"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 12/02/18 (acronyms: quango, pog, laser, sim card, care package, pelican crossing)

Just a few acronyms for you today. Such a boring word, acronym. It's got acro in there, which is the Greek for height. You find it in lots of words - acropolis, acrobat, etc. But an acronym is a word that is formed from the initial letters of other words. And although it is a boring term, it has produced lots of nice words in English. Not all of them are obviously acronyms. I am going to start with quango. We don't often takl nicely about quangos - administrative bodies connected to the government outside the civil service, usually used in associoation with red tape and administrative boringness, really. But it sounds like it ought to be a tropical fruit drink. It sounds quite nice, but it's not. It's, in fact, a Quasy-Autonomous-Non-Governmental-Organosation. So, boring is as boring does, I suppose. Pog - did any of you used to play with Pogs? I think they were sort of... Yeah, around '80s, '90s... Little cardboard discs. I'm not sure anyone knew the rule for the game of Pogs. But this one does come from a tropical fruit drink, in fact - a Hawaiian fruit drink - the lids of which provided the first discs that were used. And Pog is an acronym for Passopn fruit, Orange, Guava, in case anyone was wondering. Laser, perhaps... people know this one. It's a good illustration of why we use acronyms, because they are such a mouthful when yo uspell them all out. Laser - you might imagin a James Bond film... You'd never imagine a James Bond saying Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. That's what laser is. Sim card - you might probably guess that a sim is an acronym, but maybe not for Subscriber Identification Module. It's all about the user's network details. Care package - this is perhaps the most surprising of all the acronyms that I've come across anyway. Widespread use, especially in military. Care packages sent to soldiers at war, but also students at university you might send a care package to. But the "care" originally stood for the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, which sent out aid in the afretmath of World War II. Finally, the pelican crossing - you can't get more British than the pelican crossing. That's actually a respelling of an acronym - PEdestrian LIghts CONtrolled crossing. Again, pretty boring on its own but once you make it into an animal, it sounds so much better. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 09/02/18 (word from places: cantaluope melon, mayonnaise, denim, jeans, jersey, lesbian, balaclava, cardigan, raglan)

I want to talk a little bit about words that came over into English from places. Because it's chock-a- block with words that originated in one praticular place, and they've slipped into the mainstream so much that the place name that they stem from is noe pretty much unrecognisable. Sometimes we just don't know that it comes from a place. A cantaloupe melon, for example, comes from Cantalupo, a place in Italy, whose name actually means "singing wolf", which makes this cantaloupe melon a little bit more sinister. Mayonnaise - the French captured the island of Menorca during the Seven Years' War, and the victory was apparently celebrated with a huge amount of feasting, together with a very special condimentthat was native to that particular place. The capital of Menorca is Port Mahon and the "aise" in mayonnaise means native to. Which is where we get mayonnaise today. Most people probably know that denim was originally serge de Nimes, it was a fabric from Nimes, in France. The serge eventualyy got dropped off and de Nines became denim. Similarly jeans were named after their place of origin, which was Genoa in Italy. A jersey - we wear jerseys all the time. Knitted pullovers that were native to Jersey, in the English Channel, originally worn by fishermen. Kept them very warm in the winter. Lesbian comes from the Greek island of Lesbos, the home of the great Greek poetess Sappho. She was the leader of a religious community that was dedicated to Aphrodite, goddess of love - who dave us aphrodisiac - and her surviving lyric poemsexpress often intense affection for the girls who were members of this community. Balaclava - close-fitting woolen hood or hat, covering the ears and neck - originally worn by soldiers in the Crimean War. And Balaclava was a small port in southern Crimea, in the Ukraine. And in 1854, it was yhe scene of that very famous battle involving the Charge of the Light Brigade. And curiously, two people involved in that war as well also gave their names to the items of clothing. So, from places to people. The Earl of Cardigan, who led the charge, gave us the cardigan, obviously. He was said to wear that knitted type of buttoned sweater to keep himself warm. And possibly less well-known, the first Baron Raglan gave his name to hot only a type of coat, an overcoat, but also the raglan sleeve. And what he wore was quite peculiar, in a way. At least, it ws different from the fashion of the time, because the sleeves continued in one piece up to the neck, so it produced a larger and looser armhole that people weren't used to. But it suted this particular Baron Raglan. And that was because his right arm has been amputated after the Battle of Waterloo, because he'd had it so severely injured. So, the raglan sleeve goes all the way back to a one-armed general. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 08/02/18 (friend, definite, free, fiend, frenemy)

I was talking recently about how tricky English is in terms of its sprlling. And there are sometimes tips to help you remember. So, definite, if you remember two Is because it's linked to finire, the Latin, meaning to finish. So definite is linked to finish, and that way you might remember the two Is. And one way to remember friend, which is another really commonly misspelled word, is to think about fiend, the I-E, because, believe it or not, friend and fiend derive from pretty much the same root and they have grown in parallel courses, if you like, over the course of English. So although, they developed independently from two different Germanic words, they were once very much seen as paired opposites, and alliteratively paired opposites as well, if you like. So to take friend first, that entered old English as freond. And that from a Germanic verb brought by all the Germanic invading tribes, which was freon, meaning to love. And believe it or not, freon is also behind free. Free, once meaning belived or dear. And we think it's because members of a household united by blood or by kinship were seen as not only were they dear to each other, but they as free, as opposite to the slaves that they hired to wait upon them. And over time that meaning changed. Free and friend and to love. So friends in those days meant exactly the same as it does today. So a person other than a lover or a relative who you hold in affection. Fiend goes back to another Germanic word and that was feond. So it wasn't freond, it was feond. So just the R was missing. Meaning to hate. And it was used very much in the form of an enemy. So a feond was somebody who was your arch-rival, if you like. In time it came not to mean your personal arch-rival but a rival to humankind itself, in fact to the very devil, and it is from that idea that fiend took on the idea of Satsn incarnate, if you like. Or to anybody who had evil intent. Foe took the place, if you like, of fiend in that sense. It was friend or foe, rather than friend or fiend, but those were the two exact opposites in the olden days. Eventually fiend was applied to somebody a little bit devilish, if you like, or had some sort of uncommon craving, like a fiend for chocolate, for example. If you don't know whether somebody is your friend or fiend, then you can call them frenemy. Frenemy being a modern blend of friend and enemy. But that idea of two polar opposites has been around for a while. In Samuel Johnson's dictionary talks about a backfriend. A backfriend is pretty much the same as a frenemy. So he called it "a friend backwards, that is, an enemy in secret". 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 07/02/18 (lemure)

We've been talking recently about spirits and demons from folklore and myth and most of the words - ogres, imps, devils themselves, you would expect to be on the list, but I don'r think you would put this word on the list of spooky things and that is the animal, the lemur. Because lemur actually means "spirit of the dead" in Latin and there's quite a story behind it. They were given their name by Carl Linnaeus and he was the founder of the names of many of our animals. And he was clearly familiar with mythology and the works of Roman poets like Virgil and Ovid. In Roman tradition, lemures, rhymes with "please", were believed to be the ghosts of all those who have not been afforded proper burial rites or had died leaving unfinished business behind them. And ultimately, there were ghosts of lots of people from sailors who had been lost at sea, from suicides, who weren't then granted a proper burial, to murder victims, criminals who had been executed in some grisly way, so lot og unquiet souls who were said to haunt the streets of Rome looking for peace and looking for solace. It's the same sort of ideology, I suppose, that's behind the idea of ghosts today. The idea is that they would rise at night and, as I say, walk along the srteets haunting their former homes neighbourhoods. It's quite a sort of spooky idea. But from there, if you skip forward a few millennia, the Swedish naturalist  I mentioned, Carl Linnaeus, entered a record of the creature that he called the lemur in his Systema Nature - that was his book, as I say, in which he created a lot of the names from Latin for the animals that we know today. Why did he do it? It seems a bit of weird chioce, but he says, "I call them lemures because they go around mainly by nights in the certain way similar to humans and roam with a slow pace". So despite all their cuteness, he obviously saw something quite spooky, perhaps their expressive eyes, their nocturnal habits, sort of humanlike expression that they take on as if they're lost souls, that made him go all the way back to mythology to choose his word. I love that, sort of ancient Rome's creepiest ghosts really haunting the streets of Rome have inspired the lemurs that we know today.  

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 05/02/18 (tarantella, hell, Lucifer, devil, blues)

This is going to pick up very briefly on something Suzannah was talking about earlier, this dancing, this impulse to dance. And that is behind quite a lot of words in English, or at least three words that I can think of. Tarantism was a disease that was thought to be exactly that, the psychological impulse to dance, and it was prevalent in Italy, perticularly during the 15th and 17th centuries. It was thought to be cos by the bite of a tarantula. And the taranrula and tarantism, behind those words are Taranto in Italy where it was first diagnosted, if you like. And the dance, if you still dance today, is known as the tarantella, so it still sort of lives on, that mad, frenzied impulse to dance, which is pretty helliesh. And I was going to talk today mostly about words to do with hell, so diabolical words, if you like. And hell has been around sinse Old English times as a word, as a name for the abode of the dead. And it comes from the Old English verb helan, which meant to hide or to conceal, so it was somewhere hidden away where you would least like to go. Other English relatives actually might surprise you - helmet, hull, hall, and hole and hollow are all related to that word hell. Lucifer is another interesting one because Lucifer seems a bit of a contradiction in terms. Lucifer obviously the name for the devil, and yet it means light-bearing, so it seems a bit of strange name for the Prince of Darkness - the exact opposite. The word is from lux - light - and then fere in Latin - to carry - so someones who carries the light. It was also applied to the morning star that heralds the dawn. But the reason it was applied to the devil is that it was applied to the name of the angel before his fall, so it was Satan before his fall. Christ talked about, "I beheld Satan as a lightning fall from heaven", so that idea of the light disappearing, which is why it was applied to Satan. So it depicted his former respectability in heaven, if you like, before the fall. Devil itself, and diabolical, goes all the way back to the Greek diaballein, which meant to throw across. In other words, to slander but also to thwart, so to thwart good with evil, which means that the devil and diabolical, those two words are linked to other strange mates, if you like, in English - metabolism, ballistics, hyperbole, symbol, and perhaps more appropriately parable and problem. And finally the blue devils. The blue devils were the demons that were said to affect people with deep, deep melancholy, a bid belief again in the 17th century that they would haunt the mind of somebody who was prone to feeling sad and blue. Blue devils eventually shortened to the blues, which is why we talk about having the blues today, and that in turn in the 20th century was applied to the music called the blues, the melancholy music.  

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 02/02/18 (silent letters: debt, doubt, salmon, solemn, ghost, gnat)

Today I have more silent letters. Yesterday I was talked about the Ks that we used to have, the hard Ks in English, whuch we took from all Germanic invaders that had come to Britain around the fifth century. So we had knots and knitting and knees and knechts and knight and things. So today we're going to talk about some other silent letters. And I'll start with B, the silent B that we get in things like debt or doubt. Those goes back to 16th-century scholars, and I mentioned recently how there was a big drive around this time to make English more classical, to make it more refined, a little bit more like Latin and Greek, and not just more refined, but more predictable as well, so, easier to learn, because Latin and Greek are sort of quite smooth in terms of their endings and their plurals, etc. And probably a little bit of showing off as well, amongst all these scholars. So they decided that doubt, which had previously been spelt D-O-W-T or D-O-U-T, deserved B because the Latin for doubt is "dubitum". Same for debt, it was "debitum". So they put the B in there, but they didn't suggest we change our pronunciation, they just liked the B for the spelling, because it looked more Latinate. Likewise, salmon got L, it goes back to the Latin "salmo", and solemn got an N, it didn't have one before, the Latin was "solemnis". And so, that accounts for a lot of the silent letters that we have in English. But some of them, the words were serendipity, really, or accidental, or even hiccups. The H in ghost, for example,  we owe entirely to William Caxton, who standartised a lot of our spelling in English and was huge influential. He did very, very good things. But he learned his trade in Flanders, and in Bruges, and when he came over to England to set up his printing press, he didn't ehought typesetters, so he brought some over from Flanders, where he had been working. They were Flemish, the Flemish for ghost is "gheest", with an H, so they stuck one in because it looked more familiar to them. And we've been left with the result ever since. And finally the G in gnat - nothing to do with Latin, nothing to do with Germanic. That is an Old English word, and the G would have been pronounced when it was first used in the days of King Arthur. So, it would have been a g-nat, which I eould love to bring back. So, with all this confusion going on, I thought we should give ourselves a big pat on the back for knowing how to spell anything at all. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 01/02/18 (silent letters: knight, knot, knife, knitting, answer)

I have some silent letters for you, cos for the last few days I've been talking about how tricky English is, such an irregular language. Silent letters are some of the things that puzzle people so much, because we have no idea why they are there. Some of languages are entirely phonetic, or certanly more phonrtic than other. Lots of words in Ehglish are phonetic, they sounds as they are written, but there are so many others that aren't. The reason fo this, again, is that English has absorbed so many words from different cultures. Quite often we have absorbed letters which we then don't pronounce because it's too difficelt to get round our native tongue. So if you take the word know, to have knoledge with its silent K. That's just one example. You've got knight and knee and knives and knit and knock. You have a silent G in gnat and gnome. B in subtle, numb. L in salmon, N in solemn. A W in answer, and so it goes on and on and on. So I thought I'd take some of these examples and explain why they're there in the first place. English is predominantly Germanic language, so around the 5th century, the Jutes came over the Jutland, that's part of northen Germany and Denmark now. They settled in Kent. The Saxons came over from Saxony in Germany. They settled south of the Thames. The Angles came over from what is now Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, and they settled in northen and central England. So you had all these Germanic tribes coming in and the result is an awful lot of silent letters that we took from German, but they weren't always silent. To take knight, the German word for a boy or a knave was knecht. For a while, when that was twisted around our tongue and became knight, we pronounced it as k'night as well. Likewise, we took a k'nife. We ate with a k'nife before we had "nives". We went on to our k'nees to pray. The Anglo-Saxon talked about k'nitting, which turned out to be knitting in the end. K'not in ropes or strings, that gave us knitting and knots. So that explains that. The W in answer, likewise, is Germanic. The easy way of remembering that is that it's very much linked to swear with the W in that as well, which we do pronounce. So ot cimes from answarian, which we took from German. To answer originally was to respond to an accusation in court. So if you remember that legal sense of swearing and answering to rebut an accusation, you remember that W. But over the next two days, I'll take some more silent letters and explain why they are there and possibly why we don't pronounce them any more as well.