"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.