"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.