"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.  

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 03/01/18 (coins slang name: bob, bender, tanner, quid)

I have an e-mail from Neil and Christine Shuttleworth from Huddersfield, who said some of the old coins have slang-type names, such as tanner and bob and quid for a 1£ note, and they wonder where they come from. I'll start with bob for a shilling. That's incredibly convoluted, this one. It's a bit of a mystery. One theory is it stems from the use of bob by bell ringers in churches for a ring of the bells. And as the word shilling came from a Germanic word, "skell", which also meant ring, it might be a very clever play on words, but, as I say, that's a slightly sequitous answer. The truth is they're not completely sure. A sixpence, we do know, was once known as a bender. And that's because due to its silver content, it could be bent quite easily. It was commonly done, bent in this way, to create love tokens and you can find some of these wonderful love tokens,  sixpence love tokens in museums today. But the value of a sixpence was enough, quite often, to get you quite inebriated, shall we say, at your local pub, and some people say that's at the root of going on a bender. A tanner, another name for the sixpence, dates from the 1800s. Again, not completely sure about this one, but there is a Romany word, "tawno", which simply means "a small one". And again, that may be account for it. And finally, the "quid" - we think this comes from the classical Latin quid, meaning "what", in other words, a quid is your what, your wherewithal, your means to buy something. So that's just a few, a whizz around some of the coin origins, as I say, but they're very, very difficult to track down, and the hunt goes on. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 02/01/18 (penny drops, penny for your thoughts)

Today I/m going to talk about pennies, the old coin, the penny, because it's actually found in many, many idioms in English even though the penny as we knew it doesn't exist any more. I'm going to start with the penny drops, so that's a moment when in idiom or a joke of some remark or argument has suddenly been understood. A little bit obvious perhaps, this one, but it dates from the middle of the 20th century when penny slot machines were incredibly popular at fairgrounds up and down the land and indeed on piers and arcades, etc. They're, of course, motionless and entirely unresponsive until the penny drops inside and, similary, a person who doesn't understand a joke or a remark made to them doesn't react until, so to speak, the penny drops in their brain. But inflation has caught up with proverbial sayings. We still use them today. A penny for your thoughts means nothing, really, a penny, but we still use it. You'd now need at least 20p to spend a penny obviously in a British public loo. Obviously that comes from when you had those coin-operated locks operated by the heavy, really old, pre-decimal pennies. And, finally, the penny is also related to the soucepan that we use simply because of the round shape. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 21/12/17 (cheeselog, woodlouse)

Well, we've had Rufus' wonderful poetry recently and I though we'd mention National Poetry Day, which was really exiting this year because there was collaboration between National Poetry Day and the Oxford English Dictionary and the idea was there would be a nationwide appeal for local dialect words, so local BBC radio stations would ask their listeners which words they thought should be celebrated in poetry. And 13 words was selected and poems  written on the basis of these words. And there were some absolutely wonderful ones. And the easiest way to find out whether somebody has a local, particularly local vocabulary is to ask them things like, what do you call a soft bread roll? And yo uwill get cob, batch, barm, and various answers back. Likewise, what do you call an alleyway? There's so many different words for alleyways up and down the land. But last but not least is a rather surprising one and that is, what do you call a woodlouse? And believe it or not, the humble woodlouse has hundreds of names up and down the land and  they're really evocative and very often they involve cheese or pigs and they're called roly-poly bugs, monkey peas, I mean, the most extraordinary names for them. But it was "cheeselog" that was chosen by BBC Berkshire listeners, that was their distinctive local word. And as to where cheeselog itself comes from, we're not completely sure. But wherever it came from, it's a fantastic word, and as I say, there are so many different types of woodlise up and down the country. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 20/12/17 (hat-trick)

I had an e-mail in from Kieran McCarthy, who was wondering about sets of threes in sport. He was wondering about the origin of a hat-trick, and a story began with an English game of cricket in1858. And HH Stephenson was the firrst cricketer to be awarded a hat for taken three wickets in consecutive balls. He performed the feat for the All-England Eleven against the 22 of Hallam at the Hyde Park ground in Sheffield. And a collection was made for him, and he was presented, indeed, with a hat or a cap with the proseeds. And that became very much a tradition in cricket, in first, because, of course, it then extended onto other sports. Sometimes as well, if a bowler did incredibly well, took three wickets on the trot, he was allowed to take his hat round the crowd and then get some money from the crowd. So that was his personal hat-trick. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 19/12/17 (busy as a bee, bee's knees)

I have bees for you today. Bees being the symbol of Manchester and obviously we're very close to Manchester, but also I went to visit some friends the other day who have a lot of hives and it got me thinking about all the idioms to do with bees in our language. So start with "busy as a bee", wich is a fairly obvious one. Bees are famous for their hard work - pathering pollen, tending to the quine, cooling the hive etc. But what is really surprising about this phrase is how old it is. It goes all the way back to the 1300s and we know this because it was used in Chauser's Canterbury Tale. So incredibly old, 700 years so far and still going strong. And the one we all think of, "the bee's knees". If something is bee's knees, it'a acme of excallence, really. This is just a jesting touch of nonsense, really, with good alliteration thrown in. There are so many quirky coinages which I often turn to on Countdown. Lots of wonderfull ones - canary's tusks, flea's eyebrows, bullfrog's beard, cuckoo's chin, kipper's knickers, caterpillar's kimono, and my favourite, the elephant's adenoids. So it's simply a nonsense phrase, but we love it.