The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (26 page)

They meant this in a nice way. It was like calling them
fellow humans
, but of course the word got taken up by bullies and, like
spastic
in modern playgrounds,
cretin
quickly acquired a derogatory sense. So
Christian
became a term of abuse.

The first
idiots
were also Christian, or rather the first Christians were
idiots
. The word
idiot
first appears in English in the Wycliffite Bible of 1382. There, in the Book of Deeds (which we would call Acts), it says that:

Forsoth thei seynge the stedfastnesse of Petre and John, founden that thei weren men with oute lettris, and idiotis

A verse that was translated in the King James Version as:

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men

But in the Latin of Saint Jerome, the passage ran:

videntes autem Petri constantiam et Iohannis conperto quod homines essent sine litteris et idiotae

St Peter and St John were
idiots
simply because they were
laymen
. They had no qualifications and were therefore their own men, rather than belonging to some professional class. If they had spoken
their own
language it would have been an
idiom
, and if they had been eccentrics with their
own way of doing things
(which they undoubtedly were) they would have been
idiosyncratic
.

Neither
cretin
nor
idiot
was originally meant to be an insult. One was a compliment and the other a simple description, but people are cruel and are always casting about for new ways to abuse others. As fast as we can think up technical terms and euphemisms like
cretin
,
moron
,
idiot
or
spastic
, people will take the words and use them to be nasty to others. Consider the poor
moron
. The term was invented in 1910 by the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded. They took an obscure Greek word,
moros
, which meant
dull
or
foolish
, and used it to refer to those with an IQ of between 50 and 70. The idea was that it would be a word reserved for doctors and diagnosis. Within seven years the word had escaped from medical circles and was being used as an insult.

Incidentally,
moron
meant
dull
, but in Greek
oxy
meant
sharp
. Many, many chapters ago we saw how
oxygen
got its name because it
gen
erated acids, and the
oxy
in
oxymoron
has the same root. So an
oxymoron
is a
sharp softness
.

The unkindest twist of the English language is, perhaps, that which happened to John Duns Scotus (1265–1308). He was the greatest theologian and thinker of his day, the
Doctor Subtilis
, the philosopher of the univocity of being, master of the formal distinction and of the concept of haecceity, the essential property that makes each thing this, and not that.

Duns Scotus had a formidable mind which he used to draw the finest distinctions between different ideas. This was, linguistically, his downfall and destruction.

When Duns Scotus died his many followers and disciples lived on. They pursued and expanded on his astonishingly complicated philosophical system of distinctions and differences. One could almost say that they, like their master, were hair-splitters and pedants.

In fact, people did say they were hair-splitters and pedants. When the Renaissance came along, people suddenly got rather enlightened and humanist and were terribly angry when
Duns-men
, as they were called, tried to contradict them with an obscure Aristotelian enthymeme. Duns-men became the enemies of progress, the idiots who would turn the clock back and return to the Dark Ages; and
Duns
started to be spelled
dunce
.

Thus did the greatest mind of his generation become a synonym for
gormless
. This is terribly unfair, as Duns Scotus was full of
gorm
. He was brimming over with the stuff. And if you don’t know what
gorm
is, that’s because it’s a fossil word.

Fossil-less

Do you have any gorm? It’s an important question, because if you don’t have any gorm it logically follows that you are gormless.
Gormless
is a fossil. Dinosaurs and trilobites once flourished, now only fossils remain, petrified and scattered. The same has happened to
gorm
,
feck
,
ruth
and
reck
. They were all once real words. Now they are frozen for ever in –
less
phrases.

Gorm
(spelled all sorts of ways) was a Scandinavian word meaning
sense
or
understanding
. As a twelfth-century monk called Orm put it:

& yunnc birrþ nimenn mikell gom

To þæwenn yunnkerr chilldre

– a sentiment with which we can all, I’m sure, agree. However, poor
gorm
(or
gome
) rarely got written down. It was a dialect word used by Yorkshiremen, and most of the literary action was happening in London.

However, in the nineteenth century Emily Brontë wrote a book called
Wuthering Heights
, in which is the line:

Did I ever look so stupid: so gormless as Joseph calls it?

Joseph is a servant who speaks with a strong Yorkshire accent, and the word
gormless
is clearly being brought in as an example of one of his dialect terms. Joseph would probably have used the word
gorm
as well, but Emily Brontë doesn’t mention it. So
gormless
got into one of the most famous novels ever written, while poor
gorm
was left to pine away and die on a lonely moor in Yorkshire.

Once upon a time there was the word
effect
. It was a happy, useful, innocent word until it went to Scotland. Once north of Hadrian’s Wall, the word
effect
was cruelly robbed of its extremities and became
feck
.

Indolent, vigourless Scotsmen who had no ef
fec
t on things were therefore
feckless
. This time it was not Brontë but Thomas Carlyle, a Scot, who brought the word into common usage. He used
feckless
to describe the Irish and his wife.

However, it’s hard to see exactly what Carlyle meant by
feckless
. This is from a letter of 1842:

Poor Allan’s dust was laid in Kensal Green,—far enough from his native Kirkmahoe. M’Diarmid has a well-meant but very feckless Article upon him this week.

In another letter Carlyle wrote that the summer had made his wife feckless, and he even described how living with her in London had turned the couple into ‘a feckless pair of bodies’, ‘a pair of miserable creatures’. Anyway, Carlyle used
feckless
but he never used the word
feck
, and so the one word lived and became famous, while the other vanished into a Celtic twilight.

Reckless
is far simpler and there’s more poetry in it, which is the important thing.
Reck
used to mean
care
(although it’s etymologically far from
reckon
). As Chaucer put it:

I recke nought what wrong that thou me proffer,

For I can suffer it as a philosopher.

Shakespeare used
reck
too, yet by his time it already had an archaic feel. In
Hamlet
, Ophelia chides her brother thus:

Do not as some ungracious pastors do,

Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,

Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine,

Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads

And recks not his own rede.

Rede
was an archaic and ancient word for
advice
, and
reck
was probably already an archaic and ancient word for
take notice of
. Shakespeare used
reckless
six times in his complete works, as much as all the other
recks
,
reckeths
and
reckeds
put together.
Reck
must already have been fading,
reckless
rushing headlong to the future.

If something is
true
, it’s the
truth
. If you
rue
your actions, you feel
ruth
. If you don’t rue your actions, you feel no ruth and that makes you
ruthless
.
Ruth
survived for quite a long time, and it’s uncertain as to why it died out in the end. Maybe it’s just that there are more ruthless people than ruthful ones.

Language sometimes doesn’t have an explanation. Words rise and die for no reason that an etymologist can discover. History is not immaculate, in fact it is
maculate
. We might feel more
consolate
if we could give a span, and even spick, explanation for everything, but to no avail.

And so we come,
exorably
, to the end of our study of fossil words. We could go on, as the language is brimming with them, but you might become listless and disgruntled. P.G. Wodehouse once remarked of a chap that, ‘if not exactly disgruntled he was far from being gruntled’. So let us continue by seeing exactly how
gruntling
relates to
grunt
.

The Frequentative Suffix

If a gem frequently sparks, we say that it
sparkles
. If a burning log frequently emits cracking noises, then it
crackles
. That’s because –
le
is a frequentative suffix.

With this in mind, let’s turn to
grunting
. To
gruntle
is to
grunt often
. If a pig makes one noise it has grunted, if it grunts again you may add the frequentative suffix and call the pig a
gruntler
. A medieval travel writer called Sir John Mandeville
19
described the men who live in the desert near the Garden of Eden thus:

In that desert are many wild men, that are hideous to look on; for they are horned, and they speak not, but gruntle, as swines do.

But the
dis
in
disgruntled
is not a negative prefix but an intensive one. If the verb already carries negative connotations (and something that makes you keep grunting is probably no good), then the negative
dis
just emphasises how bad it is.
Disgruntled
therefore means almost the same thing as
gruntled
.