The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (2 page)

He told me firmly that he didn’t.

Did he know about Mr Masoch, after whom masochism was named? He was a novelist and …

The fellow told me that he didn’t know about Mr Masoch, that he didn’t want to know about Mr Masoch, and that his one ambition in life was to eat his biscuit in peace.

But it was too late. The metaphorical floodgates had opened and the horse had bolted. You see there are a lot of other words named after novelists, like Kafkaesque and Retifism …

It was at this point that he made a dash for the door, but I was too quick for him. My blood was up and there was always something more to say. There always is, you know. There’s always an extra connection, another link that joins two words that most of mankind quite blithely believe to be separate, which is why that fellow didn’t escape until a couple of hours later when he managed to climb out of the window while I was drawing a diagram to explain what the name Philip has to do with a hippopotamus.

It was after an incident such as this that my friends and family decided something must be done. They gathered for a confabulation and, having established that secure psychiatric care was beyond their means, they turned in despair to the publishing industry, which has a long history of picking up where social work leaves off.

So, a publisher was found somewhere near the Caledonian Road and a plan was hatched. I would start with a single word and then connect it to another word and then to another word and so on and so forth until I was exhausted and could do no more.

A book would therefore have a twofold benefit. First it would rid me of my demons and perhaps save some innocent conversationalist from my clutches. Second, unlike me, a book could be left snugly on the bedside table or beside the lavatory: opened at will and
closed
at will.

So a book it was, which set me thinking …

The Etymologicon

A Turn-up for the Books

This is a book. The glorious insanities of the English language mean that you can do all sorts of odd and demeaning things to a book. You can cook it. You can bring a criminal to it, or, if the criminal refuses to be brought, you can throw it at him. You may even take a leaf out of it, the price of lavatory paper being what it is. But there is one thing that you can never do to a book like this. Try as and how you might, you cannot turn up for it. Because
a turn-up for the books
has nothing, directly, to do with the ink-glue-and-paper affair that this is (that is, unless you’re terribly modern and using a Kindle or somesuch). It’s
a turn-up for the bookmakers
.

Any child who sees the bookmaker’s facing the bookshop across the High Street will draw the seemingly logical conclusion. And a bookmaker was, once, simply somebody who stuck books together. Indeed, the term
bookmaker
used to be used to describe the kind of writer who just pumps out one shelf-filler after another with no regard for the exhaustion of the reading public. Thomas More observed in 1533 that ‘of newe booke makers there are now moe then ynough’. Luckily for the book trade, More was beheaded a couple of years later.

The modern sense of the bookmaker as a man who takes bets originated on the racecourses of Victorian Britain. The bookmaker would accept bets from anyone who wanted to lay them, and note them all down in a big betting book. Meanwhile, a turn-up was just a happy chance. A dictionary of slang from 1873 thoughtfully gives us this definition:

Turn up
an unexpected slice of luck. Among sporting men bookmakers are said to have a turn up when an unbacked horse wins.

So, which horses are unbacked? Those with the best (i.e. longest) odds. Almost nobody backs a horse at 1,000/1.

This may seem a rather counterintuitive answer. Odds of a thousand to one are enough to tempt even a saint to stake his halo, but that’s because saints don’t know anything about gambling and horseflesh. Thousand to one shots never, ever come in. Every experienced gambler knows that a race is usually won by the favourite, which will of course have short odds. Indeed, punters want to back a horse that’s so far ahead of the field he merely needs to be shooed over the line. Such a horse is a
shoo-in
.

So you pick the favourite, and you back it. Nobody but a fool backs a horse that’s unlikely to win. So when such an unfancied nag romps over the finish line, it’s a turn-up for the books, because the bookies won’t have to pay out.

Not that the bookmakers need much luck. They always win. There will always be many more bankrupt gamblers than bookies. You’re much better off in a zero-sum game, where the players pool their money and the winner takes all. Pooling your money began in France, and has nothing whatsoever to do with swimming pools, and a lot to do with chickens and genetics.

A Game of Chicken

Gambling in medieval France was a simple business. All you needed were some friends, a pot, and a chicken. In fact, you didn’t need friends – you could do this with your enemies – but the pot and the chicken were essential.

First, each person puts an equal amount of money in the pot. Nobody should on any account make a joke about a
poultry sum
. Shoo the chicken away to a reasonable distance. What’s a reasonable distance? About a stone’s throw.

Next, pick up a stone.

Now, you all take turns hurling stones at that poor bird, which will squawk and flap and run about. The first person to hit the chicken wins all the money in the pot. You then agree never to mention any of this to an animal rights campaigner.

That’s how the French played a game of chicken. The French, though, being French, called it a game of
poule
, which is French for chicken. And the chap who had won all the money had therefore won the
jeu de
poule
.

The term got transferred to other things. At card games, the pot of money in the middle of the table came to be known as the
poule
. English gamblers picked the term up and brought it back with them in the seventeenth century. They changed the spelling to
pool
, but they still had a pool of money in the middle of the table.

It should be noted that this pool of money has absolutely nothing to do with a body of water. Swimming pools, rock pools and Liverpools are utterly different things.

Back to gambling. When billiards became a popular sport, people started to gamble on it, and this variation was known as
pool
, hence shooting pool. Then, finally, that poor French chicken broke free from the world of gambling and soared majestically out into the clear air beyond.

On the basis that gamblers
pooled
their money, people started to pool their resources and even pool their cars in a
car pool
. Then they pooled their typists in a
typing pool
. Le chicken was free! And then he grew bigger than any of us, because, since the phrase was invented in 1941, we have all become part of the
gene pool
, which, etymologically, means that we are all little bits of chicken.

Hydrogentlemanly

The gene of
gene pool
comes all the way from the ancient Greek word
genos
, which means birth. It’s the root that you find in
generation
,
regeneration
and
degeneration
; and along with its Latin cousin
genus
it’s scattered generously throughout the English language, often in places where you wouldn’t expect it.

Take
generous
: the word originally meant
well-born
, and because it was obvious that well-bred people were magnanimous and peasants were stingy, it came to mean munificent. Indeed, the well-bred
gen
tleman established such a reputation for himself that the word
gentle
, meaning
soft
, was named after him. In fact, some gentlemen became so refined that the
gin
in
gingerly
is probably just another
gen
lurking in our language.
Gingerly
certainly has nothing to do with ginger.

Genos
is hidden away in the very air that you breathe. The chemists of the late eighteenth century had an awful lot of trouble with the gases that make up the air. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and the rest all look exactly alike; they are transparent, they are effectively weightless. The only real difference anybody could find between them was their effects: what we now call oxygen makes things burn, while nitrogen puts them out.

Scientists spent a lot of time separating the different kinds of air and then had to decide what to call them all. Oxygen was called
flammable air
for a while, but it didn’t catch on. It just didn’t have the right scientific ring to it. We all know that scientific words need an obscure classical origin to make them sound impressive to those who wouldn’t know an idiopathic craniofacial erythema
1
if it hit them in the face.

Eventually, a Frenchman named Lavoisier decided that the sort of air that produced water when it was burnt should be called the
water-producer
. Being a scientist, he of course dressed this up in Greek, and the Greek for water producer is
hydrogen
. The bit of air that made things acidic he decided to call the
acid-maker
or
oxy-gen
, and the one that produced
nitre
then got called
nitrogen
.

(Argon, the other major gas in air, wasn’t known about at the time, because it’s an inert gas and doesn’t produce anything at all. That’s why it’s called argon.
Argon
is Greek for
lazy
.)

Most of the productive and reproductive things in the world have
gen
hidden somewhere in their names. All words are not homo
gen
ous and sometimes they are en
gen
dered in odd ways. For example, a group of things that reproduce is a
gen
us and if you’re talking about a whole
gen
us then you’re speaking in
gen
eral and if you’re in
gen
eral command of the troops you’re a
gen
eral and a
general
can order his troops to commit
gen
ocide, which, etymologically, would be suicide.

Of course, a general won’t commit genocide himself; he’ll probably assign the job to his privates, and
privates
is a euphemism for
gonads
, which comes from exactly the same root, for reasons that should be too obvious to need explaining.

1
That’s a blush to you and me.

The Old and New Testicle

Gonads
are
testicles
and testicles shouldn’t really have anything to do with the Old and New
Testaments
, but they do.

The Testaments of the Bible
testify
to God’s truth. This is because the Latin for
witness
was
testis
. From that one root,
testis
, English has inherited pro
test
(bear witness for), de
test
(bear witness against), con
test
(bear witness competitively), and
test
icle. What are testicles doing there? They are
testi
fying to a man’s virility. Do you want to prove that you’re a real man? Well, your
testi
cles will
testi
fy in your favour.

That’s the usual explanation, anyway. There’s another, more interesting theory that in bygone days witnesses used to swear to things with their hands on their balls, or even on other people’s balls. In the Book of Genesis, Abraham makes his servant swear not to marry a Canaanite girl. The King James Version has this translation: