The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (10 page)

So derricks and brief spans of time were both named after cruel and psychotic executioners. The guillotine, on the other hand, was named after a jolly nice chap.

Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had nothing whatsoever to do with the invention of the guillotine. In fact, so far as anybody can tell, he was against the death penalty. Nobody is sure who designed the first modern guillotine, but we know that it was built by a German harpsichord-maker called Tobias Schmidt.

It was Guillotin’s kindness that got the machine named after him. You see, in pre-revolution France poor people were hanged, whereas nobles had the right to be beheaded, which was considered less painful (although it’s uncertain how they worked that out). So when the poor of France rose in revolution, one of their key demands was the right to be decapitated.

Dr Guillotin was on the committee for reforming executions. He decided that hanging was horrid and that axes were inefficient. However, a newfangled mechanism from Germany was, probably, the least painful and most humane method available. If there
had
to be executions, it was best that they were done with this new device. He recommended it.

In the debate that followed, on 1 December 1789, Dr Guillotin made one silly remark: ‘Avec ma machine,’ he said, ‘je vous fais sauter la tête d’un coup-d’oeil, et vous ne souffrez point.’ (‘With my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.’)

The Parisians loved this line. They thought it was hilarious. In fact, they composed a comic song about it. And thus Dr Guillotin’s name was attached to one of the most famous methods of execution. Thomas Derrick and Jack Robinson were both sadistic, heartless thugs, whose names live on in innocence, if not glory. Poor Dr Guillotin’s family were so embarrassed that they had to change their surname. There’s no justice.

And sometimes with these eponymous inventions it can be hard to work out which came first, the word or the man. This is the case with Thomas Crapper, who invented the crapper.

Thomas Crapper

There’s a myth that the word
crap
was coined for the sake of Thomas Crapper, the inventor of the flushing lavatory. There’s also a myth that the word
crap
was
not
coined for Thomas Crapper. It actually depends on where you come from, and if that sounds odd, it’s because
crap
is a sticky subject. Luckily, I have, as it were, immersed myself in it.

The first mistake that must be wiped away is that Thomas Crapper (1836–1910) was the inventor of the lavatory. He wasn’t. The first flushing lavatory was invented by the Elizabethan poet Sir John Harington (who was quoted a couple of pages ago on the subject of treason).

Sir John installed his invention in his manor at Kelston, Somerset, where it’s said that it was used by Queen Elizabeth herself. Harington was so pleased with the device that he wrote a book on the subject called
A New Discourse Upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax
. Ajax gets in there because in Elizabethan times the slang word for a privy was
a jakes
.

A whiff of the book’s style and of the previous state of English crapping can be gained from the following extract:

For when I found not onely in mine own poore confused cottage, but even in the goodliest and statliest pallaces of this realm, notwithstanding all our provisions of vaults, of sluces, of grates, of paines of poore folkes in sweeping and scouring, yet still this same whorson sawcie stinke, though he were commanded on paine of death not to come within the gates, yet would spite of our noses, even when we would gladliest have spared his company … Now because the most unavoidable of all these things that keep such a stinking stirre, or such a stinke when they be stirred, is urine and ordure, that which we all carie about us (a good speculation to make us remember what we are and whither we must) therefore as I sayd before, many have devised remedies for this in times past … but yet (as the ape does his young ones) I thinke mine the properest of them all.

Americans like to talk about
going to the john
, and it has been suggested that this is in memory of John Harington. Unfortunately that’s unlikely, as
john
in the lavatorial sense didn’t appear until more than a hundred years after Harington’s death. However, it
is
likely that
john
was an alteration of
jake
. Or perhaps we just like giving boys’ names to the smelliest room in the house.

Harington’s invention didn’t catch on. Unless there are sewers and running water, a flushing lavatory is never really going to be viable for the mass market. It’s like having an electric lamp without mains electricity, or skis without snow.

Sewers and running water arrived in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, and what we generally think of as a lavatory was patented by Edward Jennings in 1852.

So who was Crapper? Thomas Crapper was born in Yorkshire in 1836. In 1853, a year
after
Jennings’ patent, he came to London to start an apprenticeship as a plumber. He was jolly good at plumbing, and the 1850s were the golden age of the toilet trader. The new sewers meant that everyone could flush away their shame and smell. Business boomed.

Crapper set up his own company, Thomas Crapper & Co., and designed his own line of thrones. He invented the ballcock system for refilling, which stopped water being wasted, and added extra devices to stop anything unpleasant flowing back into the bowl after the flush. His were very superior lavatories, the pinnacle of plumbing.

Crapper lavatories were chosen for the residence of the Prince of Wales and for the plumbing of Westminster Abbey, where Crapper’s name can be seen to this day on the manhole covers. The brand-name Crapper was everywhere, but
crap
had been around for a long time before.

All the dictionaries claim that
crap
first appeared in the 1840s, but in fact the word can be traced back to 1801 and a poem by a fellow called J. Churchill. Churchill’s poem tells a story (which it claims is based on fact) about a subaltern in the army who feels the call of nature. He runs to the outhouse only to find that a major is already there, and as the major outranks him, he’s forced to wait. The subaltern feels himself beginning to give way and his misery is compounded when a captain turns up and pulls rank:

Just adding (for some only mind number ONE)
4

‘I, I shall go in, when the major has done:’

The Sub, who was, now, a most terrible plight, in;

And, not quite aware of priority S---ING,

Squeez’d awhile; ‘Well!’ says he, ‘then, the best friends MUST PART;’

Crap! Crap! ’twas a moist one! a right Brewer’s ****!

And, finding it vain, to be stopping the lake;

‘Zounds!’ says he, ‘then, here goes man! I’ve brew’d; so, I’ll bake.’

That beautiful poem was written 35 years before Thomas Crapper was born, and half a century before he started plumbing. So
crap
is certainly not named after Crapper. Perhaps it was a case of nominative determinism. If you’re unfortunate enough to be called Crapper, what are you going to do except work with it?

However, if Crapper didn’t cause
crap
, he associated himself with it closely. All of his lavatories had Thomas Crapper & Co. written on them in florid writing and these lavatories were installed all over Britain. But in America, nobody had ever heard of either Crapper the man, or
crap
the word.

There isn’t an American reference to
crap
all through the nineteenth century. In fact, there’s nothing before the First World War. Then, in 1917, America declared war on Germany and sent 2.8 million men across the Atlantic, where they would have been exposed to the ubiquitous Thomas Crapper & Co. on every second lavatory.

It’s only after the First World War that
crap
,
crapper
,
crapping
around
and
crapping
about
appear in the United States. So it would seem that though the English word
crap
doesn’t come from the man, the American one does. Crapper didn’t invent it, but he spread the word.

4
This is also the first-ever reference to
number one
in a lavatorial context. Most authorities have it down as a twentieth-century term.

Mythical Acronyms

Can you take another chapter on the same subject? Good, because we have something to clear up:
shit
and
fuck
, or more precisely,
SHIT
and
FUCK
.

You might have heard the story that both these words are acronyms. This is absolute twaddle.

The story goes that manure gives off methane. So far, so true. But then the story continues that when manure is transported on a ship, it needs to be stored right at the top of the boat to stop the methane building up to explosive levels in the cargo hold. So the words
Store High In Transit
used to be stamped on bags of manure before they were loaded onto a boat.
Store High In Transit
then got shortened to its initials –
S.H.I.T.
– and that was the start of
shit
.

It’s an ingenious explanation and whoever thought it up at least deserves credit for imagination. Unfortunately it’s absolute manure.
Shit
can be traced back to the Old English verb
scitan
(which meant exactly what it does today), and further back to Proto-Germanic
skit
(the Germans still say
scheisse
), and all the way to the Proto-Indo-European word (c. 4000 BC)
skhei
, which meant to
separate
or
divide
, presumably on the basis that you
separated
yourself from your faeces.
Shed
(as in
shed your skin
) comes from the same root, and so does
schism
.

An odd little aspect of this etymology is that when Proto-Indo-European arrived in the Italian peninsula they used
skhei
to mean
separate
or
distinguish
. If you could tell two things apart then you
knew
them, and so the Latin word for
know
became
scire
. From that you got the Latin word
scientia
, which meant
knowledge
, and from that we got the word
science
. This means that
science
is, etymologically,
shit
. It also means that
knowing your shit
, etymologically, means that you’re good at physics and chemistry.

Also, as
conscience
comes from the same root, the phrase
I don’t give a shit
is thoroughly appropriate.

The other acronymic myth that we need to stamp out is that
fuck
is a legal term. The commonly believed myth runs that once upon a time, when sex could land you in jail, people could be taken to court and charged
For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge
. Nothing of the sort is true and there has never been such a term in English law.

The first recorded
fuckers
were actually monks. There was a monastery in the English city of Ely, and in an anonymous fifteenth-century poem somebody mentioned that the monks might have acquired some dirty habits. The poem is in a strange combination of Latin and English, but the lines with which we are concerned run thus:

Non sunt in celi

Qui fuccant wivys in Heli