The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (28 page)

Most mathematics used to be written out in full sentences, which is why the equals sign was invented by a sixteenth-century Welshman who rejoiced in the name of Robert Recorde. Robert had got thoroughly bored of writing out the words
is equal to
every time he did a sum. This was particularly irritating for him, as he was writing a mathematical textbook with the memorable title,
The Whetestone of Witte whiche is the seconde parte of Arithmeteke: containing the extraction of rootes; the cossike practise, with the rule of equation; and the workes of Surde Nombers
.

But the prolixity of the title was matched by the brevity that the book brought to algebra. Recorde wrote:

… to avoid the tedious repetition of these words: is equal to: I will set as I do often in work use, a pair of parallels, or Gemowe lines of one length, thus:
, bicause no 2 things, can be more equal.

So
is an equals sign because the two lines are of
equal
length. Robert Recorde published his
Whetstone of …
(see above) in 1557 and died in debtors’ prison the following year, thus demonstrating the difference between good mathematics and good accounting.

Recorde thought that the two lines of
were so similar that they were like identical twins, which is why he called them
gemowe
, meaning
twin
.
Gemowe
derived from the Old French
gemeaus
, which was the plural of
gemel
, which came from the Latin
gemellus
, which was the diminutive of
Gemini
.

Stellafied and Oily Beavers

The
zo
diac is, of course, the little circular
zoo
that runs around the sky. It’s a
zoo
-diac because eleven of the twelve signs are living creatures and seven of them are animals. In fact, when the Greeks named the zodiac all of the signs were living creatures.
Libra
, the odd one out, was added in by the Romans.

The zodiac is filled with all sorts of strange word associations.
Cancer
is the
crab
largely because Galen thought that some tumours resembled crabs and partly because both words come from the Indo-European root
qarq
, which meant
hard
. Goats such as
Capricorn
skip about and are generally
capricious
, or
goatlike
. And bulls like
Taurus
get killed by
toreadors
. But let’s stick, for the moment, to
Gemini
, the
twins
.

The twins in question are two stars called Castor and Pollux, and how they came to be there is a tender and touching story. Despite what astronomers would have you believe, most of the stars were created not by energy cooling into matter, but by Zeus.

Zeus had a thing for a girl called Leda and decided to turn into a swan and have his wicked way with her. However, later that night Leda slept with her husband Tyndareus. The result was a rather complicated pregnancy and Leda popping out two eggs, which is enough to make any husband suspicious.

The first egg contained Helen (of Troy) and Clytemnestra. The second egg contained Pollux and Castor. Extensive mythological paternity testing revealed that Helen and Pollux were the children of Zeus, and Castor and Clytemnestra were the mortal children of Tyndareus, which can hardly have been much of a consolation for the poor chap.

Castor and Pollux were inseparable until one day Castor was stabbed and killed. Pollux, who was a demi-god, struck a deal with his dad that he could share his immortality with his twin brother, and the result was that Zeus turned them into two stars that could be together for ever in the heavens (well, in fact they’re sixteen light years apart, but let’s not get bogged down in details).

Castor
was the Greek word for
beaver
, and to this day beavers all across the world belong to the genus
Castor
, even if they don’t know it. We usually think of beavers as sweet little creatures who build dams, but that’s not how a constipated Renaissance man would view them; a constipated Renaissance man would view them as his relief and his cure.

You see, the beaver has two sacs in his groin that contain a noxious and utterly disgusting oil that acts as a very effective laxative. This very valuable liquid was known as
castor oil
.

The name survives, but the source of the liquid has changed. To the delight of beavers everywhere, people discovered in the mid-eighteenth century that you can get exactly the same bowel-liberating effect from an oil produced from the seeds of
Ricinus communis
, also known as the castor oil plant. So though it’s still called castor oil, it’s no longer obtained from the groin of a beaver.

Several anatomical terms derive from the beaver, but in order to keep this chain of thought decent and pure and family-friendly, let us for the moment consider that
beaver
was once a word for beard.

Beards

The number of hidden beards in the English language is quite bizarre.
Bizarre
, for example, comes from the Basque word
bizar
or
beard
, because when Spanish soldiers arrived in the remote and clean-shaven villages of the Pyrenees, the locals thought that their
bizars
were
bizarre
.

The feathers that were stuck into the back of arrows were known by the Romans as
the beard
, or
barbus
, which is why arrows are
barbs
, and that’s ultimately the reason that
barbed
wire is simply wire that has grown a beard.

Barbus
is also the reason that the man who cuts your beard is known as a
barber
. The ancient Romans liked to be clean-shaven, as beards were considered weird and Greek, so their barbers plied a regular and lucrative trade until the fall of the Roman empire. Italy was overrun by tribesmen who had huge long beards which they never even trimmed. These tribesmen were known as the
longa barba
, or
longbeards
, which was eventually shortened to
Lombard
, which is why a large part of northern Italy is still known as Lombardy.

The Romans by that time had become effete, perhaps through a lack of facial hair, and couldn’t take their opponents on. If they had been more courageous and less shaven, they could have stood
beard to beard
against their enemies, which would have made them objectionable and
rebarbative
.

What the Romans needed was a leader like General Ambrose Burnside, who fought for the Union during the American Civil War. General Burnside had vast forests of hair running from his ears and connecting to his leviathan moustache. So extraordinary was his facial foliage that such growths came to be known as
burnsides
. However, Ambrose Burnside died and was forgotten, and later generations of Americans, reasoning that the hair was on the
side
of the face, took the name
burnside
and bizarrely swapped it around to make
sideburns
.

And it’s not only humans that have beards, nor only animals. Even trees may forget to shave, namely the
giant bearded fig
of the Caribbean. The bearded fig is also known as the
strangler tree
and can grow to 50 feet in height. The beards and the height and the strangling are connected, for the tree reproduces by growing higher than its neighbours and then dropping beard-like aerial roots into their unsuspecting branches. The beards wrap themselves around the victim until they reach the ground, where they burrow in and then tighten, strangling the host.

There’s an island in the Caribbean that’s filled with them. The natives used to call it the
Red Land with White Teeth
, but the Spanish explorers who discovered it were so impressed with the psychotic and unshaven fig trees that they called it
The Bearded Ones
, or
Barbados
.

Islands

Some parts of the English language can only be reached by boat. For instance, there’s a small dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean whose natives called their home Coconut Island, or
Pikini
, which was mangled into English as
Bikini Atoll
.

For centuries nobody knew about Bikini except its natives, and even when it was discovered by Europeans, the best use that anyone could think of for the place was as a nautical graveyard. When a warship had outlived its effectiveness, it would be taken to the beautiful lagoon and sunk.

Bikini Atoll was put on the map (and almost removed from it) by America in 1946 when they tested their new atomic bombs there.
Atom
is Greek for
unsplittable
, but the Americans had discovered that by breaking the laws of etymology they were able to create vast explosions, and vast explosions were the best way of impressing the Soviets and winning the Cold War.

However, the tests at Bikini had a more immediate effect on the French and the Japanese – both, perhaps, illustrative of their national characters.