The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (17 page)

O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,

Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,

O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;

O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

And the new title that he gave to an old drinking song takes us straight back to
small spangs
.

Torpedoes and Turtles

The conflict between the Royal Navy and the revolutionary Americans also gave us the word
torpedo
, which has nothing and everything to do with being
torpid
.

The Latin word for
tired
or numb
was
torpidus
. From this we got the adjective
torpid
, which is still with us today. And that would be the end of the story were it not for electrical fish.

That there are electric eels is commonly known. But there are also kinds of ray that can produce electricity, in fact they can produce 220 volts of the stuff, which is quite enough to knock you out, and therefore render you
torpid
.

In English they were once called
numb-fish
or
cramp-fish
, but the educated Latin name is
Torpediniformes
, with the major family being the
torpedoes
. As Lawrens Andrewe put it in his snappily-titled book of 1520,
The noble lyfe & nature of man, Of bestes, serpentys, fowles & fisshes y be moste knowen
:

Torpido is a fisshe, but who-so handeleth hym shal be lame & defe of lymmes that he shall fele no thyng.

For a long time, therefore, a torpedo was simply
something that rendered you incapable
. For example, there was an eighteenth-century dandy called Beau Nash who was awfully witty but had trouble writing well. ‘He used to call a pen his torpedo for whenever he grasped it, it numbed all his faculties.’ This is a shame, as Nash was meant to be the wittiest, most charming man of his day and when he died his wife went to live in a hollow tree near Warminster.
7

But to return to the story: in 1776 the Americans were revolting. The British Navy sailed to New York, but so revolting were the Americans that the Brits decided to stay in the channel and blockade the harbour. The Americans didn’t like this, and there was a fellow called Bushnell who invented a submarine with which to attack the blockading British boats in the most unsporting manner.

Bushnell couldn’t decide what to call his new submarine: he seems to have been in two minds between the
American Turtle
and the
Torpedo
. In shape it resembled both. Eventually, he decided on the latter.

The idea of the submarine was that it had a ‘magazine or powder’ attached to it that it would screw to the hull of the British flagship. A timer would then be set, giving the submarine a few minutes to get clear, and then there would be a big explosion and the British boat would be blown to smithereens and beyond. This didn’t happen, as the revolting Americans were foiled by the hulls of the British ships, which were copper-bottomed.

But the Americans were not to be deterred. Another inventor called Fulton took up where Bushnell left off (Bushnell for some reason ran away to the South and took on a new identity). Fulton worked to the same general plan, but he gave the name
torpedo
to the explosive device rather than the submarine itself. He also decided to change it a bit. Rather than the submarine getting right up to the enemy ship, it would instead fire a harpoon at it. The explosive device would be attached to the harpoon by a rope and contain within it a timer. So the submarine would pop up, harpoon the ship, and disappear before the charge went off.

Fulton’s torpedoes didn’t work either. Decades passed of utterly ineffective torpedo inventing and improvement. The torpedo was fitted with a motor and other such gizmos, but nothing was sunk with a vile torpedo until 1878, when a Russian ship torpedoed an Ottoman one.

And that’s how
tired and numb
came to be a name for something
fast and explosive
.

Now, before the next story, what’s the connection between Mount Vernon in Virginia, Portobello Road in London, and feeling groggy?

7
Yes, really.

From Mount Vernon to Portobello Road with a Hangover

Relations between the Royal Navy and the Americans were, as we have seen, fraught. However, it was not always thus. The fault lies with George Washington.

But George had an elder half-brother and mentor called Lawrence Washington who had, in fact, been a British soldier. Specifically, he was a marine in the Royal Navy. As a recruit from the British dominions in North America, he served under Admiral Edward Vernon in the Caribbean, and was part of the force that seized a strategically important base called Guantánamo, which has some minor position in modern history.

Lawrence Washington was very attached to Admiral Vernon. So loyal was he that when he went home to the family estate, which had been called Little Hunting Creek Plantation, he decided to rename it
Mount Vernon
. So Washington’s house was named after a British admiral.

Admiral Vernon’s naming exploits didn’t end there, though. In 1739 Vernon led the British assault on Porto Bello in what is now Panama. He had only six ships, but with lots of derring-do and British pluck etc. etc. he won a startling victory. In fact, so startling was the victory that a patriotic English farmer heard the news, dashed off to the countryside west of London, and built Portobello Farm in honour of the victory’s startlingness. Green’s Lane, which was nearby, soon became known as Portobello Lane and then Portobello Road. And that’s why the London market, now one of the largest antiques markets in the world, is called Portobello Market.

But Admiral Vernon’s naming exploits didn’t end there, either. When the seas were stormy he used to wear a thick coat made out of a coarse material called
grogram
(from the French
gros graine
). So his men nicknamed him
Old Grog
.

British sailors used to have a daily allowance of rum. In 1740, flushed from victory at Porto Bello and perhaps under the pernicious influence of Lawrence Washington, Vernon ordered that the rum be watered down. The resulting mixture, which eventually became standard for the whole navy, was also named after Vernon. It was called
grog
.

If you drank too much grog you became drunk or
groggy
, and the meaning has slowly shifted from there to the wages of gin: a hangover.

A Punch of Drinks

The etymology of alcohol is as unsteady as one would have suspected. For starters the word
alcohol
is Arabic. This may seem odd, given that Islam is a teetotal religion, but when the Arabs used the word
alcohol
they didn’t mean the same stuff that we do.
Alcohol
comes from
al
(the)
kuhul
, which was a kind of make-up. Indeed, some ladies still use
kohl
to line their eyes.

As kohl is an extract and a dye,
alcohol
started to mean the
pure essence
of anything (there’s a 1661 reference to
the alcohol of an ass’s spleen
), but it wasn’t until 1672 that somebody at the Royal Society had the bright idea of finding the pure essence of wine. What was it in wine that made you drunk? What was the
alcohol
of wine? Soon
wine-alcohol
(or
essence of wine
) became the only alcohol anybody could remember, and then in 1753 everybody got so drunk that
wine-alcohol
was shortened to
alcohol
.

Spirits
arrived in the drinks cabinet by almost exactly the same root, but this time from alchemy. In
al
chemy (there’s the Arabic
the
again) every chemical was thought to contain
vital spirits
, little fairies who lived in the substance and made it do funny things. On this basis gunpowder contained fiery spirits, acid contained biting spirits, and things like whisky and vodka contained the best spirits of all, the ones that got you plastered. It’s odd that whisky and vodka get you drunk at all, as, according to their names, they are both water.

Vodka
comes from the Russian
voda
, which means
water
, and indeed both words come from the same Proto-Indo-European root:
wodor
.

The word
whisky
is surprisingly recent. It’s not recorded before 1715, when it leapt into the lexicon with the sterling sentence: ‘Whiskie shall put our brains in a rage.’ Philologists, though, are reasonably agreed that it comes from the Gaelic
uisge beatha
meaning
water of life
.

Why the
water of life
? The Scots hadn’t made the name up, they merely took it from alchemical Latin. Alchemists, who were trying to turn base metal into gold, could find consolation for their failure in the fact that it’s pretty damned easy to distil alcohol, which they called
ardent spirits
or
aqua vitae
(water of life).

It wasn’t only drunken Scotsmen who took
aqua vitae
into their own language. The Scandinavians called their home-brew
aquavit
, without even bothering to translate, and the French called their brandy
eau de vie
.

However, the
water of life
is also a delightful euphemism for urine. This should be drunk in moderation. Morarji Desai, who was Prime Minister of India, used to start every day by drinking the liquor brewed in his own internal distillery, which he always referred to as ‘the water of life’. Desai claimed that Gandhi had taught him the trick, although the Gandhi Institute denies this vehemently and says that Desai’s story is balderdash.

Balderdash
used to be a kind of drink as well. Not a very good kind of drink, mind you: it was wine mixed with beer or water or anything else that meant that you could sell it cheap. Balderdash was strange stuff, but not nearly so rum as rum.

Rum
was once a thieves’ word meaning
good
; but like most thieves’ slang the adjective
rum
got a bad reputation and started to mean
queer
or
a little bit fishy
. It’s hard to say which of these uses caused the Caribbean spirit previously known as
kill-devil
to be nicknamed
rumbullion
. Or perhaps it was just a variant of
rum booze
, in reference to rum’s strong and sugary nature. It might even be something to do with the Devon dialect word
rumbullion
meaning
uproar
, or it could be the dnuora yaw rehto. Or maybe it was a
rum bouillon
or
strange brew
. Either way,
rum
is first recorded in 1654 and by 1683 people were already making
rum punch
.

Vodka, whisky, aquavit, balderdash and rum are just enough to make the sort of punch that will knock you out. Only just, mind you, because
punch
comes from the Hindi word for
five
:
panch
. That’s because, technically, a punch should contain five different ingredients: spirits, water, lemon juice, sugar and spice. That’s also the reason that the area of India that contains five rivers is called the Punjab.