The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (25 page)

A little over twenty years later, a man called Herman Melville began to write a novel about whales and whaling. Specifically he wrote about a ship called the
Pequod
setting sail from Nantucket to hunt a white whale known as Moby-Dick. Melville had been a whaler himself and had heard of the famous Starbuck whalers of Nantucket, so he decided to call the first mate of the
Pequod
Starbuck in their honour.

Moby-Dick
wasn’t a very popular novel at first. Most people, especially the British, couldn’t make head or tail of it, though this was largely because the British edition was missing the last chapter. However, in the twentieth century, novels that nobody can make head or tail of became very much the fashion and
Moby-Dick
was taken up by all and sundry, especially American schoolteachers who have been inflicting its purple prose on children ever since. There was one particular English teacher in Seattle who loved the book: his name was Jerry Baldwin.

Baldwin and two friends wanted to start a coffee shop. They needed a name and Jerry Baldwin knew exactly where to find the right one – in the pages of
Moby-Dick
. He told his business partners of his fantastic idea. They were going to call the coffee shop …

Wait for it …

Pequod!

His business partners pointed out (quite rightly) that if you’re planning to open a shop selling potable fluids, you probably don’t want the name to contain the syllable
pee
. That’s just bad marketing. So Baldwin was overruled and the others started looking for something a little more local. On a map of the area they found an old mining settlement in the Rocky Mountains called Camp Starbo. Baldwin’s two partners decided that Starbo was a great name. But Jerry Baldwin was not to be defeated. He suggested that they compromise with a little alteration to the second syllable that would make the name match the
Pequod
’s first mate:
Starbucks
. The three of them agreed, and that Viking’s name for a little stream in Yorkshire became one of the most famous brands in the world.

The high street might be a different place if Baldwin had remembered that Moby-Dick was based on a real white whale that was said to have fought off over a hundred whaling parties in the Pacific of the early nineteenth century: that whale was called Mocha Dick.

There are no branches of Starbucks on Starbuck Island, but that’s probably because there are no people there either, and the occasional seal is unlikely to have the cash for a cappuccino.

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History is actually rather bewildered as to who named it in honour of whom first.

Coffee

Balzac once wrote that:

This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.

But Shakespeare never drank coffee. Nor did Julius Caesar, or Socrates. Alexander the Great conquered half the world without even a café latte to perk him up in the morning. The pyramids were designed and constructed without a whiff of a sniff of caffeine. Coffee was introduced to Europe only in 1615.

The achievements of antiquity are quite enough to cow the modern human, but when you realise that they did it all without caffeine it becomes almost unbearable. The words for coffee arrange themselves beautifully into highly-caffeinated spirals. Let’s start with
espressos
and consider what they have to do with
expressing
yourself.

An espresso is made in a little machine that
presses
steam
outwards
(
e
in Italian) through tightly-packed grains of coffee. It’s exactly the same process by which a cow
expresses
milk, or a sore
expresses
pus, and metaphorically it’s the same process by which your thoughts are
expressed
outwards from your brain through your mouth. Thus self-expression.

Those actions that have been thought about are premeditated, intentional and deliberate. If, for example, you have done something
expressly
for a purpose, it’s because you have thought about it.

How does this connect to
express
mail?
Expressly
came to mean
for one particular purpose
. A letter can be entrusted either to the tender mercies of the national postal system (who will probably lose it, burn it or deliver it back to you a month later with a fine) or it can be given to a paid messenger who has one
express
job: to deliver that one letter. This is an
express
delivery – one where a postman has been hired
expressly
for the purpose.

And the same is true of trains. Some trains stop at every station; no village halt or stray cow is too small or too irrelevant to slow you down. All this can be avoided, if rather than taking a stopping train you board one that is bound
expressly
for one particular destination. Such trains are now known as
express
trains, and they usually have a little buffet car where you can pay a small fortune for a tiny
espresso
.

Cappuccino Monks

If expressive espressos have a circuitous etymology, it’s as nothing compared to the frothy delights of the
cappuccino
.

In 1520, a monk called Matteo Da Bascio decided that his fellow Franciscans were all terrible sybarites who had fallen away from the original calling of St Francis. They did luxurious things like wearing shoes, and Da Bascio decided to start a new order of pure, barefoot Franciscans.

The Old Franciscans were rather hurt by this and tried to suppress Matteo’s unshod breakaways. He was forced to flee into hiding with the sympathetic Camaldolese monks who wore
little hoods
called, in Italian,
cappuccios
. Matteo and his brethren wore the cappuccios themselves, just to blend in, but when his breakaway order got official recognition in 1528 they found that they had become so used to the hoods that they decided to keep them on. His followers were therefore nicknamed the
Capuchin Monks
.

The Capuchin Monks spread quickly all over Catholic Europe, and their hoods had become so familiar that when, a century later, explorers in the New World found apes with a dark brown patch on the top of their heads that looked like a little monkey-hood, they decided to call them
Capuchin Monkeys
.

What’s particularly beautiful about this name is that, so far as anybody can tell,
monkeys
are named after
monks
. You see, most people agreed with Matteo Da Bascio: far from being models of chastity and virtue, medieval monks were all filthy sinners and little better than animals. So what do you call that brown, hairy ape? A
monk
ey.

The habit of the Capuchin Order was, and is, a pretty sort of creamy brown colour. So when the new, frothy, creamy, chocolate-sprinkled form of coffee was invented in the first half of the twentieth century, it was named after their robes: the
cappuccino
.

Mind you, most baristas wouldn’t understand you if you ordered a
little hood
. But then again, most
baristas
don’t realise that they are really
barristers
.

Called to the Bar

Barista
, the chap who serves you your coffee, is a case of English lending a word to Italian and then taking it straight back again. A
barista
is nothing more than an Italian
barman
. The –
ist
suffix just means
practitioner
, as in a Marx
ist
evangel
ist
.

A
bar
, as any good dictionary will tell you, is
a rod of wood or iron that can be used to fasten a gate
. From this came the idea of a
bar
as any let or hindrance that can stop you going where you want to; specifically the
bar
in a pub or tavern is the
bar
rier behind which is stored all the lovely intoxicating liquors that only the
bar
man is allowed to lay his hands on without forking out.

We are all, at times, called to the bar, if only in order to pay the bill. But the bar to which
barristers
were called was a lot less alcoholic, even though it was in an inn.

Half a millennium ago, all English lawyers were required to train at the Inns of Court in London. These inns were not the pleasant inns that serve beer, they were merely lodging houses for students of the law, because
inn
, originally, just meant
house
.

The internal arrangement of the Inns of Court was as Byzantine and incomprehensible as one would expect from a building devoted to the law, but basically there were the
Readers
, who were clever folk and sat in an Inner Sanctum separated from the rest of the students by a big
bar
.

The lesser students would sit around reading and studying and dreaming of the great day when they would be
called to the bar
and allowed to plead a case like a proper lawyer. The situation was complicated by the fact that there used to be
outer barristers
and
inner barristers
who had a particular relationship with sheriffs at law, and you would probably have to study for a few years before you understood the bar system even partially, and it wouldn’t do you any good anyway, as just when you thought you’d got a grip on things, the meaning of
bar
was changed. That’s law for you.

In about 1600 the word
bar
started to be applied to a wooden railing that ran around every courtroom in England, at which prisoners had to stand while the judge ticked them off or sentenced them or fumbled with his black cap. The defendant’s
barr
ister would stand next to him at the bar and plead his case.

Meanwhile, the prosecuting lawyer would insist that the prisoner was guilty and that he was ready to prove his case. If he insisted this in French he would say
Culpable: prest d’averrer nostre bille
, but that was a bit of a mouthful so it would be shortened to
culprit
.

Then the defendant’s fate would be handed over to a jury. If the jury couldn’t decide, then they would declare
we don’t know
, but they would declare it in Latin – and the Latin for
we don’t know
is
ignoramus
.

Ignoramus
was thus a technical legal term until a writer called George Ruggle used it as the title for a play in 1615, the main character of which was a stupid lawyer called
Ignoramus
. The usage stuck and now an ignoramus is any old idiot.

This also means that the plural of
ignoramus
is definitely not
ignorami
.

Ignorami

Christians are all cretins, etymologically speaking, and cretins are all Christians. If this sounds unfair, it’s because language is much less kind than religion.

The original cretins were deformed and mentally deficient dwarves found only in a few remote valleys in the Alps. These days their condition would be called
congenital iodine deficiency syndrome
, but the Swiss didn’t know anything about that. All they knew was that, though these people had a problem, they were still human beings and fellow Christians. So they called them
Cretins
, which means
Christians
.