously said, that. She said, "Rosemary for rememberance, pancies for thought". So, beautiful, beautiful stories lies behind so many things in our garden. There are hundreds and hundreds more, but I hope I've satisfied some of Charlotte questions. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 26/02/18 (talking cold turkey)

We had a nice e-mail in from Mike and Liza, or Lee-za, I'm not sure which, but Lewin, so thank you to them. They say, "We are regular whatchers and were wondering the other day where going cold turkey comes from. Why turkey and not, say, broccoli?" The most popular suggestion that you will find  if you go looking for this is that it derives from the combination of goose bumps and what William Burroughs caled the cold burn that drug addicts suffer when they try to give up their habit. It sort of is linked in with the idea that there is a cold, clammy feel to the skin, really, rather like a turkey that's been plucked or even been refrigerated, so, all in all, very, very unpleasant. But there is a problem, slightly, with this theory, and that's because it ignores the fact that cold turkey was around quite for a few decades before this drug addiction sense came in. So if you look to a  cartoon in 1920, you will find someone saying, "Now, tell me on the square - can I get by with this for the wedding? Don't string me tell me cold turkey". And another one goes back earlier still to 1910, when somebody lost 5 000$ cold turkey, and it's use there in the sense of loosing it absolutely outright, so a sort of similar sense, if you like, to the way we use it today. But why turkey, which is Mike and Liza's question? Well, there is one theory attached to this, and it's quite a nice one, that it goes back to much a older idiom, 1800s we're talking now, in North America, and talking turkey. And to talk turkey you might thing is a bit like gobbledegook, as in talking is absolute rubbish, but it's the exact opposite - it means to talk frankly and directly. And there's a tale attached to it which invilves a Native American and a white American who went hunting together and desoded to divide the game. The white man was said to say, "I'll take the turkey and you take the buzzard, or you take the buzzard and I'll take the turkey", so trying to trick the Native American. And the Native American looked at him apparently very sternly and said, "Talk turkey to me", in other words, tell me straight. And that's possible that from that story, whether or not it's actually happened, the idea of talking frankly and plainly then went into talking cold turkey and than the idea that we have with drug addict today, so to follow a course with absolute directness, whatever the consequences. It's a very, very convoluted story but it might just be behind the idea of giving something upand the horrible consequences that come with it. It's worth it in the end, but it's not nice doing it. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 23/02/18 (being in stitches, to stitch someone up)

I havr to thank a Rowena Smith, who sent me a tweet saying, "Stitches normally refer to sewing, so why, when we're in fits of laughter, do we talk about being in stitches?" And it's a really good question. Obviously, stitshes are normally linked to sewing, but that's actually a pretty late development when you look back over the history of the word. So to go right back to the beginning, it's a Germanic origin, like so many words in English, thanks to our Germanic invaders. And its first meaning was a thrust or a stub, which makes sense when you realise that stitch is actually related to the English verb to stick. And so very first sense of stitch for our purposes today is a sudden, sharp pain back in those days caused, probably, by being stubbed or by being thrilled because, of course, the first meaning of thrill as well was to be a pierced. So this sense of stitch, in terms of the stabbing pain, is around 1 000 years old. And several meanings than derived from that idea of pain, if you like, one of which was conversely, if you think about it, a fit of laughter which has you in stitches, and that's because you were laughing so hard that you sides phisically hurt. Shakespeare, unsurprisingly, was one of the first to mention  a stitch brought on by laughing so, in Twelfth Night, Maria invites her fellow conspirators to observe Malvolio, and she says, "If you will laugh youselves into stitches, follow me". The stitch that we have when we run follows again this sense of a sharp pain in the side, so it goes back to that stabbing related to stick. The sewing use that we know today, the sort of loops, if you like, loops of thread, came along in the Middle Ages and, again, there is that idea there of puncturing a piece of cloth, if you like, with a needle and then sewing a piece of fabric that way. Not to have a stitch on follows from that idea of clothing, obviously. And there is one other idiom, if you like, in all of this which is to stitch someone up, to frame them or to betray them in some way. Stitching as in swindling has been around in criminal slang for quite a long time. you can find it in, I think, as far back as Victorian times. But to stich up, we only have a records of it from the 1970s. Lots of theories to this one. We talk about being stitched up like a kipper, which might mean the fish that was cut and gutted and then hung up to dry. Or it may be even refer to the kipper tie, in fact, which was very famous in the 1960s, looked a bit like a kipper. It may be an idea of being a sort of confined as if you've being sewn in to your kipper tie. But it's got a long, long trailing history, but wounding someone and puncturing their skin is at the heart of stitch and every single sense that's come after. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 22/02/18 (time: o'clock, am, pm, noon)

I had a tweet from Janice Scott, who asked why we started telling time in terms of o'clock and when we started doing it. And it's nice question. The original form of the expression, you probably won't be surprised to know, was of the clock and it goes back centuries to at least Chaucer's Day, so you'll find of the clock in the 14th century. Right up until Victorian times, you might still find a formal invintation being issued that eould give a certain time to arrive of the clock. English speakers tried lots and lots of different forms over the years. You might have heard two of clock, two a'clock, three at clock or simply three clock, which I quite like, but our standard form, o'clock, is first recorded in about the 18th century. And the use of 'o to mean of was well known, particularly at that time, and had been around ainse Middle Ages, so you'll find it in things like will-'o-the-wisp, jack-'o-lantern, that kind of thing, so it wasn't a greate push to come up with two o'clock, for example. And like two o'clock, most of the forms have been used with whole numbers only, so you won't find three thirty o'clock, we've never used that. But indication of morning and afternoon was a little bit more complicated, s othe expression was extended further. So it would be six o'clock at night, nine o'clock in the morning, and we still use that sometimes, but of course now we've graduated to am and pm. And am's short from ante meridiem, and pm's short from post meridiem - before and after noon. They were introduced the second half of the 18th century, so again they've been around for quite some time, they've made things a lot easier. But just while we're on time, it's worth just reminding that noon actually comes from the Latin, the Roman nona hora, which meant the ninth hour. Which seems a litte bit confusing, really, but they started counting not from midnight but from the hours of daylight, so nona hora was the ninth hour from daylight. So their noon was around three o'clock in the afternoon. And that nona, meaning ninth, has absolutely no relevance today, but it's just a bit of relic from ancient times, from ancient Roman times, that we still refer to nine when we talk about noon. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 21/02/18 (parsimonious, skinflints)

I have an e-mail from Anne Hunter in County of Durham, who says "parsimonious" is a greate word, but why are parsimonious people sometimes known as "skinflints"? I always think of Scrooge when I think of skinflints. It has slightly Dickensian feel to it, but actually it goes back a little bit earlier than that. I'll start with parsimonious. It is indeed a nice word. That goes back to the Romans, who gave us "parsitas", which meant sparing or thrifty or restrained, and if you look in the historical thesaurus which is nested with the wonderful Oxford English Dictionary, you'ii find lots of brilliant synonyms. So, tight-fisted speak for itself. Husbandly used to be an adjective meaning miserly, because a husband was the male of the houshold, in control of the finances. Scrimpy, and also squeezy, which is quite fun, or a pinchpenny, a skinflint also could be also a pinchpenny. But I'll go back to skinflint, and the idea of skinning a flint or a whittling down a flint stone for starting your fire until it was as thin as skin had, understandably, a lot more resonance in the 17th century than it does today. To skin a flint would be a very difficult task and would only be undertaken by somebody who really didn't want to go to the trouble of trying to find a new flint for their fire to keep warm. But it's been used as a metaphor for extrem miserliness for centuries, so at least the 1600s, when the first dictionaries of criminal slang were collected and published around that time. One of them defines a skinflint as "a gripping, close-feasted fellow". And it was popularised iby many works of drama and fiction. Not by Dickens, actually, but in the 18th century, a Skinflint with a capital S was a name of many stock characters that you'll find in dramas, plays, etc, who showed extreme greed. Lots of other phrases doing the same qualities, actually, and one of them was to skin a flea for its hide and tallow, so quite a similar idea. And in French they talk of "tender sur un oeuf", which is quite fun, which means to shave an egg. So again, it's almost... It's a near-impossible task, but if you were that miserly, it might just be one that you'd do. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 20/02/18 (X for kiss, 0 for hug)

I had an e-mail in from Darren Smith in Kenley and he said, "Can you ask Susie to explain why X replesent a kiss. Has it anything to do with Spanish "equis"? Keep up a good stuff, you be sure of it", says Darren for you, Nick. It is a very good quiestion. Where does these symbols come from? We do sprinkle them absolutely everywhere in our correspondence these days. Unsurprisingly, lots and lots of theories as to where they come from. Not definitive answer but we can make a good guess. There are visual explanations. Some people think that X is a character, looks like two pairs of lips come together, while the 0 which we use to mean a hug looks like an embrace, and X0X0 is like a kiss on the face. Some people try to interpret it in that way. Other people looks to the ear, sort of auditory explanation and think that there is a similarity in the pronunciation between X ans kiss. I haven't heard "equis" before, Darren's theory, which, of course, means the letter X in Spanish but we can add that one to the list of the many suggestions. As I say, no definitive answer, but we can get a good guessand it's mostly to come from a written tradition. When Christianity came along, X was used unsurprisingly to represent a cross. X means Christ, as in Xmas we have today, and because of that it meant faith and fidelity, so that might explain why it was used in the correspondence. It certanly became a signature of choice. In the Middle Ages, when few people could write, documents were signed and sealed indeeed with an X embossed in wax, and you'll find letters between kings and subject, all letters between ordinary peopre sealed with a kiss, and with that literal symbol of the X. The Oxford English Dictionary has the first record of X as a liss from letter in 1763, and it was the British curate and naturalist called Gilbert White, and he wrote a letter which ended, "I am with a many XXXX and many a Pater noster and Ave Maria, Gil White". So the X in his letter could mean kisses but it also could mean blessings, given that he also calls upon some, you know, religious refereces there. But by the time Winston Chulchill was writting a letter to his mother, you know, many years later, we knew what it meant. He said. "Please excuse bad writing as I am in an awful hurry, XXX (many kisses), WSC". Come to the zero, the nought we use for a hug and finally that probably came from a completely non-religious source and the linguist Ben Zimmer, who was wonderful on these things, thinks that it stems from the game of nought and crosses which sounds completely ludicrous until you know that actaully that was ariund since Egyptian times and Roman times as well. It is calles tic-tac-toe in America. Lots and lots of different names all over the world. It was played with pebbles and coins, whatever was available, but it was very much in the popular imagination. That's possibly why X and zero became used together. X meaning a kiss and zero became a hug. So a long explanation. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 19/02/18 (prom)

I'm going to talk about Proms today. Not just the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, but also prom culture seems to have come to British schools. They're very much... At the end of exams now, schools will hold formal dances for pupils. If it's a single-sex school they invite another school along, and it's a big deal and definetely an import from North America, you would think, and it is in some way, but actually prom, if you go back over its history, has crossed the Atlantic and also other seas quite a few times. It's a shortener from "promenade", which is the word of French origin and that was used as early at the 1500s to mean a leisure walk. In later years it was a public space in which such leisure walks took place. About three centures later, so it took a little while, promenade has begun to be used as the shorteningof its own, stanting in for things like a promenade deck on board a ship, where people who were taking a cruise, for example, could go up and take a leasure stroll and take in some sea air. And indeed there was a promenade concert, which was a concert place without seating, and that is where the Prom in the Royal Albert Hall come in, probably the most famous of all promenade concerts. But promenade also had quite strong link with dance, and in ballet it's a slow turn made on one leg. It's got a different meaning in country dance. It's like a formation really of couples moving forward. And in ballroom dancing it's called an open position for promenading, which the partner face in the same direction again, as if they're about to take a walk. But the proms we know today that are creeping into schools, that all goes back to Ivy League universities in the USA, but it's gone all the way around the world and, as I say, it's settled in the Royal Albert Hall, and long may it continue. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 16/02/18 (irony)

There are some words which if, as a linguist or a lexicographer, you are asked for definition, you freeze inside, because some of them are notoriously difficelt to define. An one of the ones that I personally dread is irony. When people ask me about irony or ironic, it's really, really difficult. It goes back to the Greek eiron, which meant to dissemble. Mostly when we talk about irony these days, we're talking about a situational irony. And back in the '96, the singer Alanis Morissette caused a real stir with her song Ironic. I'm sure lots of people remember it. It includes a list of things, so, there's a rain on your wedding day, the good advice that you just didn't take, a free ride when you've already paid, a death-row pardon two minutes later. And to those who took a sort of keen interest in the English language, whether or not you want to call them pedants, they said, "This is rubbish, this isn't irony, these are just sort of unfortunate events. This doesn't fulfil the definition of irony". So, true situational irony, I suppose, would be things like fire station burned down or a police station gets robbed. You post a tweet saying what a waste of time social media is, for example. That sort of situational irony. And so critics would say ironic doesn't, as I say, involve odd or coincidental events, but - and this is a reason why it's so difficult - irony has been used vaguely and fuzzily for about 150 years. So, if you look up in the Oxford English Dictionary, there's a quote from 1906. "The gentlemen who add to their advertisments for coachman or gardeners the ironic phrase, 'no scholar need apply'". You could take that as a bit of verbal irony, a bit of sarcasm, but it's not completely clear. And it's very likely that in the course of time - in fact, probably already in some dictionaries - ironic can be used simply to describe a curious or a surprising event, just as Alanis Morissette used it in her song, because it has been used that way pretty much since the 19th century. And so, as I say, only a matter of time before they go with that way. And whether or not you say that itself, the new dictionary definitions are a classic case of a situational irony. the jury's out, but personally please don't ask me what it means in meantime. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 15/02/18 (favourite words: defenistration, kerfuffle)

Very often a marketing company or even a dictionary publisher will ask the nation for their favourite words. There are regularly polls to see wich words we like best. I don't know what yours is. But I having a guess that it's not going to this one, which is surprisingly near the top very, very often and it's a very curious word. It's defenstration. Very strange. A lot of people seem to love it and it means throwing someone out of the window, so I'm not sure what it tell us about the British psyche. It's an odd word, on the face of it, but its story is even odder. You have to go back to 1609 and the city of Prague when the Emperor of Bohemia granted freedom of religious expression to the Protestants in the city. Eight years later, his very Catholis cousin gained control of Bohemia and he instructed his officials, his people, to stop any construction of new Protestant churches on royal land. Now, as you can imagine, this caused a right kerfuffle. Kerfuffle - another word that regularly comes near the top. The Protestants were incredibly disgruntled about this and in 1618, a gorup of people of Protestant faith tried in court two peoplewho were said to have aided Catholic officials in stopping the construction of teo very specific churches. They were found guilty of violating the earlier decree and their punishment was to be thrown out of the window of Prague Castle. They apparently fell 100 feet but they were unharmed, but politically it had a really siesmic effect because it started the Thirty Years' War, and, as with any news event, it needed an epithet. It needed a nickname really and so defenistration was born and it comes from the Latin "di" meaning out and "fenestra" meaning window. So really quite a grisly beginnings. Thirty Years' War was a pretty horible time, a pretty horrible military campaign if you like. So far a word that people seem to love today, as I say, it didn't have a very nice beginning. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 14/02/18 (St Valentine's Day and love)

I'm realising now that that this may only appeal to 13% of our viewers, given the stats that you were giving about Valentine's Day at the beginning. Just going to talk a little bit about Valentines and love as well. There were two early Italian martyrs whose feasts was celebrated on St. Valentine's Day, and love didn't became associated with either of them until the Middle Ages. And two possible reasons for this. One is that there was a very old belief that birds mated on exactly this day, so they would find their life mate on St Valentine's Day, the feast of St Valemtine, which is very sweet. Another is that it's linked to a pagan fertility festival. Now, that was called Lupercalia, and it was held in honour of the fertility god, the Roman fertility god, Lupercus. So those are the two reasons possibly why we  associate love with - because it was a fertility day - with St Valentine's Day. But to take love itself, unsurprisingly, it's a very, very ancient word. It's existed as long as humankind has existed. And if you go back to the most ancient language that we've traced, which is an Inddo-European language, you will find it there. And it's shared by a Sanskrit word, lubhyati, which meant desire, and that incidentally also give us libido and the Latin word, libet, meaning "it's pleasing". It's related to other words in English, including lief, an old-fashioned word, my lief, which means dear of pleasant, but also very appropriately, love is linked to life itself. It shares the same ancient root, which I think is quite lovely. And just to flick briefly to tennis, because I think you love tennis. Love in tennis - a lot of people think that it's got everything to do with the shape of l'oeuf, the egg in French. It's actually not. We think it goes back to the idea of playing for love rather than for money, which is behind one of the ancient rules of the game. So there you go, a quick wirlwind tour of love, and apologies to anybody who actually really hates St Valentine's Day. I'll stop now. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 13/02/18 (Carnival Day, Shrove Tuesday, deadpan expression)

Erm, and a Carnival Day has come round again. Today is Carnival Day. In Roman catholic countries, it's the period before Lent, it's a time of public merrrimaking and a great feasting and festivities. It comes from medieval Latin carnelevamen, which meant to put away meat, which is exactly of course what you do when you begin fasting. A lot of people think it's carnevale, so goodbye to meat, that is not quite right, it is to put it away. And there are many other flesh related words which are linked strangely to carnival and you wouldn't always put them together. Carnivorous, because you have got the meat connection, carnage, carnation from the flower's fleshy colour and carrion and incarnation, as well. So lots of bedmates, if you like, in English. But today of course is Shrove Tuesday, as we say, it's Pancake Day and Shrove Tuesday is linked to giving somebody short shrift which is to treat them in a really curt and a very dismissive way. That phrase originally referred to the short time that a condemned criminal was allowed to make penance before he or she was executed. So they would be shriven, absolved of their sins by a priest. It's the day before the start of Lent, it's marked by feasting and celebration, and of course, we mostly call it Pancake Day but other countries celebrate it as Mardi Gras which meant Fat Tuesday. Again, that link to feasting and eating a lot. While we are on pancakes, pancake make-up often used as stage make-up, the very, very heavy make-up that you use. Nothing do with the flat things that we eat today and everything to do with pan and slang for the face. It's because of the round shape, it's where we get deadpan from. If we have a deadpan expression, it's a dead expression on your face. So lots and lots strange links there, sort of a little whirl around pancakes but whatever I hope everyone eats lots and make merry. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 12/02/18 (acronyms: quango, pog, laser, sim card, care package, pelican crossing)

Just a few acronyms for you today. Such a boring word, acronym. It's got acro in there, which is the Greek for height. You find it in lots of words - acropolis, acrobat, etc. But an acronym is a word that is formed from the initial letters of other words. And although it is a boring term, it has produced lots of nice words in English. Not all of them are obviously acronyms. I am going to start with quango. We don't often takl nicely about quangos - administrative bodies connected to the government outside the civil service, usually used in associoation with red tape and administrative boringness, really. But it sounds like it ought to be a tropical fruit drink. It sounds quite nice, but it's not. It's, in fact, a Quasy-Autonomous-Non-Governmental-Organosation. So, boring is as boring does, I suppose. Pog - did any of you used to play with Pogs? I think they were sort of... Yeah, around '80s, '90s... Little cardboard discs. I'm not sure anyone knew the rule for the game of Pogs. But this one does come from a tropical fruit drink, in fact - a Hawaiian fruit drink - the lids of which provided the first discs that were used. And Pog is an acronym for Passopn fruit, Orange, Guava, in case anyone was wondering. Laser, perhaps... people know this one. It's a good illustration of why we use acronyms, because they are such a mouthful when yo uspell them all out. Laser - you might imagin a James Bond film... You'd never imagine a James Bond saying Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. That's what laser is. Sim card - you might probably guess that a sim is an acronym, but maybe not for Subscriber Identification Module. It's all about the user's network details. Care package - this is perhaps the most surprising of all the acronyms that I've come across anyway. Widespread use, especially in military. Care packages sent to soldiers at war, but also students at university you might send a care package to. But the "care" originally stood for the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, which sent out aid in the afretmath of World War II. Finally, the pelican crossing - you can't get more British than the pelican crossing. That's actually a respelling of an acronym - PEdestrian LIghts CONtrolled crossing. Again, pretty boring on its own but once you make it into an animal, it sounds so much better. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 09/02/18 (word from places: cantaluope melon, mayonnaise, denim, jeans, jersey, lesbian, balaclava, cardigan, raglan)

I want to talk a little bit about words that came over into English from places. Because it's chock-a- block with words that originated in one praticular place, and they've slipped into the mainstream so much that the place name that they stem from is noe pretty much unrecognisable. Sometimes we just don't know that it comes from a place. A cantaloupe melon, for example, comes from Cantalupo, a place in Italy, whose name actually means "singing wolf", which makes this cantaloupe melon a little bit more sinister. Mayonnaise - the French captured the island of Menorca during the Seven Years' War, and the victory was apparently celebrated with a huge amount of feasting, together with a very special condimentthat was native to that particular place. The capital of Menorca is Port Mahon and the "aise" in mayonnaise means native to. Which is where we get mayonnaise today. Most people probably know that denim was originally serge de Nimes, it was a fabric from Nimes, in France. The serge eventualyy got dropped off and de Nines became denim. Similarly jeans were named after their place of origin, which was Genoa in Italy. A jersey - we wear jerseys all the time. Knitted pullovers that were native to Jersey, in the English Channel, originally worn by fishermen. Kept them very warm in the winter. Lesbian comes from the Greek island of Lesbos, the home of the great Greek poetess Sappho. She was the leader of a religious community that was dedicated to Aphrodite, goddess of love - who dave us aphrodisiac - and her surviving lyric poemsexpress often intense affection for the girls who were members of this community. Balaclava - close-fitting woolen hood or hat, covering the ears and neck - originally worn by soldiers in the Crimean War. And Balaclava was a small port in southern Crimea, in the Ukraine. And in 1854, it was yhe scene of that very famous battle involving the Charge of the Light Brigade. And curiously, two people involved in that war as well also gave their names to the items of clothing. So, from places to people. The Earl of Cardigan, who led the charge, gave us the cardigan, obviously. He was said to wear that knitted type of buttoned sweater to keep himself warm. And possibly less well-known, the first Baron Raglan gave his name to hot only a type of coat, an overcoat, but also the raglan sleeve. And what he wore was quite peculiar, in a way. At least, it ws different from the fashion of the time, because the sleeves continued in one piece up to the neck, so it produced a larger and looser armhole that people weren't used to. But it suted this particular Baron Raglan. And that was because his right arm has been amputated after the Battle of Waterloo, because he'd had it so severely injured. So, the raglan sleeve goes all the way back to a one-armed general. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 08/02/18 (friend, definite, free, fiend, frenemy)

I was talking recently about how tricky English is in terms of its sprlling. And there are sometimes tips to help you remember. So, definite, if you remember two Is because it's linked to finire, the Latin, meaning to finish. So definite is linked to finish, and that way you might remember the two Is. And one way to remember friend, which is another really commonly misspelled word, is to think about fiend, the I-E, because, believe it or not, friend and fiend derive from pretty much the same root and they have grown in parallel courses, if you like, over the course of English. So although, they developed independently from two different Germanic words, they were once very much seen as paired opposites, and alliteratively paired opposites as well, if you like. So to take friend first, that entered old English as freond. And that from a Germanic verb brought by all the Germanic invading tribes, which was freon, meaning to love. And believe it or not, freon is also behind free. Free, once meaning belived or dear. And we think it's because members of a household united by blood or by kinship were seen as not only were they dear to each other, but they as free, as opposite to the slaves that they hired to wait upon them. And over time that meaning changed. Free and friend and to love. So friends in those days meant exactly the same as it does today. So a person other than a lover or a relative who you hold in affection. Fiend goes back to another Germanic word and that was feond. So it wasn't freond, it was feond. So just the R was missing. Meaning to hate. And it was used very much in the form of an enemy. So a feond was somebody who was your arch-rival, if you like. In time it came not to mean your personal arch-rival but a rival to humankind itself, in fact to the very devil, and it is from that idea that fiend took on the idea of Satsn incarnate, if you like. Or to anybody who had evil intent. Foe took the place, if you like, of fiend in that sense. It was friend or foe, rather than friend or fiend, but those were the two exact opposites in the olden days. Eventually fiend was applied to somebody a little bit devilish, if you like, or had some sort of uncommon craving, like a fiend for chocolate, for example. If you don't know whether somebody is your friend or fiend, then you can call them frenemy. Frenemy being a modern blend of friend and enemy. But that idea of two polar opposites has been around for a while. In Samuel Johnson's dictionary talks about a backfriend. A backfriend is pretty much the same as a frenemy. So he called it "a friend backwards, that is, an enemy in secret". 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 07/02/18 (lemure)

We've been talking recently about spirits and demons from folklore and myth and most of the words - ogres, imps, devils themselves, you would expect to be on the list, but I don'r think you would put this word on the list of spooky things and that is the animal, the lemur. Because lemur actually means "spirit of the dead" in Latin and there's quite a story behind it. They were given their name by Carl Linnaeus and he was the founder of the names of many of our animals. And he was clearly familiar with mythology and the works of Roman poets like Virgil and Ovid. In Roman tradition, lemures, rhymes with "please", were believed to be the ghosts of all those who have not been afforded proper burial rites or had died leaving unfinished business behind them. And ultimately, there were ghosts of lots of people from sailors who had been lost at sea, from suicides, who weren't then granted a proper burial, to murder victims, criminals who had been executed in some grisly way, so lot og unquiet souls who were said to haunt the streets of Rome looking for peace and looking for solace. It's the same sort of ideology, I suppose, that's behind the idea of ghosts today. The idea is that they would rise at night and, as I say, walk along the srteets haunting their former homes neighbourhoods. It's quite a sort of spooky idea. But from there, if you skip forward a few millennia, the Swedish naturalist  I mentioned, Carl Linnaeus, entered a record of the creature that he called the lemur in his Systema Nature - that was his book, as I say, in which he created a lot of the names from Latin for the animals that we know today. Why did he do it? It seems a bit of weird chioce, but he says, "I call them lemures because they go around mainly by nights in the certain way similar to humans and roam with a slow pace". So despite all their cuteness, he obviously saw something quite spooky, perhaps their expressive eyes, their nocturnal habits, sort of humanlike expression that they take on as if they're lost souls, that made him go all the way back to mythology to choose his word. I love that, sort of ancient Rome's creepiest ghosts really haunting the streets of Rome have inspired the lemurs that we know today.  

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 05/02/18 (tarantella, hell, Lucifer, devil, blues)

This is going to pick up very briefly on something Suzannah was talking about earlier, this dancing, this impulse to dance. And that is behind quite a lot of words in English, or at least three words that I can think of. Tarantism was a disease that was thought to be exactly that, the psychological impulse to dance, and it was prevalent in Italy, perticularly during the 15th and 17th centuries. It was thought to be cos by the bite of a tarantula. And the taranrula and tarantism, behind those words are Taranto in Italy where it was first diagnosted, if you like. And the dance, if you still dance today, is known as the tarantella, so it still sort of lives on, that mad, frenzied impulse to dance, which is pretty helliesh. And I was going to talk today mostly about words to do with hell, so diabolical words, if you like. And hell has been around sinse Old English times as a word, as a name for the abode of the dead. And it comes from the Old English verb helan, which meant to hide or to conceal, so it was somewhere hidden away where you would least like to go. Other English relatives actually might surprise you - helmet, hull, hall, and hole and hollow are all related to that word hell. Lucifer is another interesting one because Lucifer seems a bit of a contradiction in terms. Lucifer obviously the name for the devil, and yet it means light-bearing, so it seems a bit of strange name for the Prince of Darkness - the exact opposite. The word is from lux - light - and then fere in Latin - to carry - so someones who carries the light. It was also applied to the morning star that heralds the dawn. But the reason it was applied to the devil is that it was applied to the name of the angel before his fall, so it was Satan before his fall. Christ talked about, "I beheld Satan as a lightning fall from heaven", so that idea of the light disappearing, which is why it was applied to Satan. So it depicted his former respectability in heaven, if you like, before the fall. Devil itself, and diabolical, goes all the way back to the Greek diaballein, which meant to throw across. In other words, to slander but also to thwart, so to thwart good with evil, which means that the devil and diabolical, those two words are linked to other strange mates, if you like, in English - metabolism, ballistics, hyperbole, symbol, and perhaps more appropriately parable and problem. And finally the blue devils. The blue devils were the demons that were said to affect people with deep, deep melancholy, a bid belief again in the 17th century that they would haunt the mind of somebody who was prone to feeling sad and blue. Blue devils eventually shortened to the blues, which is why we talk about having the blues today, and that in turn in the 20th century was applied to the music called the blues, the melancholy music.  

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 02/02/18 (silent letters: debt, doubt, salmon, solemn, ghost, gnat)

Today I have more silent letters. Yesterday I was talked about the Ks that we used to have, the hard Ks in English, whuch we took from all Germanic invaders that had come to Britain around the fifth century. So we had knots and knitting and knees and knechts and knight and things. So today we're going to talk about some other silent letters. And I'll start with B, the silent B that we get in things like debt or doubt. Those goes back to 16th-century scholars, and I mentioned recently how there was a big drive around this time to make English more classical, to make it more refined, a little bit more like Latin and Greek, and not just more refined, but more predictable as well, so, easier to learn, because Latin and Greek are sort of quite smooth in terms of their endings and their plurals, etc. And probably a little bit of showing off as well, amongst all these scholars. So they decided that doubt, which had previously been spelt D-O-W-T or D-O-U-T, deserved B because the Latin for doubt is "dubitum". Same for debt, it was "debitum". So they put the B in there, but they didn't suggest we change our pronunciation, they just liked the B for the spelling, because it looked more Latinate. Likewise, salmon got L, it goes back to the Latin "salmo", and solemn got an N, it didn't have one before, the Latin was "solemnis". And so, that accounts for a lot of the silent letters that we have in English. But some of them, the words were serendipity, really, or accidental, or even hiccups. The H in ghost, for example,  we owe entirely to William Caxton, who standartised a lot of our spelling in English and was huge influential. He did very, very good things. But he learned his trade in Flanders, and in Bruges, and when he came over to England to set up his printing press, he didn't ehought typesetters, so he brought some over from Flanders, where he had been working. They were Flemish, the Flemish for ghost is "gheest", with an H, so they stuck one in because it looked more familiar to them. And we've been left with the result ever since. And finally the G in gnat - nothing to do with Latin, nothing to do with Germanic. That is an Old English word, and the G would have been pronounced when it was first used in the days of King Arthur. So, it would have been a g-nat, which I eould love to bring back. So, with all this confusion going on, I thought we should give ourselves a big pat on the back for knowing how to spell anything at all. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 01/02/18 (silent letters: knight, knot, knife, knitting, answer)

I have some silent letters for you, cos for the last few days I've been talking about how tricky English is, such an irregular language. Silent letters are some of the things that puzzle people so much, because we have no idea why they are there. Some of languages are entirely phonetic, or certanly more phonrtic than other. Lots of words in Ehglish are phonetic, they sounds as they are written, but there are so many others that aren't. The reason fo this, again, is that English has absorbed so many words from different cultures. Quite often we have absorbed letters which we then don't pronounce because it's too difficelt to get round our native tongue. So if you take the word know, to have knoledge with its silent K. That's just one example. You've got knight and knee and knives and knit and knock. You have a silent G in gnat and gnome. B in subtle, numb. L in salmon, N in solemn. A W in answer, and so it goes on and on and on. So I thought I'd take some of these examples and explain why they're there in the first place. English is predominantly Germanic language, so around the 5th century, the Jutes came over the Jutland, that's part of northen Germany and Denmark now. They settled in Kent. The Saxons came over from Saxony in Germany. They settled south of the Thames. The Angles came over from what is now Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, and they settled in northen and central England. So you had all these Germanic tribes coming in and the result is an awful lot of silent letters that we took from German, but they weren't always silent. To take knight, the German word for a boy or a knave was knecht. For a while, when that was twisted around our tongue and became knight, we pronounced it as k'night as well. Likewise, we took a k'nife. We ate with a k'nife before we had "nives". We went on to our k'nees to pray. The Anglo-Saxon talked about k'nitting, which turned out to be knitting in the end. K'not in ropes or strings, that gave us knitting and knots. So that explains that. The W in answer, likewise, is Germanic. The easy way of remembering that is that it's very much linked to swear with the W in that as well, which we do pronounce. So ot cimes from answarian, which we took from German. To answer originally was to respond to an accusation in court. So if you remember that legal sense of swearing and answering to rebut an accusation, you remember that W. But over the next two days, I'll take some more silent letters and explain why they are there and possibly why we don't pronounce them any more as well. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 31/01/18 (plurals: goose, moose, ignoramus)

I have more strange plurals. I talked about octopuses, octopi, octopodes, yesterday and how difficult it is to grasp plurals in English and how often you need to be careful. Ignoramus, for example, the plural is never going to be ignorami. Because it never started off as a noun in Latin. It was used by grand juries who couldn't convict a felon and ignoramus or ignor-amus means "we do not know" cos they didn't have sufficient evidence so the plural is always ignoramuses there. Why are plurals so strange? I mentioned this yesterday. English is Germanic but than it had huge influences that came over with the Normans. It had a thing for Latin and Greek. It eavesdropped on practically every land that it encountered in its seafaring exploits. It is essentially just a hotchpotch of various influences, various words from different cultures. So it's unsurprising that a language with all of that going on is very, very irregular and a bit of topsy-turvy. It's the same with plurals. I'm going to talk about goose and moose because lots of people will say, "If the plural of goose is geese, why do we not talk about meese?" It's a good question. I'll start with goose. That goes back over a thousand years to the Anglo-Saxon word gos. For them the plural of goose was not geese, but it was ges. So they gave us the beginings of that change of the O to the E. We have pretty much stuck with that today. But moose is a far more recent addition to the language. It is about 400 years old and it was adapted from Algonquin, which is a group of North American native languages. It gave us toboggan, moccasin and quite a few other words as well. So it gave no sense to give moose an old English plural, why would you? So meese has never really made any sense at all. By the time it arrived in our language, we did stick an S onto our words so you would think it might be mooses but in fact for animals, we have always preserved, game animals particularly, we've always preserved that singular plural. Not quite sure why but we have deer, we have elk and so it was with moose, The plural of moose is moose. As for meese, it never really got a look-in because the Anglo-Saxons had no hand in it whatsoever. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 30/01/18 (irregularities: octopuses, octopi or octopodes)

I thought I'd talk a little bit in the next few shows about irregularities of English, becauseeven native speakers know just how thorny and tricky English spelling is - pronunciation, plurals, there are just so many things for us to learn, and I always pity children, except in many ways, that's what makes English what it is, because it is the result of this vast melting pot of different influences that have to bear over the course of various centuries. And one thing, one plural that often comes up, believe it or not, is that of octopus. What is the correct plural of octopus? And in many ways, this small story illustrates just how difficult English is to learn. So, what do you call more than one eight-legged cephalopod? Is it octopuses, or is it octopi? Well, it first showed up in English in the mid-1700s, and it was gives the standard English plural E-S, because that's what we used to do with nouns. So far, so good. Except there was a movement afoot at the time who wanted to bring English into line with classical languages, because they were thought to be not just refined and sophisticated, but also more predictible, and smoother in many ways. So, grammarians at the time took a whole group of English words and gave them Latin endings. It made sense. So, aquariums bacame aquaria and syllabuses became syllabi, criterion, which is Greek, became criteria, etc. And many of them we still keep today. And this is what happened with octopuses as well, they gave it the Latin ending, octopi. So, that sort of makes sense. Except there is only one problem, because yes, it did come to English via Latin, but ultimately, it goes back to Ancient Greek, and when the smarter grammarians worke this out, they gave it the correct Greek plural, which is octopodes, believe it or not, so it's P-O-D-E-S at the end. So the picture became even more difficult. But eventualy, the tide of resistance became too strong, most English speakers accepted that, you know, if it's going to be English, we're going to put the E-S ending on, and that's what they did. So, most people today will say octopuses, rather that octopi or octopodes. But you do have a choice. If you consult Oxford Dictionaries, it will tell you that on a formal occasions you can get away with the Latin ending, but no-one going into guitar shop, as I did once, and asking for a couple of plectra, instead of plectrums, and practically being laughed out of the shop, would do that, I think. Just stick to the English endings - I think pedands will say no, it's got to be Latin. Fine in formal contexts, but otherwise, the English is absolutely fine. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 29/01/18 (boxing, sport metaphors: pugilism, cadaver, Real McCoy)

Well, out for the count, not pulling any punches, below the belt, on the ropes, in your corner, saved by the bell - English has possibly more metaphors from the sport of boxing than almost any other, including football. Perhaps it's because it's captured the public imagination for many, many centuries, so they are carvings from ancient civilisations and they are alresdy wearing their tight wrist-straps to protect their bones. It was known to the Romans as pujilato. it was incredibly popular. That's what we get "pugilism" from, of course, and it was really impoltaint patr of gladiatorial sport. It was verey, very bloodthirsty, and the boxers would wear leather knuckle-dusters knowing as caestus, and they were really horrible. They were decided to shred the face and limbs of the opponent, and that word shared the ancient root with "cadaver", and did ultimately, usually the result in the death of one and huge adultation of the winner. We get not just all those expressions, but also some idioms as well, so the Real McCoy was certanly popularised by Kid McCoy, who was a very popular Anerican boxer. He was so much inpressionated, he went under the epithet the Real McCoy, cos that was really him. And as happy as Larry, again, he probably wasn't the originator, but Larry Foley was a very, very succesful boxer himself, and retired very early, so he too was happy. But the sport of wrestling is just as old, and its name come from Old English, but again, its ars goes back thousands and thousands of years and, again, you can find carvings representing the sport ever back then. Again, it's given us lots of expressions. They have lost their moorings somewhat, but no holds barred is one of them, and that refers to a no-holds-barred contest, quite obvious when you think about it, in which the usual rules are complitely lost or left behind, and competitors are permitted to use any means they can to throw their opponent, topple him or her, and keep their shoulders pinned to the floor. Before there were any regulations, wrestling was indeed a freeform affair, so you didn't even need to say no holds barred. But cage fighting, hardcore wrestling, they still have no holds barred, and the Hulk Hogan slogan was, of course, "No ring, no ref, no rules". Thst's pretty much what it is. But, yes, so many words come over from boxing. 

 - Why it called boxing?

 - It's a really good question, and it's a bit of a mystery. No-one knows. It probably comes from Old English, and maybe the idea of the clenched fist forming a box shape, but that's as far as we go. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 26/01/18 (to look at: took a butcher's at, a quick gander in something, a shifty)

We had a nice e-mail from Alec Dodd from the butifully named Derbyshire town of Ambergate, and he said, "Whot are the origins of phrases meaning "to look at", especially "took a butcher's at" "a quick gander in something", "a shufty", et cetera?" And it's a nice question so I was going to have a quick wiz around verbs and expressions meaning "to have a look". We have lots of them in English. As well as ones Alec mentioned, we have a squiz, a look-see, a double-O, a Bo-Peep, et cetera. But I/ll start with gander. This goes back to the late 1800s, and it sounds like a rhyming slang, but it is not. The image is simply of the resemblance between an inquisitive person and a goose stretching out its neck to take a look at something. It's the same idea as craning our necks - the idea again goes back to the bird, the crane. Butcher's is a bit of nice rhyming slang - having a butcher's, butcher's hook - look. In Australia and New Zealand, where rhyming slang is even more popular that it is here, going butchers means something very different. That's rhyming slang for being angry, being crook, so butcher's hook - crook. Shufty began in the British military and was brought back from military encounters abroad. It's from the Arabic "shufti", simply, "Have you seen?" And in the same way, having a dekko was harvested by the British Army during the governance of Indi, and its from the Hindu, again meaning simply "to look". So they're just words that we borrowed from other continents. But while we're looking at verbs and expressions meaning "to look', I thought I'd just give you a couple of idioms. One is to keep your eyes peeled, which always used to make me shiver when I was little. That a pretty obvious, really - it's just to take the covers off your eyesand really have a good look for something,  but "peel" actually goes back to "pill" and "pillage" - it was the Vikings word meaning "to plunder". And then the idea of stripping something came along a little bit later. And finally, "to look a gift horse in its mouth", the idea  is that if you were given a horse by a king or a royal, as a present or as a gift, never, ever look at its mouth because if you look in the teeth, you'll be able to see how old it is - that would be considered incredibly rude because horse's teeth change shape, bacame a little bit protruding as they get older - they leterally get longer in the tooth, which is where that comes from as well. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 25/01/18 (gambling: jackpot, to be above board, blue-chip stocks, gimmic)

I'm going to talk a little bit about gambling today and how it has influenced English and English idioms. Many of them we probably realise originated at the gambling tables so to be above board, keep your hands above board you'd avoid tricking or decieving your opponent. We talk about blue-chip stocks or companies - that goes back to blue chips on the gambling table that were the highest value in these particular games and then of course it was transferred over to a financial sector. Or you could pass the buck which was another one. A buck was a sort of deerskin counter often that was used in gambling. Gimmic as well. I remember talking to Paul Zennon about this one. A gimmic was originally a mechanical device by which a gambling apparatus like a roulette wheel was secretly manipulated so it was all to do with trickery again at the card table. We are going to talk about origin of jackpot because I'm often asked about that one and that popped up around the 1870s and it was from the pocker game called Jack or Better.  It is much loke the  traditional five-card draw, except in this case if the opening player doesn't have a pair of jacks or better in the first round he or she has to pass. Doesn't necessarily mean they have to be holding a pair of jacks, as long as the card they're holding will beat a pair of tens, then they can have a go. And so it goes on, once the opening player has placed a bet in the opening round, the rest of participants are free to declare whatever they want, but again they have to have a lacks or better in order to win and if noboby wins, the ante - the stake, we talk about upping the ante - goes up and so it goes on until this pot of money gets bigger and bigger and because the game was played in jacks or better, it bacame known as the jackpot very simply. And then it became associated with big cash prizes, coin slot machines and today, if we hit a jackpot, we find real happiness in life or we have a very big succes of some kind. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 24/01/18 (being in one's element)

I had a tweet from Chloe Wrtight, who asked of the background of being in one's element, if you're in one's element. And to answer this, you need to look back to the very elements that were once believed to be the make-up of all human beings. The primary elements being earth, fire, air and water. And, as regular viewers will know, every human being was classified according to their humorous disposition, the humorous here have nothing to do with comedy or wit, and everything to do with bodily fluids and the balance with which they existed in the body. But if you tke those bodily humours, they were always thought to have one corresponding element, whether it was, as I say, air, fire, water or earth, and every human being was thought to have a particular affinity to one of those and they weren't always obvious, either. So a salamander, for example, was thought to exist in fire, so quite curious medieval beliefs, there. But to go back to those corresponding elements, somebody who was inrtospective, quite creative but prone to melancholy... Melancholy, as you know, meant black bile, because a melancholy person was thought to have too much of it. These people were supposed to be ruled by the cold and dry element of earth. The wiry, often red haired for some reason, ambitious and choleric person was dominated by fire, they were hot and dry. And the sluggish, slightly phlegmatic, and perhaps slightly tubby person, was sain to be influenced by water. Whereas someone who was sanguine, red-cheeked, optimistic, they enjoyed all the healthful benefits of air. Obviously there were quite sort of neat categories that they thought people existed in, but it wasn't always the case. Clearly not all of us are red haired or optimistic all of the time, so they were a little bit too neat, and the truth was that... We all need in order to keep a happily existence, to have these elements and  thase humours in good balance. But it was quite interesting, because the phlegmatic person, someone who was full of phlegm, it was thought, and stiocally calm, as a result, was advised not to eat fish, because they would make the water element go overboard, if you'll excuse the pun,  so that easn't a good thing. And someone affected by melancholy was told to avoid eating vegetables because then the pull of the Earth would become too strong, so it really informed so much, not just beliefs as to personality, but also medicine, dietary habits, all that kind of thing. Add all of the characters in the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries reflect this view of the world, and references to being in your element date all the way back to the 16th century and beyond, so it was a really core part of understanding the world ant the universe, was to be in one's element, and that was crucial for happy life. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 23/01/18 (walnut and Wales, Cornwall, meat, dear)

I'm going to swerve to Jonathan Wilbur, who e-mailed in to say, "I seem to remember that the country called Walesis somehow linked to a nut. Am I dreaming?"And the answer is no, Jonathan, you're not dreaming. There is a very strange link between the two. The nut in question is a walnut., and I'll start with that, because the WAL part of the is came from an  old English word that meant foreign. In other words, the walnut was the foreign nut, and it was called in order to distinguish it from the native hazelnut. It was introduced from Gaul and Italy, and so it was seen as beign slightly exotic, and in fact the Roman name for it was nux gallicia, the Gaulish nut. And when you think how variety footstuffs in Anglo Saxon times was a lot narrower than it is today, it make sense that it was probably just ine foreign nut at the time. And you can see the same process goin on in the word meat, because meat once meant al food, not just a flesh of an animal. Vegetables in those days, for example, were sometimes known as green meat. And it make sense, once you know that it meant all food, a lot of expressions in English like, "It's meat and drink to me". "One man's meat it is another man's poison". And the morning was called before meat, and the afternoon sometimes was called after meat, so it was used in that general sense, and similary, a deer was any wild animal at all before it became more restricted in meaning. A dear actually comes back to an ancient word  meaning a creature that breathes, which is obviously behind animals as well. Anima - it has a spirit and breath. But back to walnuts. The first element, as I say, meaning foreign is also behind the country name Wales, and it was known as such because it wasn't Anglo Saxon, and so the Welsh were seen as foreigners. And you also find that same root in Carnwall. Cornwall and the Cornish were literally the foreigners who lived on the long horn or the corn of headland, and in surenames Walsh and Wallace. All originally seen as foreign to the Anglo Saxons. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 22/01/18 ( superlatives: cool, playing a blinder, lollapolooza, cut the mustard, peachy, a corker, rip snorter)

I have a tweet in from John Ashworth, who asked for the origin of "playing a blinder". And it's actually quite simple when you think about it. Something that's good, or perhaps, you know, a difficult piece of play in sporting match where you really have overcome the odds. To play something that is dazzlingly good, and the dazzling is what it's all about, because that's why it is blinding. So, it's as simple as that. But it got me thinking about other superlatives, because English is awash, thankfully, with lots of superlatives. We tend to stick to the tried and tested, but there are many that we can use. We like, in slang, to flip bad for good, so "bad" itself means "good" - "sick", "wicked", etc. But we've lost some of the wonderful terms that we used to have. So, "lollapolooza", which you'll still find in dictionary, is a term from the US from the early 1900s for something outstanding, that's "lollapoloosa", it's simply a flanciful formation, but I like it. Or it may be so hot, it's "mustard", and "mustard" was another slang term in the US for something outstanding, and that's where we get "cut the mustard" from. Mustard being it's so hot, it's really, really good, and cutting in that sense is the same is, "she cuts a fine figure". So although it seems strange, "cutting the mustard", it's actually quite simple when you analyse it. The outstanding thing may be "peachy", that's simply play on words on something sweet or juicy. Or in the olden days, it could also be a carbuncle, something that was great was a carbuncle. And that's very strange to us today, because we associate carbuncles with something entirely negative. But it originally described a large precious stone of blazing, fierly red colour, and it was a mythical gem, it was believed to give out the light in the dark. And the lesions of the skin that we associate with carbuncles today are so-called simply because they are flamming red, they are very inflamed. More obviously wonderful superlatives are "a corker" - something so fizzy, it pops - and a "rip snorter" - originally a dashing, riotous fellow. And you had a "screamer" too - a "screamer" was actually also once a term for an exclamation mark, believe it or not. But perhaps the most enduring term of approval of all, which has lasted for such a long time and can be used by any generation, is "cool". Ans that may well go all the way back to the late 1800s and have started off in British public schools, but it really was propelled into the mainstream in the jazz era of the '30s and '40s by Charlie Parker and his ilk. So, the lexicon of superlavives goes on and on and on, and let's keep selebrating them, because there are so many out of there we could use. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 19/01/18 (police terms: rozzer, peeler, bobby, copper, Scotland Yard)

I have to thank Omar Nour. He e-mailed in to ask about the origin of the term rozzer for a policeman and various other terms for the police, cos they have attracted many epithets over the years,  not all of them, obviously, very pleasant ones. But I'll start with rozzer. It's a bit of a mystery. If you look up in most dictionaries, it eill say, "ethymology unknown". But the most plausible suggestion is that it's the... A take, if you like, on the name of Sir Robert Peel, who of course was Home Secretary when the new Metropolitan Police Act was passed in 1828. Sir Robert Peel was the person who gave us both peeler, as an old term of policeman, and also bobby, a riff on Robbert. A Bow Street runner was a precursor to the modern police officer, and this is a reference to Bow Street in Covent Garden, in London, in which the most famous police magistrates' court was situated. And it's got a really lovely history, because the second magistrate to take a residence there was non other than novelist and the playwright Henry Fielding. And he was appointed, as I say, as magistrate for the City of Westminster, and this was at the time when gin consumption in London was at its absolute height, and Fielding reported that every foorth house in Covent Garden was a gin shop. And as a result of too much gin, there was just a lot of drunkeness about, a lot of lewd, debauched riotous behaviour, and something needed to be done. So Fielding brought together eight relaible constables, he brought together these people, and they were known as Mr. Fielding's people, and then eventually they became Bow Street runners. But I have ro mentioned a copper, as well. That comes from the slang verb cop, which itself is a variant of cap, and all goes all the way back to the Roman times and the word capere, means to seize or take. It's the same root as capture. So a copper is simple somebody who seize a criminal and then take them off to prison, and that's the same copper that you'll find in "it's a fair cop". And finally I'll just mentioned a Scotland Yard, where the name of that comes from. The pople who organised the new police force after Sir Robert Peel introduced his act were Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne. They occupied the place at 4 Whitehall Place, and the back of that opened up onto a courtyard called the Great Scotland Yard, so-called because there was once a medieval palace there which housed Scottish riyalty on their visits to London. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 18/01/18 (taboo, tattoo)

I often talk about how English hoovers up words and expressions from almost every tongue it encounters, and it has done since its very beginning. It's estimated 60% of the words we use come from Greek or Latin. Only 10% of those directly, the others have com via French or other Romance languages, particularly. Germanic accounts for about 25%, if not more. French, when you take into account those Latin words, at least 25%, possibly even as much as 40%. So much of our language made up of words that we take from other people. But we don't often talk about words from Tongan. And Tongan is a language spoken in Tonga, in the south Pacific, and it's given us two words that we use very, very often. They were both brought to us by Captain Cook. I'll begin with taboo. Taboo cames over from the Polynesian islands. It was introduced, as I say, into English by Captain James Cook in 1777. And he wrote these wonderful narratives of his voyages. And he wrote, "not one of them", talking about the people he had met on his travels, "Not one of them would sit down or eat a bit og anything, it was all taboo". And he goes on to explain that the word was generally used to mean "forbidden". The other one is tattoo, the tattoo on the skin. Again. that came into English from the Pacific Islands and was first recorded onboard HMS Endeavour. But Cook wasn't the first one to use it, because it has been found in the diaries of the naturalist and explorer Josef Banks, who also wrote a very, very detailed journals about their trip. And he recorded, "I shall now mentioned the way they mark themselves indelibly. Each of them is so markes by their humour or disposition"/ In other words, their art was a reflection of their personality, just as we have tattoos today. Cook themself recorded the same word a little bit later. "Both sexes paint their bodies. "Tataw" - spelld with a W at the end -  as it is called in their language. This is done by inlying the colour of black under their skins". As for its meaning, it comes from Tongan word from to write, very simply. Not the same as military tattoo, I'll just explain that onevery briefly. That's the drum or the bugle call to recall a soldiers to their quarters in the evening. That comes from Dutch - "doe den tap toe", which is literally meant " close the tap". And it was an instruction to close the tap on the cask full of rum or beer or whatever the alcohol was at the time, because drinking time was over and it was time to go back to the quarters. So, very different tattoo, but the tattoo on our skin and taboo both go back to Tongan. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 17/01/18 (recipe)

I have an e-mail from Peter Cameron-Waller, who's curious to know the origin of the word "recipe". And, he also wonders about pronunciation because he says it sounds as thought it comes from French, but the way we speak it doesn't quite bear that out. So, here goes. It actually comes from Latin, not from French. It didn't travel through French. It is an imperative, so the command of recipere, which means take or recieve. That might seem a little bit odd when you think about modern cookeryrecipes today until you know that the word first appeared in the 15th century at the top of medical prescriptions. And they were the instruction to the patient to take the pills that were prescribed to them in order to cure their ills. In other words, this was the instruction from the pharmacist to the patient - recipere, recipe, take. The pills, incidentally, just as the side note, that they might be ordered to take, could well have been tabloids because the first meaning of the "tabloid" was a small, compressed tablet of medicine. But by the late 16th century recipe had begun to mean the prescription itself rather than the instruction to take it. Ans soon it being generally applied to notes for making a preparation of some kind, or indeed a list of ingredients. And there's a letter from an archive of the personal history of an upper class family that spans centuries, the Vernese. It includes the letter from a Sir Thomas Cave from 1716 which says, "Sister Lovette and I greatly admire the ink you wrote last with but dare not wish for the recipe, it no doubt being a secret". Ink highly prized  in those days, clearly. But the leap from the commodity of ink perhaps to the commodity of food perhaps wasn't such a great one and so the word was first recorded in the cooking sense in the middle of the 18th century. But looking back to the origin Latin recipere, take or recieve, you can see where the modern pronunciation comes from, to answer Peter's second question. Ans also it take you can still find in recipes today. It'll say take two eggs, for example. Incidentally, if you've ever seen Rx on a prescription, which yo ucan still find today, that's the pharmacists way of saying "recipe". So in pharmaceuticals today, in you local chemist, the Rx is an abbreviation for recipe. So we still hold that 15th century meaning today. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 16/01/18 (to take the gilt off the gingerbread, gingerbread, to be a knight of gingerbread, tawdry)

I was asked by one of our audience members, Eamonn Kelly, where the expression "to take the gilt off the gingerbread" comes from.  It's a slightly dated expression now. It means simply to strip something of its appeal. A modern version, I'm told, is, "Who took the jam out of your doughnuts?" It's a similar sort of things. As I say, on the face of it, it's a pretty curious one. But ehen you realise just how elaborate old cakes used to be, it begins to make sense. Five centuries or so ago, treacle and ginger and other spicies were incredibly exotic, brought over from afar. And so they were treated with some reverence and cakes flavoured with them were equally prized. Many of them would be marked with the shape os a saint, or another sacred image and then coloured over, or even covered with gold leaf - so gilded in very literal sense. So the cost, as you can imagine with such exotic ingredients, meant that originally these confections were originally enjoyed only by the rich. But as they became more affordable, gaudy versions used to appear and they became a staple at fairgrounds up and down the land, all of which explains why "taking the gilt off the gingerbread" made absolute sense to people in the 18th and 19th century. Meanwhile gingerbread itself became a byword, if you like, for something that was showy but rather worthless. To be a knight of the gingerbread - I like this one - was to be all mouth and no trousers. Trumperiness, incudentally, is a modern version of that - not a modern version, it's quite old, but you might think it's got a modern resonance. But there is another word based on a commodity that took a downward turn from something very precious to something quite shoddy. And its story is slightly better known. It goes back to Etheldreda, who was one of the five daughters of the king of East Angles in Suffolk. She was nicknamed Audrey and she founded a religious community at Ely, and the Norman cathedral still stand there on the site of the abbey that she built. She eventually died of the tumour of her throat and she blamed this affliction as punishment for earlier vanity because she loved wearing quite fancy, fine necklaces. Audrey later bacame a saint, and on the 17th October each yearher saint's day was marked with a lot of feasting and fun and fairs - definitely fairs. And at these fairs were sold laces and sort of fringes for wearing about the neck, if you like, in Audrey's honour. Ther were St Audrey's laces, which became shortened to tawdry-laces and that, of course, is how English came to adopt the adjective tawdry, meaning something that looks pretty good on the outside, but it's actually pretty cheap. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 15/01/18 (nose: cut-off your nose to spite your face, ness, nozzle, Nosey Parker)

I was talking a while ago about the origin of paying through the nose, which is rather strange expression, and ehere did it came from and I didn't quite have time to throw in some more nosey facts, and because Richard has said to me he's long be teased for his nose, I'm not quite sure why, I thought I would just explain a little bit about how nose operates in English because there are so many, literally hundreds and hundreds expressions which involve our nose in some way in the English language. So you can get up someone's nose, you can have your nose in front,  you can have your nose out of joint, you can win by a nose, look down your nose or stick your nose up. You can keep your nose clean or you can cut-off your nose to spite your face and that's really, really old. In fact, it wasn't recorded until 1785 in Francis Grose's favourite classical Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue, which he collected all the vocabulary and the vernacularof the common people as opposed to the literature that Samuel Johnson collected. And he was the first to mentioned it, he said, "When someone cut off his nose to be revenged of his face, said by one who to be revenged of his neighbour, has materially injured himself". But obviously it was in circulation a long, long before that. But you will also find noses hidden in other words. For example, ness, we talk about Loch Ness, Inverness, that actually is a form of nose and it refers to a headland or promontory nearby. Nozzle was a 7th century slang form of nose and schnozzle is the Yiddish version. And lots and lots of noses in crime as well, so you can be a nark, a snitch or a snout, all of those are terms for someone who stick their nose in, if you like, as an informer in that sense. The first Nosey Parker appeared in a postcard caption from 1907, The Adventures of Nosey Parker, ehich is referred to a Peeping Tom in Hyde Park. Now, nosey is self-explanatory, that's quite an old sense of, again, somebody, who's quite inquisitive and curious and possibly having a big nose, which you obviously haven't. But the common surename Parker was originally given to caretakers of parks or large enclosures of land, so the idea was of park keeper who likes spying perhaps voyeuristically on couples who were canoodling in the park. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 05/01/18 (playing through the nose, to bleed someone dry)

I've been talking a lot about money, currency in recent days. And today I'm going to talk about an idiom that has everything to do with playing and money, and that's playing through the nose, which is a really curious expression when you think about it. Ans that's a really gristy, quite notorious tale attached to it. It suggests that folowing their invasion of Ireland in the ninth century, the Danes, as they were called in Ireland - we call them the Vikings - imposed heavy taxes on the Irish people. And we know this is true. They arrived in two very big fleet on the Boyne and the Liffey, scores of boats, and conquered quite a lot of territory. And they did indeed impose taxes. For the most part, the Vikings lived quite comfortable with the British, or the native, people. But their finantial penalties were often very, very hefty. Ans this was the case here, according to this story. Those who were unable or refuse to pay the tax - there were gold taxes, taxes on all sorts of metals - they were said to suffer the penalties of having their noses slit. Ansd that is said to be the origin of paying through the nose. Gorily colourful as it is, the chronology of the phrase just doesn't work, because  obviously this was in the ninth century, and the phrase didn'n begin to emerge until the 17th century and the gap is just too big. HAving said that, we are not entirely sure about the truth origin of the term, but there is another suggestion that is much more plausible, and it's based on 400 year-old-slang. We know that rhino was once a slang term for money, and the fanciful rhinocerical meant rich, possibly because rhinoceros horn was known as an aphrodisiac. And even though there were very, very few rhinos in the country, in fact - I think there were two in the 17th century, and they were seen as these strange and wondrous creatures - that is possibly a reason behind the term. Now, at the same time, rhino or rhinos is a Greek word for nose. We talk about rhinoplasty, for example. And to bleed was slang for loosing a lot of money, hence our expression to bleed someone dry. So, put all of that together, and since noses bleed, rhino was a nose, it was also a slang term for money, a victim could possibly be said to be paying through the nose. Very long, very convoluted story, but it does just about fit and, thankfully, it has nothing to do with the sitting of noses by the Vikings. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 04/01/18 (foreign coins' names: nickel, quarters, dollar)

I have been talking about money this week and yesterday I was talking about old slang terms for British money. Today I/m going to talk about the names of some foreign coins. I'm going to start with nickel, which became very popular after about 1866 when the content of the five cent piece in North America was hanged from silver and copper to copper and nickel, whixh was a much cheaper metal. It comes from Kupfernickel which was a German name meaning "copper demon", and it was called copper demon because miners would sometimes alight auon this one and think, "Wow, we've found some copper"when in fact it was just a nickel which as I say was cheaper. It's related to "pumpernickel", as I often delight in saying, which is a bread, which mean "farting demon". Back to coin though, a quarter - originally quarters were Spanish dollars circulated alongside US dollars for many years, and they were often divided into eight wedge-shaped segments, believe it or not, and so the government eventuslly issued 25 cent coin to enable people to give change. And these coins were known as quarters or two bits, and we still talk about two-bits operation, which is kind of small change, if you like. Not the same incidentally as pieces of eight - they were the eight "real" coins, the Spanish silver dollar, and they were marked with the figure eight, hence that term. The Australian dollar - suggested nemes for that were great, the Royal, the Austral, the Oz, the boomer, the roo, the emu, the kanga, the digger and the dinkum. All slang terms for the Australian dollar. But I'll finish with dollar itself, because people often wonder about this one. That goes back to Joachimsthaler, and that was a coin that came from a silver mine of Joachimsthal in the Czech Rpublic. It then crossed over to Spanish American colonies and eventually to North America close to the War of Independence, but it's actuallu a name that comes from the Czech Republic.