The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (14 page)

It worked. White people were so confused by ‘Hey, man’ that the sixties happened and everybody, of whatever race, started calling each other
man
, until the original significance was lost. This is an example of Progress.

Now, before the next link, are
robots
Martian slave-owners, Bolivian peasants, or Czech serfs?

5
This was a Good Thing, as the American troops were issued with rations of bacon and eggs. When an American GI was hungry he would pay a local chef to turn these basics into a pasta dish, and that’s how spaghetti carbonara was invented. (At least, that’s one theory, and there’s certainly no record of carbonara before the Second World War.)

Robots

Once upon a time in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which ruled much of central Europe, there were lords and peasants. The lords owned all the land but peasants were granted portions of it to work for themselves. The peasant would then work his own little plot
and
the lord’s. The bigger the peasant’s plot, the longer he had to work the fields of the lord who had granted it to him.

This system, abolished by Emperor Josef II in 1848, was called
robot
.

The system was abolished, but the word, of course, survived. Seventy-two years later, in 1920, a Czech fellow called Karel Čapek was writing a play. It was a rather spooky, futuristic piece about a factory that produced willing servants out of biological matter. Mr Čapek decided to use the Latin root
labor
(that gives us
labour
) and call these manufactured servants
labori
.

And that would have been that, were it not for Karel’s brother, Josef, who suggested calling them
robots
instead. Karel took the suggestion and made the changes. The play was performed under the title
RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots
and was such a success that the word arrived in English two years later.

Of course,
robot
had cropped up in English before, but only in references to European politics that seem rather odd to the modern reader. Take this complaint of 1854 by an Austrian aristocrat who believes that socialism has gone quite mad:

I can get no labor, as the robot is abolished; and my tenants have now land of their own, which once was mine, to cultivate.

The English-speaking equivalent of
robot
was
indentured labour
, whereby a fellow signed a contract that made him a slave for a limited period. There are no extant records of indentured dentists, which is a shame because they both involve teeth.

In fact, lots of things involve teeth. Tri
dent
s have three teeth;
al dente
food is cooked for the teeth; and dandelions are
lions’ teeth
, or
dents de lions
in French. But I digress. For the moment, we must stick to
indentations
, which are, etymologically,
bite marks
.

Medieval contract law was a sorry affair, largely because very few people could read. This meant that contracts could be signed left, right and centre, but few could tell which one was which. Most of us already have enough trouble finding some important piece of paper that we know we put somewhere safe; imagine how much harder it is for the illiterate.

There are two solutions to this problem, but as one of them involved learning to read, there was really only one solution, and it involved scissors.

A contract would be written out by a priest, signed or sealed by both parties (probably with an X) and then cut in half. This would not, though, be a straight cut. Instead, the contract would be cut up in a thoroughly wonky zig-zag. Each party would then keep one half of the contract and, if they ever needed to prove whose it was, they would simply put the two pieces of paper together to show that the
indentations
matched. Thus indentured servants were indentured until the contract was terminated by a terminator.

Terminators and Prejudice

The
termination
is the end. That’s because the Latin
terminus
meant
boundary
or
limit
, from which we get
bus terminals
,
terms and conditions
,
fixed-term parliaments
and indeed many
terms
for things (because a
term
has a
limited
meaning).

From that you get the idea of
terminating
somebody’s employment. Legally speaking, you can do this in one of two ways: you can
terminate without prejudice
, meaning that you are open to the idea of re-employing the poor chap; or you can
terminate with prejudice
,
meaning that you will never hire the scoundrel again. The latter is for employees who have done something awfully naughty and broken and betrayed your trust.

The CIA employs agents. If you break the CIA’s trust and reveal their secrets to the Other Side, your employment will be terminated. Indeed, it will be terminated with prejudice. Indeed, the CIA often makes sure that nobody ever employs you again by the simple expedient of creeping up behind you and shooting you in the head. This they jokingly refer to as
termination with extreme prejudice
.

The CIA being awfully secret, it’s hard to say exactly when the phrase
terminate with extreme prejudice
was invented. That it was revealed to the general public at all, was the fault of the US Army Special Forces: the Green Berets.

In 1969 a Vietnamese fellow called Thai Khac Chuyen was working as an agent or informer for the Green Berets (or possibly the CIA, or both). However, he was also working for the Viet Cong and when the Green Berets discovered this they became a little bit peeved.

They went (or didn’t go, depending on whom you believe) to the CIA for advice on what to do about Chuyen. The CIA told the Green Berets to let bygones be bygones and to try to see it from the other chap’s point of view, or at least that’s what the CIA claim.

The Green Berets, on the other hand, say that the CIA told them that Chuyen (or his contract) should be
terminated with extreme prejudice
.

Exactly who said what is no longer of interest to Thai Khac Chuyen, as the upshot of the story is that he was shot. Eight Green Berets were arrested over the affair and, in the brouhaha and court martial that followed, the CIA joke about contract law was finally brought out into the open.

It was this incident that took the innocent word
terminate
away from contract law and bus depots and got it a part in the movies. First, there was a mention in
Apocalypse Now
(1979), where the hero is sent off to find Colonel Kurtz and
terminate
him
with extreme prejudice
. Soon,
terminate
was so sturdily established in the public mind as a big, tough, scary synonym for ‘kill’ that in 1984 James Cameron decided to call his big, tough, scary killer-robot
The Terminator
.

Terminators and Equators

If you look up
terminator
in a dictionary, you’re unlikely to find any reference to death or cyborgs. The first definition will be an astronomical one, because the terminator is the line that divides the illuminated part of a planet from the darker half. So the straight line down the middle of a half-moon is a terminator.

Astronomy and astrology (which were once the same thing) used to be big business until somebody pointed out that huge and distant balls of hydrogen were unlikely to affect your love life. Horoscopes were sent to skulk at the back of the newspaper with the crosswords and personals. Yet the terminology of astrology survives all over the language. For example, if a fellow is of a friendly
disposition
, it’s because his friendliness is the inevitable consequence of the positions of the planets at the moment of his birth, or rather the distances between the planets, hence
disposition
.

If Jupiter was in the ascendant when you were born, you are of a
jovial
disposition
; and if you’re not jovial but miserable and
saturn
ine that’s a disaster, because a
disaster
is a
dis-astro
, or
misplaced planet
.
Disaster
is Latin for
ill-starred
.

The fault, as Shakespeare put it, is not in our stars; but the language is.

Culmination
,
opposition
,
nadir
,
depression
and
aspect
are all words that we have purloined from the horoscopes and telescopes of antiquity. However, astrology is not the only reason that the heavens take precedence over the Earth. There’s the simpler question of visibility. The North Pole, for example, is very far away, and inconveniently located for public transport, but you can
see
the pole star from your house (providing you’re in the northern hemisphere). The celestial equator is an imaginary projection of the Earth’s equator out into space, and the stars through which this celestial equator passes shine brightly every night no matter where you are, although to reach the real equator requires a journey. And that’s why the word
equator
referred to part of the sky two centuries before it referred to part of the globe.

Equality in Ecuador

Because the Earth wobbles on its axis, the celestial
equa
tor is over the terrestrial
equa
tor only twice a year, at the
equi
noxes when night and day are of
equal
length. The Sun is a nomad and for the first half of the year it tramps slowly southwards until it gets to a latitude of 23 degrees, at which point it
turns
around and heads for 23 degrees north, where it
turns
again.

The Greek for
turn
was
tropos
, which is why a
turn of phrase
was for them a
rhetorical trope
. That’s also the reason that the latitude of 23 degrees south is the
Tropic
of Capricorn and its northern equivalent is the
Tropic
of Cancer, and everywhere in between is
tropical
.

Bang in between the two tropics is the equator that runs like a 25,000-mile belt around the Earth.
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The Spanish for
equator
is
ecuador
, so when they found a country through which the
ecuador
ran, they called it Ecuador.

The equator is called the equator because it divides the Earth into two equal sections, which therefore have
equality
. In most circumstances
inequ
ality is
iniqu
itous, but sometimes iniquity is necessary. Not everybody can be equal. Take, for example, sport. You have two teams that have equal status, but when they argue you need somebody of higher status to judge between them. This referee is
not on a par
with them. In Latin he was a
non-par
and in Old French he was
a noumpere
, but then something happened to the N and he became
an umpire
.

An undignified fate often awaits words that begin with an N. Cooks used to wear a
napron
. But
naprons
were more often stained than written down, and so the A was able to craftily steal the N away from
napron
, and now a cook wears
an apron
.