"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 03/01/18 (coins slang name: bob, bender, tanner, quid)

I have an e-mail from Neil and Christine Shuttleworth from Huddersfield, who said some of the old coins have slang-type names, such as tanner and bob and quid for a 1£ note, and they wonder where they come from. I'll start with bob for a shilling. That's incredibly convoluted, this one. It's a bit of a mystery. One theory is it stems from the use of bob by bell ringers in churches for a ring of the bells. And as the word shilling came from a Germanic word, "skell", which also meant ring, it might be a very clever play on words, but, as I say, that's a slightly sequitous answer. The truth is they're not completely sure. A sixpence, we do know, was once known as a bender. And that's because due to its silver content, it could be bent quite easily. It was commonly done, bent in this way, to create love tokens and you can find some of these wonderful love tokens,  sixpence love tokens in museums today. But the value of a sixpence was enough, quite often, to get you quite inebriated, shall we say, at your local pub, and some people say that's at the root of going on a bender. A tanner, another name for the sixpence, dates from the 1800s. Again, not completely sure about this one, but there is a Romany word, "tawno", which simply means "a small one". And again, that may be account for it. And finally, the "quid" - we think this comes from the classical Latin quid, meaning "what", in other words, a quid is your what, your wherewithal, your means to buy something. So that's just a few, a whizz around some of the coin origins, as I say, but they're very, very difficult to track down, and the hunt goes on. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 02/01/18 (penny drops, penny for your thoughts)

Today I/m going to talk about pennies, the old coin, the penny, because it's actually found in many, many idioms in English even though the penny as we knew it doesn't exist any more. I'm going to start with the penny drops, so that's a moment when in idiom or a joke of some remark or argument has suddenly been understood. A little bit obvious perhaps, this one, but it dates from the middle of the 20th century when penny slot machines were incredibly popular at fairgrounds up and down the land and indeed on piers and arcades, etc. They're, of course, motionless and entirely unresponsive until the penny drops inside and, similary, a person who doesn't understand a joke or a remark made to them doesn't react until, so to speak, the penny drops in their brain. But inflation has caught up with proverbial sayings. We still use them today. A penny for your thoughts means nothing, really, a penny, but we still use it. You'd now need at least 20p to spend a penny obviously in a British public loo. Obviously that comes from when you had those coin-operated locks operated by the heavy, really old, pre-decimal pennies. And, finally, the penny is also related to the soucepan that we use simply because of the round shape. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 21/12/17 (cheeselog, woodlouse)

Well, we've had Rufus' wonderful poetry recently and I though we'd mention National Poetry Day, which was really exiting this year because there was collaboration between National Poetry Day and the Oxford English Dictionary and the idea was there would be a nationwide appeal for local dialect words, so local BBC radio stations would ask their listeners which words they thought should be celebrated in poetry. And 13 words was selected and poems  written on the basis of these words. And there were some absolutely wonderful ones. And the easiest way to find out whether somebody has a local, particularly local vocabulary is to ask them things like, what do you call a soft bread roll? And yo uwill get cob, batch, barm, and various answers back. Likewise, what do you call an alleyway? There's so many different words for alleyways up and down the land. But last but not least is a rather surprising one and that is, what do you call a woodlouse? And believe it or not, the humble woodlouse has hundreds of names up and down the land and  they're really evocative and very often they involve cheese or pigs and they're called roly-poly bugs, monkey peas, I mean, the most extraordinary names for them. But it was "cheeselog" that was chosen by BBC Berkshire listeners, that was their distinctive local word. And as to where cheeselog itself comes from, we're not completely sure. But wherever it came from, it's a fantastic word, and as I say, there are so many different types of woodlise up and down the country. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 20/12/17 (hat-trick)

I had an e-mail in from Kieran McCarthy, who was wondering about sets of threes in sport. He was wondering about the origin of a hat-trick, and a story began with an English game of cricket in1858. And HH Stephenson was the firrst cricketer to be awarded a hat for taken three wickets in consecutive balls. He performed the feat for the All-England Eleven against the 22 of Hallam at the Hyde Park ground in Sheffield. And a collection was made for him, and he was presented, indeed, with a hat or a cap with the proseeds. And that became very much a tradition in cricket, in first, because, of course, it then extended onto other sports. Sometimes as well, if a bowler did incredibly well, took three wickets on the trot, he was allowed to take his hat round the crowd and then get some money from the crowd. So that was his personal hat-trick. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 19/12/17 (busy as a bee, bee's knees)

I have bees for you today. Bees being the symbol of Manchester and obviously we're very close to Manchester, but also I went to visit some friends the other day who have a lot of hives and it got me thinking about all the idioms to do with bees in our language. So start with "busy as a bee", wich is a fairly obvious one. Bees are famous for their hard work - pathering pollen, tending to the quine, cooling the hive etc. But what is really surprising about this phrase is how old it is. It goes all the way back to the 1300s and we know this because it was used in Chauser's Canterbury Tale. So incredibly old, 700 years so far and still going strong. And the one we all think of, "the bee's knees". If something is bee's knees, it'a acme of excallence, really. This is just a jesting touch of nonsense, really, with good alliteration thrown in. There are so many quirky coinages which I often turn to on Countdown. Lots of wonderfull ones - canary's tusks, flea's eyebrows, bullfrog's beard, cuckoo's chin, kipper's knickers, caterpillar's kimono, and my favourite, the elephant's adenoids. So it's simply a nonsense phrase, but we love it. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 18/12/17 (riding a croggy)

I had a nice e-mail from Christine Craigie, who said, "My cousines talk of riding croggy for fun when the two of them ride on a bike together. Where does this term come from?" It's a great example from English dialect which, contrary to everything we believe, is actually quite well and in quite robust health. Wonderful, wonderful words are falling out of use. They all seen to collect around certain themes, which is quite interesting as well - left-handedness being one of them. Believe it or not, children's games and particularly this idea of riding two on a bike is another one. Dozens of a local versions of them so there is riding backie, dinky, seaty, piggy and croggy, which I love. That's still use in Midlands, especially in Nottinghamshire and Teesside as well. The difference here is that riding croggy, you're riding on the crossbar. You're not riding behind the rider. It may have come north all the way from Cornwall where a croggan is a limpet shell. So the idea is that you've got two riders and one is clinging really tightly to the other, which I think is beautiful. It may simply be CRO from crossbar. That's a more prosaic version, but I like a limpet explanation but, as I say, it's just one of so many words for riding on a bike this day. A lot of fun. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 15/12/17 (nailing your colours to the mast)

Thanks to John Barringer, who e-mailed in to ask for the story behind "nailing your colours to the mast", which is to declare your intentions very openly and also the idea that you will hold on to those beliefs intil the end, and there is a lovely story behind it. A little bit grisly, perhaps, because it goes back to a very famous 17th-century naval battle, and in those days colours, or flags - it's another word for flags - were struck or lowered to show surrender in a battle, but it was also a custom in warfare for one ship to direct its cannon fire at the opponent's ship's mast, so to disable it completely. Sometimes if all of the ship's masts were broken, the captain then had no alternative. He was completely lost. But if there was a little bit left, sometimes they would hoist the colours onto the remnants of the ship's rigging - in other words, they would literally nail their colours to the mast, as I say, quite literally. But there is a specific event involved and that is exploits of the crew of the ship called the Venerable, which is at the Battle of Camperdown, and that was a naval engagement that took place in 1797. It was between English and Dutch ships during the French Revolutionary Wars. Camperdown, because it was near Kamperduin in Holland. And the Venerable was under the command of the captain Adam Duncan. He led the fleet, the entire fleet, and it didn't go very well, the battle, at the beginning, so the main mast was struck and the blue standard, the Admiral, the blue flag, was brought down in the process, which could mean, as they say, that everything was over, but that's when history became an adventure story. Step forward the intrepid sailor called Jack Crawford. He climbed what was left of the mast - ans there wasn't very much left, a very, very precarious job - and nailed it back to where it was visible to the rest of the fleet, to show thst they hadn't surrended. It provided crucial in the battle. Duncan's fleet was victorious in the end and many saw Camperdown to be the end of dominance of the Dutch and the beginning of Britannia ruling the waves. Crawford returned home to Sunderland. He was an absolute national hero and, for years after, the bravery of those English sailors bacame the yardstick against which anything else was measured, so a very literal a nailing colour to the mast, all thanks to the sailor Jack Crawford.