"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 21/02/18 (parsimonious, skinflints)

I have an e-mail from Anne Hunter in County of Durham, who says "parsimonious" is a greate word, but why are parsimonious people sometimes known as "skinflints"? I always think of Scrooge when I think of skinflints. It has slightly Dickensian feel to it, but actually it goes back a little bit earlier than that. I'll start with parsimonious. It is indeed a nice word. That goes back to the Romans, who gave us "parsitas", which meant sparing or thrifty or restrained, and if you look in the historical thesaurus which is nested with the wonderful Oxford English Dictionary, you'ii find lots of brilliant synonyms. So, tight-fisted speak for itself. Husbandly used to be an adjective meaning miserly, because a husband was the male of the houshold, in control of the finances. Scrimpy, and also squeezy, which is quite fun, or a pinchpenny, a skinflint also could be also a pinchpenny. But I'll go back to skinflint, and the idea of skinning a flint or a whittling down a flint stone for starting your fire until it was as thin as skin had, understandably, a lot more resonance in the 17th century than it does today. To skin a flint would be a very difficult task and would only be undertaken by somebody who really didn't want to go to the trouble of trying to find a new flint for their fire to keep warm. But it's been used as a metaphor for extrem miserliness for centuries, so at least the 1600s, when the first dictionaries of criminal slang were collected and published around that time. One of them defines a skinflint as "a gripping, close-feasted fellow". And it was popularised iby many works of drama and fiction. Not by Dickens, actually, but in the 18th century, a Skinflint with a capital S was a name of many stock characters that you'll find in dramas, plays, etc, who showed extreme greed. Lots of other phrases doing the same qualities, actually, and one of them was to skin a flea for its hide and tallow, so quite a similar idea. And in French they talk of "tender sur un oeuf", which is quite fun, which means to shave an egg. So again, it's almost... It's a near-impossible task, but if you were that miserly, it might just be one that you'd do. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 20/02/18 (X for kiss, 0 for hug)

I had an e-mail in from Darren Smith in Kenley and he said, "Can you ask Susie to explain why X replesent a kiss. Has it anything to do with Spanish "equis"? Keep up a good stuff, you be sure of it", says Darren for you, Nick. It is a very good quiestion. Where does these symbols come from? We do sprinkle them absolutely everywhere in our correspondence these days. Unsurprisingly, lots and lots of theories as to where they come from. Not definitive answer but we can make a good guess. There are visual explanations. Some people think that X is a character, looks like two pairs of lips come together, while the 0 which we use to mean a hug looks like an embrace, and X0X0 is like a kiss on the face. Some people try to interpret it in that way. Other people looks to the ear, sort of auditory explanation and think that there is a similarity in the pronunciation between X ans kiss. I haven't heard "equis" before, Darren's theory, which, of course, means the letter X in Spanish but we can add that one to the list of the many suggestions. As I say, no definitive answer, but we can get a good guessand it's mostly to come from a written tradition. When Christianity came along, X was used unsurprisingly to represent a cross. X means Christ, as in Xmas we have today, and because of that it meant faith and fidelity, so that might explain why it was used in the correspondence. It certanly became a signature of choice. In the Middle Ages, when few people could write, documents were signed and sealed indeeed with an X embossed in wax, and you'll find letters between kings and subject, all letters between ordinary peopre sealed with a kiss, and with that literal symbol of the X. The Oxford English Dictionary has the first record of X as a liss from letter in 1763, and it was the British curate and naturalist called Gilbert White, and he wrote a letter which ended, "I am with a many XXXX and many a Pater noster and Ave Maria, Gil White". So the X in his letter could mean kisses but it also could mean blessings, given that he also calls upon some, you know, religious refereces there. But by the time Winston Chulchill was writting a letter to his mother, you know, many years later, we knew what it meant. He said. "Please excuse bad writing as I am in an awful hurry, XXX (many kisses), WSC". Come to the zero, the nought we use for a hug and finally that probably came from a completely non-religious source and the linguist Ben Zimmer, who was wonderful on these things, thinks that it stems from the game of nought and crosses which sounds completely ludicrous until you know that actaully that was ariund since Egyptian times and Roman times as well. It is calles tic-tac-toe in America. Lots and lots of different names all over the world. It was played with pebbles and coins, whatever was available, but it was very much in the popular imagination. That's possibly why X and zero became used together. X meaning a kiss and zero became a hug. So a long explanation. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 19/02/18 (prom)

I'm going to talk about Proms today. Not just the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, but also prom culture seems to have come to British schools. They're very much... At the end of exams now, schools will hold formal dances for pupils. If it's a single-sex school they invite another school along, and it's a big deal and definetely an import from North America, you would think, and it is in some way, but actually prom, if you go back over its history, has crossed the Atlantic and also other seas quite a few times. It's a shortener from "promenade", which is the word of French origin and that was used as early at the 1500s to mean a leisure walk. In later years it was a public space in which such leisure walks took place. About three centures later, so it took a little while, promenade has begun to be used as the shorteningof its own, stanting in for things like a promenade deck on board a ship, where people who were taking a cruise, for example, could go up and take a leasure stroll and take in some sea air. And indeed there was a promenade concert, which was a concert place without seating, and that is where the Prom in the Royal Albert Hall come in, probably the most famous of all promenade concerts. But promenade also had quite strong link with dance, and in ballet it's a slow turn made on one leg. It's got a different meaning in country dance. It's like a formation really of couples moving forward. And in ballroom dancing it's called an open position for promenading, which the partner face in the same direction again, as if they're about to take a walk. But the proms we know today that are creeping into schools, that all goes back to Ivy League universities in the USA, but it's gone all the way around the world and, as I say, it's settled in the Royal Albert Hall, and long may it continue. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 16/02/18 (irony)

There are some words which if, as a linguist or a lexicographer, you are asked for definition, you freeze inside, because some of them are notoriously difficelt to define. An one of the ones that I personally dread is irony. When people ask me about irony or ironic, it's really, really difficult. It goes back to the Greek eiron, which meant to dissemble. Mostly when we talk about irony these days, we're talking about a situational irony. And back in the '96, the singer Alanis Morissette caused a real stir with her song Ironic. I'm sure lots of people remember it. It includes a list of things, so, there's a rain on your wedding day, the good advice that you just didn't take, a free ride when you've already paid, a death-row pardon two minutes later. And to those who took a sort of keen interest in the English language, whether or not you want to call them pedants, they said, "This is rubbish, this isn't irony, these are just sort of unfortunate events. This doesn't fulfil the definition of irony". So, true situational irony, I suppose, would be things like fire station burned down or a police station gets robbed. You post a tweet saying what a waste of time social media is, for example. That sort of situational irony. And so critics would say ironic doesn't, as I say, involve odd or coincidental events, but - and this is a reason why it's so difficult - irony has been used vaguely and fuzzily for about 150 years. So, if you look up in the Oxford English Dictionary, there's a quote from 1906. "The gentlemen who add to their advertisments for coachman or gardeners the ironic phrase, 'no scholar need apply'". You could take that as a bit of verbal irony, a bit of sarcasm, but it's not completely clear. And it's very likely that in the course of time - in fact, probably already in some dictionaries - ironic can be used simply to describe a curious or a surprising event, just as Alanis Morissette used it in her song, because it has been used that way pretty much since the 19th century. And so, as I say, only a matter of time before they go with that way. And whether or not you say that itself, the new dictionary definitions are a classic case of a situational irony. the jury's out, but personally please don't ask me what it means in meantime. 

"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. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 14/02/18 (St Valentine's Day and love)

I'm realising now that that this may only appeal to 13% of our viewers, given the stats that you were giving about Valentine's Day at the beginning. Just going to talk a little bit about Valentines and love as well. There were two early Italian martyrs whose feasts was celebrated on St. Valentine's Day, and love didn't became associated with either of them until the Middle Ages. And two possible reasons for this. One is that there was a very old belief that birds mated on exactly this day, so they would find their life mate on St Valentine's Day, the feast of St Valemtine, which is very sweet. Another is that it's linked to a pagan fertility festival. Now, that was called Lupercalia, and it was held in honour of the fertility god, the Roman fertility god, Lupercus. So those are the two reasons possibly why we  associate love with - because it was a fertility day - with St Valentine's Day. But to take love itself, unsurprisingly, it's a very, very ancient word. It's existed as long as humankind has existed. And if you go back to the most ancient language that we've traced, which is an Inddo-European language, you will find it there. And it's shared by a Sanskrit word, lubhyati, which meant desire, and that incidentally also give us libido and the Latin word, libet, meaning "it's pleasing". It's related to other words in English, including lief, an old-fashioned word, my lief, which means dear of pleasant, but also very appropriately, love is linked to life itself. It shares the same ancient root, which I think is quite lovely. And just to flick briefly to tennis, because I think you love tennis. Love in tennis - a lot of people think that it's got everything to do with the shape of l'oeuf, the egg in French. It's actually not. We think it goes back to the idea of playing for love rather than for money, which is behind one of the ancient rules of the game. So there you go, a quick wirlwind tour of love, and apologies to anybody who actually really hates St Valentine's Day. I'll stop now. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 13/02/18 (Carnival Day, Shrove Tuesday, deadpan expression)

Erm, and a Carnival Day has come round again. Today is Carnival Day. In Roman catholic countries, it's the period before Lent, it's a time of public merrrimaking and a great feasting and festivities. It comes from medieval Latin carnelevamen, which meant to put away meat, which is exactly of course what you do when you begin fasting. A lot of people think it's carnevale, so goodbye to meat, that is not quite right, it is to put it away. And there are many other flesh related words which are linked strangely to carnival and you wouldn't always put them together. Carnivorous, because you have got the meat connection, carnage, carnation from the flower's fleshy colour and carrion and incarnation, as well. So lots of bedmates, if you like, in English. But today of course is Shrove Tuesday, as we say, it's Pancake Day and Shrove Tuesday is linked to giving somebody short shrift which is to treat them in a really curt and a very dismissive way. That phrase originally referred to the short time that a condemned criminal was allowed to make penance before he or she was executed. So they would be shriven, absolved of their sins by a priest. It's the day before the start of Lent, it's marked by feasting and celebration, and of course, we mostly call it Pancake Day but other countries celebrate it as Mardi Gras which meant Fat Tuesday. Again, that link to feasting and eating a lot. While we are on pancakes, pancake make-up often used as stage make-up, the very, very heavy make-up that you use. Nothing do with the flat things that we eat today and everything to do with pan and slang for the face. It's because of the round shape, it's where we get deadpan from. If we have a deadpan expression, it's a dead expression on your face. So lots and lots strange links there, sort of a little whirl around pancakes but whatever I hope everyone eats lots and make merry.