"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 28/11/17 (beat about the bush, drew onto red herring)

A couple of viewers have e-mailed in, including Ann and John Berry, to ask what we're doing when we beat about the bush - why do we beat about the bush? And English is full of hunting metaphors. It was a highly important aristocratic pursuit, whether or not we agree with it nowdays. But to beat about the bush is from hunting - from bird hunting, in fact. And it is simply, as you might guess, some of the participants rousing the birds by beating the bushes and cousing them to fly off so that others can catch the quarry in nets. Of course, today, still, grouse hunting and other forms of hunt still use this method of beating, and they have beaters. It drew me onto red herring, because red herring has been - I suppose inevitably - one of the main sources of red herrings in etymology throuhout the ages. We've never been quite sure where it comes from, and there have been so many guesses. But we think we have now cracked it. It goes back to William Cobbett, who was a radical journalist. HAted the English political system, which he lampooned and called "the Old Corruption". He was deeply out of love with politics of his day, which is in the 19th century, and he wrote a story - perhaps fictional, we're not sure - in a political weekly about how, as a boy, he had managed to deflect hounds from chasing a hare by dragging a red herring, ie a highly smoked herring, across the trail. The reason he told this story is he wanted to use it as a metaphor to really give the press a hard time, because thay'd allowed itself... or they'd allowed themselves to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon, a different one to the one we know, which made the press take their eye off very important domestic matters, and he said that they had deliberately created this red herring in order to deflect interest in what was really going on at home. And, of course, we talk about political red herrings to this day, and the phrase simply slipped into the mainstream from there. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 27/11/17 (tommyrot, codswallop, jack brew, bags of mystery)

A lovely member of our studio audience ask the other day where "tommyrot" comes from, which is a slightly old-fashioned term now for complete nonsense. And English is just full of so many words to do with nonsense. You have twaddle, and you have bankum and poppycock and balderdash. And if you looked at the historical thesaurus, you would probably find 100 or 200 words, which probably reflects perhaps slightly badly on the English temperament. We had codswallop as well, which is one of big mysteries of English etymology. We think it goes back tpo Hiram Codd, who invented a special bottle to contain fizzy drinks. And because beer drinkers used to call weak beer, if you like, wallop, it was a bit of scathing criticism of what was contained in these bottles. Copswallop, perhaps, goes back to Hiram Codd. Bot to tommyrot. Tommyrot is actually a World War I term. Tommy was very much the name for your traditional generic soldier. It was used - in a very good way, it was a very, very positive way - but rot, obviously wasn't very positive. And it was bread, it was a soldiers' rations. And soldiers have a great way of pocking fun at the food, which isn't by all accounts, always particularly nice. So "jack brew", one of my favourite terms, is a cup of tea that you make for yourself but not for anyone else. Of "bags of mystery", is an old term for sausages which soldiers have adopted, because you never know what's in them. I quite like that one. And tommyrot simply was your soldiers' rations. Tommy Atkins, as I say, was a general term for an honest, private soldier, but it's as simple as it gets. It was just a rather nasty food  that you would eat out in the field by your traditional Tommy. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 23/11/17 (Heath Robinson)

Thanks to John Shepherd who sent an e-mail saying, "Was there ever a real Heath Robinson?" And Heath Robinson is a slightly old-fashioned saying now, and it describes anything that is impractical, eccentric, sometimes ingeniously so, or sometimes it looks as if it's about to fall apart. But we might call some contraption or other, "That's a bit..." We might say, "That's a bit Heath Robinson". It all goes back to an illustrator and cartoonist who was called William Heath Robinson, who was alive from 1872 to 1944. And he delighted in sketching extremely unlikely looking machine which is capable of doing incredibly quirky, irregular jobs, so they were absolutely wonderful. But he meant, really, to be quite satirical, so he was poking fun at the supposedly labour saving inventions that were really all the rage at the beginning of the 20th century. And so he specialised in drawing these ludicrously overcomplicated devices that would... you know, were designed, really, to produce some kind of simple conclusion, but, as I say, went all the way round the houses to do it. So I thought I'd give you some examples because they were lovely. There was a multi-movement tabby silencer, ehich automatically threw water at sereneding cats, a bedside bomb extinguisher, a resuscitator for stale scones. He didn't however, design anything that could solve friendish maths calculations, and that's, of course, that cos he hadn't met Rachel. But had he met Rachel, it would have been a cartoon of her. But Heath Robinson, if you have a chance to look at his cartoons, they're really special. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 20/11/17 (discipline, procrastination, peredination, deadline)

I thought a little bit about the vocabulary of discipline and its enemy, which is usually procrastination in my case. But to start with, discipline, you need to be a disciple, really, to acquire a discipline, so to acquire learning in some way, because that word discipline comes from yhe Latin disciplinus, a disciple, so a learner, which, of course, in ancient times was all-important. So important, in fact, that the word school comes from a Greek word meaning leisure because it was thought to be so enjoyable to acquire a new knowledge. I'm not sure schoolchildren today would agree with that. But in other words, a period od apprenticeship is often necessary to produce good quality work, hence the learning idea of discipline. But as I say there are many enemies to that all around us. And I mentioned procrastination, and that it has at its heart cras, meaning tomorrow. So the idea was in Latin, that you were putting something off until next day. If you want to put something off until the day after tomorrow, that is known as perendination, which is also to perendinate - it's quite a useful word in my vocabulary. What's needed, then, is the opposite of all of these, is to knuckle down and ironically that comes from play, not from work, it's a geme of marbles, ehen to knuckle down is literally to put your knuckles down to the ground in order to shoot better. And finally, if you were like Douglas Adams, who famously said, "I love a good deadline. I love the wooshing sound they mke as they go by", it's worth remembering that the first deadlines were lines drown around military prisons beyond which you could be shotif you tried to escape. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 22/11/17 (nationalities' stereotypes)

I had an e-mail in from Eddie Klose. I think it's a German surename. But he asked, "Why do we introduce nationalities into our phrases?" So, why do we talk about French leave, Dutch courage, Russian roulette, etc? And the answer is really that languege can be very effective in reinforcing steretypes. And they're not usually particularly nice stereotypes. So, I'll start with the Dutch. It's quite a well-known story, I think, a lot of people know now why we talk about Dutch courage, etc, but it's worse repeating. They're not very flattering, any of idioms relating to the Dutch. Dutch courage, we know, the only time, the implication is, that the Dutch are ever brave is when they've drink a lot. Double Dutch became a byword for gibberish. To be Dutch buttocked wasn't a particularly positive thing, that meant you had a very large behind. Onto the French, excuse my French,  we still do actually often put it alongside language that would otherwise be seen as being vulgar or obscene. And finally, Russian ruolette, that's slightly different, because Russian roulette isn't really a slur. It goes back to a novel of 1937, and a military situation, as you would expect. "Did you ever hear of Russian roulette? With the Russian army in Romania around 1917, some of officers would suddenly pull out her revolver,  remove a cartridge, spin a cylindre, snap it back in place, put it to his head and pull the trigger. So they've been doing  that for a very long time, probably did originate in Russian military camps. But to answer Eddie's question, with all of these, no matter which wat you look at it, it all goes back to something rather unpleasant. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 21/11/17 (crotchety, being cross)

A couple of questions from viewers, for which, thank you. The first comes from Dave Leonard who asked where the word crotchety come from. And the one that I'm going to follow up with is from Colin Curtis who asks, "Why do we talk about being cross?" So they  were obviously both writting on a particularly cantankerous day. But I'll start with the crotchety. And it seems strange, but crotchety has a link with both handicraft and also a ball game, and I'll explain. Crochet meant in French a hook of a shepherd's crook and you can still find it in French today to mean a hockey stick, but, of course, crochet, as it would be in English, is, for us, a handicraft in which yarn is made into fabric with a hooked needle. So, the lawn game that is called croquet is also linked to this because you drive a ball through hooks or hoops in order to play the game. That, two, originated in France and then became very popular with the English aristocracy. So, this is a slightly winding thread that I'm weaving here, but the French word, if you go back to that crochet, shepherd's hook, etc, it's also the source for the musical note the crotchet, simply because of its shape - it almost resembles a shepherd's crook of a hook. And that, in turn, gave us crotchety, because it was some sort og perverse, slightly hooked belief, if you like, a sort of twisted turn of mind and then of course, you're so twisted that you're actually positively angry. Onto cross, that is even more productive in English and we have the Vikings to thank for thst, and the Romans. The Vikings brought us kross, with a K, the Romans gave us a crux, of course, and that crux is behind crucial, crucible - which was the hight light originally that shown in front of crucafix... And excruciating which reffered to torture on the cross. But to come to Colin's question, cross, meaning annoyed, goes back to the 17th century and it's actually from the high seas, to do with a crosswind. It's a wind blowing across the bow of your ship, rather then from behind. So it's an adverse, contrary or opposite wind, bot one that you will particularly like, and might leave you annoyed or bad-tempered. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 17/11/17 (curator, manicure, accurate, secure)

I'm going to talk about single word, which is curator. When we think of curators, we tend to think of museums, somebody who organises and selects, perhaps displays things. But you can curate content on the web now, so it's taking on new senses as technology develops. But unsurprasingly perhaps, we have to look back to the ancient for its origin, for there, a curator was someone with incredibly heavy responsibilities who was in charge of pretty much all public works. So if you're looking back to ancient Rome, there were curatores, as they were called, of olive oil supplies, corn supplies, food for the people, the rivers, public funds, public buindings, roads... Not taxes - they were left to somebody else - but almost any public administrative role that you can think of was under the jurisdiction of the curatores. It all goes back to cura, which in Latin meant care. If you think about it, it pops up in so many places in English. So we have a manicure, which is the care for the manus, the hand. Accurate, means done with care and if you are secure, then you are free of care. So lots and lots of places that that word, from curator and cura comes into English and it goes to show the Romans did an awful lot of us, really.