The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (19 page)

The very remotest and most unwelcoming parts of Australia, in Queensland and the Northern Territory, are known as
Never Never Land
, although today this is often shortened by Australians to
The Never Never
. Why give a place a name that refers to time? There have been various explanations for that.

It was claimed in 1908 that it was called
Never Never
because those who lived there
never never
wanted to leave, an explanation so remarkably unconvincing that it deserves a prize. An earlier and more plausible story comes from the
Gentleman’s Magazine
of 1862:

There is in a certain part of Australia a wide and desolate tract of land, a heart-breaking region which has been christened the ‘Never-Never’ land. It is so called, I believe, from the impression which its drouthy wastes convey to the mind of the traveller on first emerging within its loveless limits that he will never again emerge therefrom.

But the actual origin is a little older and much more racial. A book of 1833 described the strangely peaceful wars of the local aborigines:

There is certainly more talking than fighting in their battles, and it is, therefore, to be hoped they will some day send over a few of their people as missionaries, to convince civilized nations that it is far worse to cut the throat of a man while alive, than to eat his body when dead.

I was greatly disappointed at not falling in with a tribe on Liverpool Plains, but the stockkeepers informed me that they had gone to war against the Never-never blacks, who are so called because they have hitherto kept aloof from the whites.

So Barrie’s imaginary place came from part of Australia named after blacks who would
never never
have anything to do with white-skinned people. This origin is rather odd when you think about Michael Jackson.

8
Thank God.

Herbaceous Communication

At the time that the Never Never was being named, the British had decided that a warm, sunny country with beautiful beaches was clearly a great spot for a penal colony. If you were caught stealing a loaf of bread in early Victorian Britain you were sent to Australia, where there was less bread but much more sunshine. This system was abolished in 1850 when word got back to Britain that Australia was, in fact, a lovely place to live and therefore didn’t count as a punishment. It was decided that lounging on the beach at Christmas did not produce what judges described as ‘a just measure of pain’.

Rather than join the colony’s work gangs, where they might be forced to do hard labour or, worse, administration, some of the more enterprising of the transportees set off into the Outback, where they obstinately continued to commit crimes. The Australian police would chase after them, hoping to arrest them and deport them somewhere else. However, the population at large tended to prefer the criminal bushrangers to the policemen, and would inform the furtive outlaws about exactly where the long arm of the law was reaching. This irritating and unofficial system of communication became known as the
bush telegraph
.

The
bush telegraph
isn’t recorded until 1878, but that’s because the telegraph wasn’t introduced to Australia at all until 1853. In America, the telegraph had been around since 1844 and it took Americans only six years before they had invented their version of
bush telegraph
.

The
grapevine telegraph
became famous during the American Civil War, but nobody is sure who invented it or why. The Confederate soldiers seemed to think that they had invented the
grapevine
and that it was wonderfully Southern and lackadaisical. This view is backed up by a contemporary Yankee source claiming that:

We used to call the rebel telegraphic lines ‘the grapevine telegraph’, for their telegrams were generally circulated with the bottle after dinner.

However, the other story goes that it was the slaves of the South, those who picked the
grapes
, who were the true and original operators of the
grapevine telegraph
. In this alternative version, the grapevine telegraph was the sister system of the metaphorical
Underground Railroad
that took slaves from the South to freedom in the North.

Then, in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, and the telegraph – bush, grapevine or otherwise – became old hat.
9
The telephone had a great effect on the English language. For one thing, it made the previously obscure greeting
hello
wildly popular. Before the telephone, people had wished each other
good mornings
,
days
and
nights
; but as the person on the other end of the line might not deserve a
good day
, people needed an alternative. Alexander Bell himself insisted on beginning a phone call with the bluff nautical term
ahoy
, but it didn’t catch on and so
hello
rose to become the standard English greeting.

The other effect that the telephone had was that it made
telegraph
sound rather old-fashioned. So unofficial communication became known simply as the
grapevine
, which is why, in 1968, Marvin Gaye sang that he had heard dispiriting news of his beloved’s plans
through the grapevine
.

9
A dictionary of 1776 defines ‘old hat’ as ‘a woman’s privities, because frequently felt’.

Papa Was a
Saxum Volutum

Marvin Gaye didn’t write ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’. It was written for him by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, who also wrote the classic ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’, which is based on another old phrase.

Revolving minerals already had their (movable) place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bob Dylan had written ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and some students from London had formed a band called The Rolling Stones, named after the Muddy Waters song ‘Rollin’ Stone’.

All these rock and rollers were referring indirectly to the fact that
a rolling stone gathers no moss
. This was observed in the 1530s by the poet Thomas Wyatt:

A spending hand that alway powreth owte

Had nede to have a bringer in as fast,

And on the stone that still doeth tourne abowte

There groweth no mosse: these proverbes yet do last.

The phrase also crops up in Erasmus’ adages of 1500, where it’s rendered in Latin as
saxum volutum non obducitur musco
. But why are all these stones rolling? On the rare occasion that you actually see a stone rolling downhill, it usually gets to the bottom a few seconds later and stops. Its brief trip doesn’t tend to knock much moss off, and if it does, then the moss will just grow back later. To keep a stone moss-free, it needs to be rolled
regularly
.

That’s why the original rolling stones were not boulders crashing down a hillside. In fact, the sort of rolling stone that gathers no moss is helpfully pinned down in a dictionary of 1611 as a gardening implement used to make your lawn nice and flat. The solicitous gardener who rolls his lawn every weekend will find that his
rolling stone gathers no moss
.

Which means that Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters
et al
are all referring to diligent gardening. Moreover, one of the most successful bands of the twentieth century belongs in the garden shed.

The part of the phrase about
gathering no moss
actually predates the gardening implement. In the mid-fourteenth century you can find this observation on stone flooring:

Selden Moseþ þe Marbelston þat men ofte treden.

Which translates loosely as moss doesn’t grow on marble that gets trodden on a lot. That line is from a mystic allegorical poem called
The Vision of Piers Plowman
. So before we proceed, what has Piers got to do with a parrot?

Flying Peters

Piers Plowman
is a variant of
Peter Plowman
because the farmer in the poem was representative of the ideal disciple of Christ, the chief of the apostles and the first pope, whose real name was not, of course, Peter.

Once upon a time there was a fisherman called Simon. He fell in with a chap called Jesus who nicknamed him ‘The Rock’ (presumably in preparation for a career in professional wrestling), which in Greek was
Petros
.

And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona … And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

So Simon was – quite technically –
petrified
. And this Jesus chap, not content with renaming his friend, then decided to walk on water and, in contravention of every health and safety rule you can think of, encouraged Peter to do the same. This did not work out well.

And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear. But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.

And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.

With that story in mind, what do you call a sea bird that appears just before a storm and dips its feet into the water? You call it a
storm peter
. And then you muck about with the letters a bit – just as a
cock
is a
cockerel
– until it’s called a
storm petrel
.

Peter
went into French as
Pierre
.
Little Peters
are called
Pierrots
and in French sparrows are, for some obscure French reason, therefore called
perots
. For reasons even more obscure, England then imported this word as
parrot
. The word first pops up in the alliterative claptrap that the Tudor writer John Skelton was pleased to call his poetry. Skelton wrote an attack on Cardinal Wolsey called ‘Speke, Parrot’. Some fragments of the poem survive, which is a pity.

Parrot
got verbed by Thomas Nashe at the end of the sixteenth century in the equally pointless but fantastically titled
Have With You To Saffron Walden
, an inexplicable work of incomprehensible invective.

Parrots are very important linguistically because they preserve the words of the dead. There was an explorer at the beginning of the nineteenth century called Alexander von Humboldt. He was in Venezuela and found an old parrot that still repeated words from the language of the Ature tribe. Nobody else did, because the Atures had been wiped out a few years before. Another tribe had slaughtered every last one of them and returned victorious with, among other things, a pet parrot. This parrot still spoke only words from the tribe that had raised him. So all that was left of a Venezuelan civilisation were the echoes and repetitions of a parrot.

Venezuela and Venus and Venice

The name
Venezuela
has nothing to do with
Venus
, but the chap who thought it up was related to her by marriage.

Amerigo Vespucci was a Florentine explorer with three claims to fame. First, and most obscurely, he was the cousin of a nobleman called Marco Vespucci. Marco married a girl called Simonetta Cataneo, who was possibly the most beautiful woman who ever lived. So beautiful was she, that even after she had died (in 1476) Botticelli still used his memory of her (and the myriad portraits that already existed) as the model for his ‘Birth of Venus’.