"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 16/11/17 (nightmare, fury, rage)

Perhaps a slightly disturbing origin of words today, cos I'm going to talk about the terrifying images that lie behind both nightmare and fury. It'a just after lunch, so we should be OK for a while, hopefully. But nightmare, people often think it refers to a female horse, that kind of mare. But in fact, it comes from a Germanis folklore in which a mare was a female spirit, or a goblin, or even an incubus - incubus meant "to lie upon", and that's exactly what they did, because they would sit, so the legent went, upon the sleeper's chest, constricting it so much that they felt like they were suffocating, and in the process given them incredibly bad dreams. Some nightmares were thought to be fatal, because of this suffocation process, so all sort of things, natural phenomena, illnesses, et cetera, were blamed on these horrible female spirits. Onto more horrible female spirits, in fact, because the Furies were probably the most scariest thing in the nightscape of Greek mythology. They were called the Erinyes and they were born of the blood drops from Uranus, they had snakes famously coiled it their hair and they roamed the land, avenging, it was said, perjury, murder, all sorts of crimes that been committed, for people. They were thought to be so sort of wrathful and full of rage, that rage eventually came over to us as well, via a very complicated route, but the French "rage" which gave us rage, goes back to the Latin rabies, meaning frenzy or ferocity, which is of course wherewe get our medical term today. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 15/11/17 (adoption, fertility, ferry, felicity, feminine)

I've been reading a great book written by Peter Jones who is very much interested in bringing the classics to everybody, because not only linguistically do we owe the classics a lot, but also just in culture, as well. So I'm going to talk about the Romans again. In Roman time, whatever a father's special qualities, the key to a successful family was the wife's capacity to produce children. That was just all-important. I suppose in some cultures, not much has changed. But fertility itself comes from the Latin fero, meaning I carry. It's linked to ferry, and indeed the fare that you might pat to travel in the ferry. And they all very relevant to a fertile woman. But this is because of her depended the continuation, not just of the family, but of citizen children, and so the Roman states and of the gods that they worshipped, et cetera, so it was this very complicated interwoven thing that was all-important. And the word for blessed, felix, which of course gave us felicity and felicitous, applied to her. But if you go all the way back to thst very ancient root, you'll find it's linked to femina, so we get feminine from that - that was a woman. Fecundus, which means fecund. And foetus, as well. They're all linked, they all go back to the same ancient root, meaning to suckle. But I thought I'd mentioned that link with foetus, because you know the word effete? We talk about something over-refined today as being slightly effete or maybe just a little bit feeble, but actually, for the Romans, that was the worst fate of all, because it literally meant out-wombed. It's linked to foetus, it means worn out by bearing too many children, so a woman would be effete, essencially barren, because she had just produced too many offspring. But onto a slightly happier nite, when it comes to children - if children were lacking or didn't quite have the qualities that were hoped for, they were adopted quite regularly from otheh families to ensure the survival of the line. But I menyioned this because adoption, if you look back to its root in Latin, it's actually really lovely, because it means to choose to come to. So you were choosing someone to come to your family, which I think is a really nice way of looking at it. And it was all about, as I say, helping the family to succeed, and often it wasn't babies that came over, but it was adults, ao adults would be adopted into a family, and Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Hadrian, so many people were adopted into another family in order to keep up the power, if the womb of the all-important mother hadn't quite done its job. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 14/11/17 (nasty, nest, nostalgia)

I'm going to look at three words which on the face of it have absolutely nothing in common, but there is a link, sometimes a tiny, tiny link, between them. And I'm going to start off with nasty and nest. Because in the language trade they might be possibly, we think, be doublets. In other words, they share a common route. So the came into English via a different language, which happens all the time. But they may come from the ancient, ancient language that I often mention, of Indo-European, which was the mother of so many languages, and a root meaning nest. It seems a bit of leap of imagination to link the two, but it seems that the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons may have noticed that the place where birds sit, as Chris Packham will tell you, can get extremely foul.  And it may be that thanks to this observation, nasty rather than nesty, came into English to refer to something as disgusting and filthy, as a birds' nest. For that was the original meaning, something really repellent. But as for nests, I saw the word nestalgia recently, which is a jokey blend or portmanreau, meaning a longing for bed. When we think of nostalgia, which has a curious history itself, it was coined in 1668, and if was part of dissertation by a Swiss scholar who wanted to translate the native German, Heimweh, which translates as home-woe, longing for home. Fernweh is the longing for faraway places. But he took it from the Greek, the scholar, from the Greek, algos, meaning pain or grief, and nostos, meaning homecoming. So quite a beautiful word. But not beatiful in its consequences, because for a long time it was listed as an endemic disease in many medical manuals, because it was thought that when all these depressing symptoms came together, they actually could be fatal in the wrong person. And in the American Civil War it was cited as a serious medical problem. It was said that some 2 588 cases of nostalgia were reported, and 13 deaths. The idea, I guess, is that if your morale is low, then so is youe immunity. Today, nostalgia thankfuly  has a far more wistful sense, it's a longing for something lost, usually something evanescent. And it's deffinitely a long way from nasty. But those three words have a curious link. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 13/11/17 (Echo, Pan)

On Friday I talked about the origins of ditto, the ditto punctuation marks, which are, if you like, written echoes of what somebody else has said before or indeed what you have said before. So I thought I would talk about the history of echo because I think Margaret would be like this one. She probably knows it all already, but it's very much indebted to Greek mythology, which of course we've heard about today. It goes back to another nymph, in fact. Echo was a mountain nymph known as an oread and it's said that the goddess Hera really didn't like the way that Echo used to gossip and chat the whole time and so she deprived her of speech, apart to the ability to repeat what other people had said to her. So that was Hera's revenge for somebody who was a bit of a tittle-tattle. So poor Echo, who had already had a pretty tough time, then fell in love with the handsome Narcissus who, of course, was only in love with himself and so he didn't return her love. And when he rejected her, she wasted away with grief until there was hothing left of her but her voice. And of course Narcissus himself pined away by worshipping the reflection of himself in the pool. It's said where he died, the Narcissus flowers sprang, which is really quite sweet story. But back to Echo, there's a different story of Echo in which she was loved by the God Pan, but she turned him down so the tables were turned, if you like. In revenge, it's said Pan drove a group of shepherds mad and made them tear her to pieces in an incredibly brutal way. It said that the fragments of her flesh were buried in the earth including her voice which could still imitate other sounds. So poor Echo had an incredibly hard time of it. If you wand to look linguistically, "eche" in the Greek meant sound, simply, so that is probably where it came from, but the mythology obviously so much more colourful. And talking about Pan, the spurned lover in this one. Pan is, of course, behind panic because he was a mischievious thing. He would hide in the forest and makes all sorts of eerie, terrifying noises to frighten passers-by, which is where we get panic from today. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 10/11/17 (ditto)

I'm going to start with the origin of ditto, because we use ditto quite a lot when we want to echo someone's feeling or thoughts, or where we want to aviod repeating the same word - s oto aviod repetition. But where does it actually come from? We have to look back to 17th-century Italian, when ditto meant "in the aforesaid month". So it was used to avoid repeating a month. So quite a specialist sense. But English merchants picked it up and started used it in accounts ans lists. And actually 18th-century tailors picked it up as well, and it was shorthand for "the same material". So "sute of dittos" was a sute that was the same material and the same colour throughout. And that was a standard term in the clothing trade. But before we had the ditto marks that we know today, those double apostrophes, the word ditto was used itself. So that would be what was read out if they were repeating something that was written down. And only fairly recently did it settle on, as I say, those double aphostrophe marks. But where does ditto itself comes from? It's a Tuscan dialect word, "detto" - "I said", which ultimately goes back to the Latin dictus, and of course dictus gave us a diction, dictum, dictation and, of course, dictionary, as well. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 09/11/17 (tomboy, tom cat, waghalter)

We are with Tom Adams. He e-mailed in and said, why is a boyish girl called a tomboy?  In other words, is there any reason why Tom is the name used to describe masculine qualities, if you like. And you find it in tom cat as well, so he was wondering about that. So I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary and the first mentioned of tomboy is from a comedy performed in 1556, so we going back a long way. And the quotation is, "Is all your delight and joy in whisking and ramping abroad like a tomboy?" But there were no girls in the offing here. This was said to a boy, so the tomboy was in fact male, rather than female. And that's because the original meaning of the word was of a rude, boisterious boy or a rapscallion. Or indeed a waghalter. A waghalter was a mischievous joker, so mischievous that in the grim humour of the times, he was thought to be fit for the gallows ans that's actually where we get wag today for a comedian. Going back to tomboy, within a few dacades, it had flipped gender and  had taken on the meaning of a female who behaves like that spirited boy. Defined in the dictionary like a wild, romping girl. Gender switches or a gender fluidity like these are not uncommon at all in the history of English, so you will find, for example, the first harlot was a man. The feirst meaning of punk was a promiscuous woman. Of course nowdays it can be either sex, a punk. A punk rocker. And even girls could apply to both sexies when it first came around, so it's quite common in English to find these sort of flips. But the Tom part of the equation, I think that it what Tom Adams actually was wondering about. And you will find that in tom cat, tomfoolery, "Tom, Dick and Harry", and that's because the name was simply used as a generic label for the common man, if you like, the man of the people. It wasn't just a Tom, JAck was also used in this way, if you think about jack of all trades or a lumberjack, and the idea is that there were the ordinary man and just used, as I say, as a generic name. But quite why we have tomboy and not tomgirl is always a bit of mistery. And anyway, we might want to forget the whole idea of tomboy these days because girls can do anything, as we know. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 07/11/17 (attercop, haggersnash, cobweb, spinster)

This one is for Alison, who's written a book about spiders for children and how we should all embrace the spider, quite literally. And I wa salso talking quite recently about all the words in the dictionary for a curmudgeon, or somebody who's just quite sulky. And in there, you might also put attercop, and that was an old nickname for somebody who wasn't just sulky but was also quite spiteful with it - haggersnash was another word for them, so just slightly mean-spirited - was an attercop, which is ufair on the spider, because attercop actually was the word for spider before spider came along. And it's made up of atter, meaning poison, and coppe, which was the name for a head, so literally it was a poison head, because all spiders at that time were thought to be highly venomous, which is a little bit mean. But that attercop, the atter somehow, the poison bit, fell off and cop, the head bit, became the word for a spider for some time. And that how we came came to have our cobweb. I'm often asked about those because they were the webs of a cop, that word for a spider, and eventually the P became a B and we are stuck with cobwebs today. But wventually, the attercop became a spider. That comes from the old English word for spin, a much more neutral term, which means that the spinster and a spider intimately linked. Spinster actually, of course, to do with the fact that women used to spin for a living. Often if they didn't have a husband to rely on, they would just have to rely on the income from spinning and so it came to mean a slightly derogatoey term for a prim, unmarried woman, that was a spinster. Unlike the bachelor, who was a young knight, he had a far better deal. But, yes, spiders, we had some very strange beliefs, but I think, you know, we are much more neutral about them today, hopefully, certanly linguistically speaking and we should definitely embrace them.