The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (22 page)

Fat Gunhilda

While Britain was developing the tank, Germany was building a gun. To be precise Germany was building an absolutely bloody enormous gun. It weighed 43 tons and could fire 1,800lb shells 2½ miles. Its official name was the
L/12 42-cm Type M-Great Kurze Marine-Kanone
, but that’s hardly the catchiest of names. So the designers at Krupp Armaments did a dastardly thing: they named it after their boss. The owner of the company was a fat woman called Bertha Krupp. So the engineers called their new gun
Dick Bertha
, which is German for
Fat Bertha
, or as it came to be known more alliteratively in English,
Big Bertha
.
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It’s odd to give a cannon a girl’s name. You hardly need to be a devoted disciple of Sigmund Freud to see a smidgen of phallic symbolism in a gun. However, history and Freud are at odds: for some reason guns are always girls.

During the Vietnam War, recruits into the US Marine Corps were required to give their rifles girls’ names, usually the name of their sweetheart at home; but the practice is much older than that. The standard issue flintlock musket of the British empire was called Brown Bess, and Rudyard Kipling joked that many men had been pierced to the heart by her charms. In Edinburgh castle there’s a huge medieval cannon known as Mons Meg, which was probably named after James III of Scotland’s wife, Margaret.

Why do guns have girls’ names? It’s a silly question because
gun
itself is a girl’s name. So far as anybody can tell (and theories vary), the very first
gun
in history was a cannon in Windsor Castle. A document from the early fourteenth century mentions
Una magna balista de cornu quae vocatur Domina Gunilda
, which means ‘a large cannon from Cornwall which is called Queen Gunhilda’.

Gunhilda is a girl’s name and the usual shortening of Gunhilda is
Gunna
. So far as etymology can tell, every gun in the English-speaking world is named after that one
gunna
in Windsor Castle: the Queen Gunhilda.

There actually was a Queen Gunhilda, as well. But what did she have to do with smartphones?

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Pity for Bertha Krupp would be misplaced. The Krupp
Berthawerk
was quite officially named after her, and that was the armaments factory attached to Auschwitz.

Queen Gunhilda and the Gadgets

Gunhilda was the Queen of Denmark in the late tenth and early eleventh century. She was married to Sven Forkbeard and, as is the way with Dark Age queens, that’s all we really know about her. She was the mother of Canute the Great (he of the waves), and presumably she helped her husband out with his beard every morning. She must also have known her father-in-law, King Harald I of Denmark, who lived from 935 to 986 AD.

King Harald had blue teeth. Or perhaps he had black teeth. Nobody’s quite sure, as the meaning of
blau
has changed over the years. His other great achievement was to unite the warring provinces of Denmark and Norway under a single king (himself).

In 1996 a fellow called Jim Kardach developed a system that would allow mobile telephones to communicate with computers. After a hard day’s engineering, Kardach relaxed by reading a historical novel called
The Longships
by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson. It’s a book about Vikings and adventure and raping and pillaging and looting, and it’s set during the reign of Harald Bluetooth.

Jim Kardach felt he was doing the king’s work. By getting computers to talk to telephones and vice versa he was uniting the warring provinces of technology. So, just for his own amusement, he gave the project the working title of
Bluetooth
.

Bluetooth
was never meant to be the actual name on the package. Blue teeth aren’t a pleasant image, and it was up to the marketing men at Kardach’s company to come up with something better. The marketing men did come up with something much blander and more saleable: they were going to call the product
Pan
. Unfortunately, just as the new technology was about to be unveiled, they realised that
Pan
was already the trademark of another company. So, as time was tight and the product needed to be launched, they reluctantly went with Kardach’s nickname. And that’s why it’s called Bluetooth technology.

Shell

The history of company names is strange and accidental and filled with twists and tergiversations. For example, why is the largest energy company in the world called Shell?
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Well, the truth is that in Victorian England seashells were popular. Really popular. Popular to an extent that just looks weird to us. Victorians collected seashells, painted seashells and made things out of seashells. The devouring dustbin of time thankfully means that most of us have never and will never see a whole imitation bouquet of flowers made of nothing other than painted integuments of mortal molluscs. The word
kitsch
doesn’t do it justice.

These seashells had to be supplied by somebody. This is probably the reason that she sold seashells on the sea shore. But the beaches of Britain were not sufficient for the obsessed Victorians, so a lively trade started up importing bigger, shinier shells from all four corners of the Earth.

One man who cashed in on this importing business was Marcus Samuel, who set up shop in Houndsditch in east London and became a shell merchant. It was therefore perfectly natural that he should call his company Shell.

Shell did well and soon expanded into the other areas of the curio market: trinkets, brightly coloured pebbles and the like. Marcus Samuel brought his son (also called Marcus) into the family business and sent him off to Japan to buy gaudy trifles.

It was while on this trip that Marcus Samuel Junior realised that there might just possibly be a little bit of potential profit in, of all things, oil.

Shell did not remain true to its roots. The seashell business on which the company was founded was dropped.
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Only the name survives, but the Shell logo that stands above all those petrol stations is a mute memorial to what was once the core of the business, and to the fact that oil was only an afterthought.

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Shell merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum to form the present Royal Dutch Shell.

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In a spirit of scholarly enquiry, I tried to find out exactly when this line was discontinued, but the nice lady at Shell customer services thought I was making fun of her and hung up.

In a Nutshell

Shells are strewn all over the beaches of the English language. Artillery, for example, can
shell
a town, on the basis that the earliest grenades looked a little like nuts in their shells. It’s difficult to get a nut out of its shell, and it’s also difficult to get money out of a debtor. That’s why when you do manage it, you have made him
shell out
.

Hamlet said that he ‘could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’, but that’s not the origin of the phrase
in a nutshell
, which goes back to a deliciously unlikely story recounted by the Latin writer Pliny.

Pliny was a Roman encyclopaedist who tried to write down pretty much everything he’d ever heard. Some of his writings are an invaluable source of knowledge; others are pretty hard to believe. For example, Pliny claimed that there was a copy of
The Iliad
so small that it could fit inside a walnut shell. The weirdest thing about that story is that it’s
probably
true.

In the early eighteenth century, the Bishop of Avranches in France decided to put Pliny to the test. He took a piece of paper that was 10½ inches by 8½ (this book is about 8 inches by 5), and started copying out
The Iliad
in the smallest handwriting he could manage. He didn’t copy the whole thing, but he fitted 80 verses onto the first line and therefore worked out that, as
The Iliad
is 17,000 verses long, it would easily fit onto the piece of paper. He then folded the paper, sent for a walnut, and proved Pliny right, or at least feasible.
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A similar feat was, apparently, achieved in about 1590 by an Englishman called Peter Bales, who did it with the Bible.

The Iliad

The story of Troy (also called
Ilium
, hence
Iliad
) is magnificently grand. The heroes are more heroic than any that have fought since, the ladies are more beautiful and less chaste than all their successors, and the gods themselves lounge around in the background. Winston Churchill once observed that William Gladstone ‘read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right’.

However, Homer’s words are not nearly as grand as they ought to be. If Ajax – the giant, musclebound hero of the Greeks – had known that he would end up as a popular cleaning product, he might have committed suicide earlier. Hector, the proud hero of the Trojans who would challenge anyone, even Achilles, to a fight, has ended up as a verb,
to hector
, meaning little more than
to annoy with abusive shouting
.

Hector’s sister, Cassandra, is now a byword for a moaning, doom-mongering party pooper. Even the great Trojan horse is now a rather irritating kind of computer virus, designed to steal your credit card details and Facebook log-in.

And the phrases? There are very few famous phrases from
The Iliad
. There are a lot of famous lines
about
Troy:

Is this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

But this is from Marlowe, not Homer. In fact, the only phrase that could be ascribed to Homer that most people know comes from William Cullen Bryant’s 1878 translation, where Agamemnon prays that he’ll be able to kill Hector:

May his fellow warriors, many a one,

Fall round him to the earth and bite the dust.

Would Homer be proud that his only memorable line was a middling song by Queen?

And the most famous phrase from the most famous Homeric hero isn’t Homer’s at all. It wasn’t until more than two millennia after Homer’s death that people started to talk about the
Achilles tendon
. The myth runs that, because of his mother’s magic, the only part of Achilles’ body that could be wounded was the back of his ankle, hence the expression
Achilles’ heel
and the medical term
Achilles’ tendon
.

The Trojan War, if it happened at all, happened in about 1250 BC. Homer, if he/she existed, probably scribbled his way to immortality in the eighth century before Jesus. Philip Verheyen wasn’t born until 1648 in the unfortunately named Belgian town of Borring, and it was Philip Verheyen who named the Achilles tendon, in the most unfortunate of circumstances.

Verheyen was a very intelligent boy who started out as a cowherd (like the editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary
), but became an anatomist. Verheyen was one of the great dissectors, so when his own leg had to be amputated, it was partly a tragedy and partly a temptation.

Verheyen was an ardent Christian who believed in the physical resurrection of the body. He therefore did not want his leg to be buried separately from the rest of him, as this would be a great inconvenience at the Day of Judgement. So he preserved it using chemicals, kept it with him at all times, and after a few years began to very carefully dissect his own leg.

Carefully cutting up your own body is probably not good for the sanity. Verheyen started writing letters to his own leg, in which he recorded all his new findings. It’s in these letters to a limb that we first find the term
chorda Achillis
, or
Achilles tendon
.

Verheyen went mad before he died. A student of his recounted visiting him in the last year of his life. Verheyen was gazing out of the window of his study. Beside him, on a table, was every last tiny piece of his leg laid out and neatly labelled.