The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (18 page)

Panch
derives from the Sanskrit for five,
pancas
, which comes from the Proto-Indo-European
penkwe
, which went into Greek as
pent
and gave us a
pentagon
.

But if you want to get properly sloshed you need the queen of drinks: champagne.

The Scampering Champion of the Champagne Campaign

According to legend (the beautiful elder sister of truth), champagne was invented by a Benedictine monk called Dom Pérignon who shouted to his fellow monks: ‘Come quickly, I am tasting the stars.’

This is, of course, balderdash. Making sparkling wine is simple; it’s bottling it that was difficult. If you put fizzy wine in a normal bottle, it can’t take the pressure and explodes. A champagne bottle has to contain six atmospheres of pressure. Even now the caverns of Moët and Chandon lose every sixtieth bottle to explosion. Moreover, it was English glassmakers who perfected the method in order to keep their cider fizzy, and the French simply stole the technology to bottle their bubbly.

Champagne was originally just
vin de campagne
, or
wine from the countryside
. It was only in the eighteenth century that it came to refer to wine from the particular region around Épernay, where many of the worst bits of the First World War happened. That Champagne saw some of the worst trench warfare is no coincidence.

The German advance of 1914 started very well. They circumvented the Maginot Line and stormed across northern France with Teutonic efficiency, until they got to the champagne warehouses. There’s something about finding the whole world’s champagne supply that can make even a German commander find reasons for pausing, and the pause was all that the French and British needed. The Allies arrived, everybody dug trenches and the rest is War Poetry.

The German campaign took place during the summer. It had to. When winter arrives, armies generally have to find somewhere warm to hole up and wait for the snows and the gales to pass. Then in the spring they can set out into the
campagne
again, which is why an army fights a summer
campaign
: literally
on the countryside
.

Campagne
comes from the Latin word
campus
, which meant
field
. The very best soldiers in the field were called the
campiones
, from which we get
champion
. So the champion of a champagne campaign would be the same thing three times over.

You can do a lot of things with a field. You can, for example, build a university on it, in which case you have a university
campus
. But what most campaigning armies do is simply take out their tents and guy-ropes and pitch
camp
.

Actually, there’s another thing that armies usually do. Armies are mostly composed of men, young men, without any women to keep them company. This means that the soldiers have every reason in the world to try to sneak out of the camp to seek the solace of sex. Creeping out of camp was called
excampare
by the Romans and
escamper
by the French, but we call it
scampering
.

The ladies towards whom these young champions would be scampering were the
camp followers
, women of more enterprise than virtue, who would follow the soldiers around and rent their affections by the hour.

Camp followers
aren’t the classiest of broads (a
broad
, by the way, is a woman a
broad
). They tended to wear too much make-up to be truly ladylike, and their dresses were garish and their hair badly dyed. During the First World War, British soldiers started to call such a get-up
campy
. They also referred to such illicit sexual scamperings as
camp
. From here the word
camp
had to make only a short hop before it referred to a man in make-up (and maybe a dress) who had illicit sexual encounters, and that’s why tarty men in make-up are, to this day,
camping it up
, often with a glass of pink champagne.

Camp, in the sense of battlefield, also wheedled its way into German as
Kampf
meaning
battle
. So Hitler’s book
Mein Kampf
could reasonably be described as rather
camp
.

Insulting Names

It’s a funny thing, but Hitler wouldn’t have called himself a Nazi. Indeed, he became quite offended when anyone did suggest he was a Nazi. He would have considered himself a National Socialist.
Nazi
is, and always has been, an insult.

Hitler was head of the catchily-named
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(National Socialist German Workers’ Party). But, like the Cambridge University Netball Team, he hadn’t thought through the name properly. You see, his opponents realised that you could shorten
Na
tionalso
zi
alistische
to
Nazi
. Why would they do this? Because
Nazi
was already an (utterly unrelated) term of abuse. It had been for years.

Every culture has a butt for its jokes. Americans have the Polacks, the English have the Irish, and the Irish have people from Cork. The standard butt of German jokes at the beginning of the twentieth century were stupid Bavarian peasants. And just as Irish jokes always involve a man called Paddy, so Bavarian jokes always involved a peasant called Nazi. That’s because Nazi was a shortening of the very common Bavarian name Ignatius.

This meant that Hitler’s opponents had an open goal. He had a party filled with Bavarian hicks and the name of that party could be shortened to the standard joke name for hicks. (Incidentally,
hick
was formed in exactly the same way as
Nazi
.
Hick
was a rural shortening of
Richard
and became a byword for uneducated famers.)

Imagine if a right-winger from Alabama started a campaign called
Red
States for the
Nex
t America
. That’s essentially what Hitler did.

Hitler and his fascists didn’t know what to do about the derogatory nickname
Nazi
. At first they hated the word. Then, briefly, they tried to reclaim it, in roughly the way that some gay people try to reclaim old insults like
queer
. But once they got to power they adopted the much simpler approach of persecuting their opponents and forcing them to flee the country.

So refugees started turning up elsewhere complaining about the
Nazis
, and non-Germans of course assumed that this was the official name of the party. Meanwhile, all the Germans who remained in Germany obediently called them the
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
, at least when the police were listening. To this day, most of us happily go about believing that the Nazis called themselves
Nazis
, when in fact they would probably have beaten you up for saying the word.

So it all goes back to the popularity of the name Ignatius. The reason that Ignatius was such a common name in Bavaria is that Bavaria is largely Catholic and therefore very fond of St Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits.

The Jesuits were set up in the seventeenth century to combat the rise of Protestantism, which had become the state religion of England. They soon gained a reputation for being very clever indeed. But as the Jesuits’ cleverness was largely directed against the Protestant English, English Protestants took their name, made an adjective –
Jesuitical
– and used it to describe something that’s too clever by half, and that uses logical tricks at the expense of common sense.

This is a tad unfair on the poor Jesuits, who have been responsible for the educations of some of the most famous men in history: Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton, Charles de Gaulle, Cardinal Richelieu, Robert Altman, James Joyce, Tom Clancy, Molière, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bing Crosby, Freddie Mercury, René Descartes, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Hitchcock, Elmore Leonard, Spencer Tracy, Voltaire and Georges Lemaître.

And if the last name on that list is unfamiliar, it shouldn’t be. Monsignor Georges Lemaître was one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century. His great idea, proposed in 1927, was the theory of the Primeval Atom, which of course you haven’t heard of.

That’s because the theory of the Primeval Atom, like the
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
, is a name that never made it. It vanished, usurped by an insult.

The theory of the Primeval Atom asserts that the universe has not been around for eternity, and that instead it started off 13.7 billion years ago with all matter contained in a single point: the Primeval Atom. This point exploded and expanded, space cooled, galaxies were formed, et cetera et cetera.

Many people disagreed with this theory, including the British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. He thought that the universe had always been around, and decided to undermine Lemaître’s theory by calling it something silly. So he racked his brains and came up with the silliest name he could think of. He called it the
Big Bang Theory
, because he hoped that
Big Bang
captured the childishness and simplicity of the idea.

Names are not earned, they are given. Often the givers don’t know what they’re doing. Sometimes, it’s simply a slip of a child’s tongue.

Peter Pan

And sometimes names come out of almost nothing. W.E. Henley (the poet who wrote
Invictus
and not much else)
8
had a daughter named Margaret. Margaret died when she was only five years old, but not before she had met J.M. Barrie. She liked Mr Barrie and tried to call him her
friendy
, but being only five and horribly ill, all she could make of the word was
wendy
.

J.M. Barrie then went off and wrote a play about a boy called Peter Pan who takes a girl and her two brothers off to Neverland. He named the heroine Wendy in memory of little Margaret Henley. So he gave her a sort of immortality, for the play was so popular that parents started to name their daughters after the central character. Although, why you would name your daughter after a girl who runs away from home with a strange boy the second the dog’s not looking, is a mystery.

Unfortunately, in
Peter Pan
, Wendy is shot with an arrow and dies. However, her death isn’t a serious matter, as after a little bit of make-believe she recovers enough to start singing in her sleep. Her song is about how she wants a house, and so Peter and his associates build a tiny cottage around her dormant body. This was, of course, the first
Wendy House
.

Back in London, Mr Darling, Wendy’s father, is rather morose about the disappearance of his progeny. He realises that it’s all his fault, as he had forced the family dog to sleep out in the kennel. So, as a penance, he takes to sleeping in the kennel himself. In fact, he never leaves the kennel at all and is transported to work in it every day. He is scrupulously polite and raises his hat to any lady who looks inside, but he remains
in the doghouse
. And so popular was
Peter Pan
that Mr Darling’s fate became a phrase.

So that’s a name, a noun and a phrase: all from one story. But Barrie also took names that had been around already.

The most famous admirer of
Peter Pan
was Michael Jackson, a singer and composer of indeterminate tan, who named his home
Neverland
. This means that Mr Jackson must have been working from the novelisation, because in the original play of
Peter Pan
, Peter doesn’t live in
Neverland
, but in
Never Never Land
, a name that Barrie got from a thoroughly real place.