"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.