The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (15 page)

This fickle N is something to ponder next time you’re bitten by
a nadder
, but I wouldn’t ponder it for too long.

Sometimes the inconstant N travels the other way. What was once
an ewt
is now
a newt
; and an extra name,
an eke-name
, is now
a nickname
.

The Latin
par
also gave us
parity
,
peer groups
,
peerless
and
peers of the realm
. It may seem rather odd that aristocrats, who are above everybody else, should be called
peers
. The reason is that Charlemagne had twelve noble knights who were all equal, and therefore
peers
. In fact, Charlemagne didn’t have twelve knights, but there was a
legend
that he did, and that’s quite good enough for spawning a word.

Par
hides all over the place. If you do somebody down and make them feel less important than you, you dis
par
age them; and if you have a girl to live with you as an equal she is an
au pair
. But the most obvious place that the word
par
survives is on the golf course, as the score between a birdie and a bogey.

6
In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, Puck says that he will ‘put a girdle round about the earth/In forty minutes’. This means that he must be able to travel at 37,000 miles an hour, or Mach 49.3.

Bogeys

Why is a score of one over par called a
bogey
?

Any game of golf is played against two opponents. You are competing against the other golfer and you are competing against the ground score, the scratch value, the
par
– the number of strokes a professional golfer should take to complete the course. Of your two opponents, the ground is usually the harder to beat.

There was a terribly popular song in Victorian England called ‘The Bogey Man’. It was about the nasty mythical fellow who creeps into the rooms of naughty children and causes all sorts of trouble to all sorts of people. This song was running through the head of Dr Thomas Brown as he played a round of golf in Great Yarmouth one day in 1890.

The idea of playing against the ground score in golf was quite new at the time. Originally, pars and eagles and birdies were unknown in golf. All you did was to add up your total number of shots, and whoever had the lowest was the winner.

This was the first time that Dr Brown had played against the ground and he didn’t like it. He preferred to play against an opponent because, as he observed, the ground always seemed to beat him. It was an enemy that followed him around the course but never appeared in person, and in the end Dr Brown decided that his invisible opponent was the Bogey Man, just like in the song. His joke caught on in Great Yarmouth and then spread around the golfing world. The Bogey became a score.

Lone golfers were therefore playing against the Bogey and the word spread until it meant
par for the course
. It wasn’t until the 1940s that the word shifted to mean
one over par
, and nobody is quite sure why.

Bugbears and Bedbugs

The previous story has an instructive little postscript. Within a few years, golfers had forgotten the origin of the word
bogey
and the par score for a course was blamed on a fictional golfer named Colonel Bogey. A book of golfing cartoons from 1897 contains the line: ‘I, Colonel Bogey, whose score is so uniform, and who generally win …’

This meant that in 1914, when Kenneth Alford wanted a name for his brand-new marching tune, he called it ‘Colonel Bogey’ and thus
bogey
returned to the world of song whence it had sprung.

So who or what was the bogeyman? Bogeymen come in all shapes and sizes. Some are shaped just like bears. They live in the woods and they eat small boys who don’t do as they’re told. These are
bogey-bears
. However, the bogey-bear has diminished over the years. He has faded from his ursine grandeur, both in threat and in the length of the term. Nowadays a bogey-bear is a mere
bugbear
, and far from devouring a child whole, he is an insignificant annoyance.

Likewise, a
bugaboo
is now scoffed at by everyone except James Bond. James Bond is very careful about
bugaboos
and usually checks for them under his bed. Well, etymologically he does.

In the eighteenth century a
bugaboo
(which is of course a variant bogeyman) became thieves’ slang for a sheriff’s officer, or policeman. Nineteenth-century burglars were therefore scared of bugaboos or
bugs
for short. But they kept burgling anyway, and burglaries continued all the way into the twentieth century. Indeed, they were so common that people started to set up burglar alarms, and in the 1920s burglars began to call burglar alarms
bugs
on the basis that they acted like an automated policeman. If a solicitous homeowner had fitted an alarm within his house, the joint was said to be
bugged
.

From there it was one small step for the word
bug
before it was applied to tiny listening devices that could be placed inside telephones or teapots. And that’s why James Bond checks his room for
bugs
, and that’s also why there could actually be an etymological
bogeyman
hidden beneath your bed.

Bogeys
and
bugs
have always been pretty much interchangeable. Myles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Psalms renders the fifth verse of the 91st Psalm thus:

Thou shalt not need to be afrayed for eny bugges by nights.

Most subsequent Bibles have used the word
terrors
; Coverdale’s is therefore known as
The Bug’s Bible
. Then, in the mid-seventeenth century,
bug
mysteriously started to mean
insect
. Perhaps this was because insects are terrifying, or perhaps because they used to get into your bed like a bogeyman. The first six-legged bug on record was a
bedbug
in 1622. Since then, though, the word has expanded to mean any sort of creepy-crawly, including insects that crawl inside machines and mess up the workings.

There’s a story that one of Thomas Edison’s inventions kept going wrong. Edison couldn’t work out why his machine kept breaking down, but break down it did. He checked all the parts and they worked. He checked the design and it was flawless. Then he went back to check the machine one last time and discovered the cause of the problem. A small insect was crawling around over his delicate electronics and messing everything up. This, so the story goes, is the origin of
bug
in the sense of a technical failing.

This story may not be completely true, but it’s certainly the case that Thomas Edison was the first person to use
bug
in the technological sense. In 1878 he wrote in a letter that:

It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise – this thing gives out and [it is] then that ‘Bugs’ – as such little faults and difficulties are called – show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.

And in 1889, the
Pall Mall Gazette
reported that:

Mr Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his phonograph – an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.

So the insect story
could
be true, or it could simply be that Edison was referring to
bogeyman
sprites that haunted his machines, working mischief in the mechanism.

Whatever the origin, the word
bug
caught on, and when your computer crashes due to a software
bug
, the fault lies with Thomas Edison and the bogeyman.

Von Munchausen’s Computer

New things need new words, but they usually end up with old ones. Computers have been around since at least 1613, when being a
computer
was a skilled profession practised by mathematicians who worked in observatories adding up numbers.

When Charles Babbage invented the precursor of the modern computer he called it an
Analytical Engine
, and when his son improved on the design he called it a
Mill
, on the basis that mills were complicated technical things and that, like his new machine, they took stuff in at one end and spat different stuff out at the other. Then, in 1869, machines that could
compute
the sum of two numbers began to be called
computers
, and slowly, as those machines started to do more and more things, the word spread. When the first modern computer was officially christened ENIAC (Electronic Numeral Integrator And Computer) in 1946, it was already too late.

Early computers were simply calculators, hence the name. Then they got software, which had to be loaded up by the user. Then in the fifties a method was invented whereby a computer would install its own software. The idea was that a single piece of code was loaded, which in turn would load up some more pieces of code, which would load more and more until the computer had … but first we must explain about Baron von Munchausen in the marsh.

Baron von Munchausen (1720–97) was a real person who had fought as a soldier in Russia. On his return home he told stories about his exploits that nobody believed. These included riding on a cannonball, taking a brief trip to the moon, and escaping from a marsh by pulling himself out by his own hair. This latter feat is impossible, for the upward force on the Baron’s hair would have been cancelled out by the downward force on his arm. It’s a nice idea, though, and von Munchausen’s preposterous principle was later taken up by Americans, but instead of talking about hair, the Americans started in the late nineteenth century to talk of pulling themselves up
by their own bootstraps
.

What’s impossible in physics is possible in computing, and a computer that’s able to load its own programs is, metaphorically, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. In 1953 the process was called a
bootstrap
. By 1975 people had got bored with the
strap
, and from then on computers simply
booted up
.

SPAM (not spam)

In 1937 a new product came on to the American market. It was made primarily of pork and potato starch and was originally called
Hormel Spiced Ham
because it was made by Geo A. Hormel & Co. However, a vice-president of Hormel had a brother who was an actor and presumably much better with words, and he suggested that it be shortened from
Spiced Ham
to
SPAM
. Another story says that
SPAM
may stand for
Shoulder of Pork And Ham
. Either way, the Hormel Foods Corporation insists to this day that it should be spelt with capital letters: SPAM, not spam.

Hitler made SPAM a great success. The Second World War caused food shortages in Britain, which caused strict rationing of fresh meat, which caused Britons to turn to tinned meat as it was less tightly rationed. The tinned meat to which the warlike Britons turned was SPAM, and this was shipped from America in gargantuan quantities. After the war, SPAM remained a staple of the British diet, especially in cheap cafés, which is where
Monty Python
comes in.

In 1970
Monty Python
produced the SPAM sketch in which two people are lowered into a nasty café somewhere in Britain, where almost every dish contains SPAM. After a while, a group of Vikings who also happen to be in the café start singing a song to which the only words are: