The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (29 page)

In 1954 the Americans tested their new hydrogen bomb, which they had calculated would be a little more powerful than the A-bombs they’d previously been mucking around with. It turned out to be an awful lot more powerful and ended up accidentally irradiating the crew of a Japanese fishing boat. Japanese public opinion was outraged, as the Japanese and Americans had a rather awkward military and nuclear relationship. Protests were made, hackles were raised, and a film was made about an irresponsible nuclear test that awoke a sea monster called
Gorilla-whale
or
Gojira
. The film was rushed through production and came out later in the same year.
Gojira
was, allegedly, simply the nickname of a particularly burly member of the film crew
. Gojira
was anglicised to
Godzilla
, and the film became so famous across the world that
–zilla
became a workable English suffix.

A bride-to-be who has become obsessed with every fatuous detail of her nuptials from veil to hem is now called a bride
zilla
, and one of the world’s most popular internet browsers is Mo
zilla
Firefox, whose name and old logo can be traced straight back to the tests at Bikini Atoll.

But where the Japanese saw a threatening monster, the French saw what the French always see: sex. A fashion designer called Jacques Heim had just come up with a design for a two-piece bathing costume that he believed would be the world’s smallest swimsuit. He took it to a lingerie shop in Paris where the owner, Louis Réard, proved with a pair of scissors that it could be even more scandalously immodest. The result, Réard claimed, would cause an explosion of lust in the loins of every Frenchman so powerful that it could only be compared to the tests at Bikini Atoll, so he called the new swimwear the
bikini
.

So by a beautiful serendipity, it’s now possible to log on to the internet and use a Mozilla browser to look at pictures of girls in bikinis, knowing that the two words spring from the same event.

The word
serendipity
was invented in 1754 by Horace Walpole, the son of the first prime minister of England. He was kind enough to explain exactly how he had come up with the word. He was reading a book called the
Voyage des trois princes de Serendip
, which is a story of three princes from the island of Serendip who are sent by their father to find a magical recipe for killing dragons. Walpole noticed that ‘as their highnesses travelled they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of’. Though the story of the three princes that Walpole read was pure fiction, the Island of Serendip was a real place, although it has since changed its name, first to Ceylon, and then, in 1972, to Sri Lanka. So a
serendipity
is really a
Sri-Lanka-ness
.

Now let us cross the Indian Ocean and head up the Suez canal to Sardinia. In fact, let’s not, because the people of Sardinia are a nasty bunch. In ancient times they were considered so waspish and rebarbative that any unfriendly remark would be referred to as
Sardinian
, which is where we get the word
sardonic
. However, Sardinia also gave its name to the little fish that were abundant in the surrounding seas, which are now called
sardines
.

We
could
go to the island of Lesbos, but that wouldn’t make us very popular. The most famous resident of Lesbos was an ancient Greek poetess called Sappho. Sappho wrote ancient Greek poems about how much she liked other ancient Greek ladies, and the result was that in the late nineteenth century
Lesbian
became an English euphemism for ladies who like ladies. The idea, of course, was that only people with a good classical education would understand the reference, and people with a good classical education would have strong enough minds not to snigger. In this,
lesbianism
was considered preferable to the previous English term,
tribadism
, which came from a Greek word for
rubbing
.

Before being adopted in the 1890s,
Lesbian
was the name of a kind of wine that came from the island, so you could drink a good Lesbian. Of course, it also was, and is, the name for the inhabitants of the island, not all of whom are happy with the word’s new meaning. In 2008 a group of Lesbians (from the island) tried to take out an injunction against a group of lesbians (from the mainland) to make them change the name of their gay rights association. The injunction failed, but just to be on the safe side, let us sail our etymological ship out through the straits for Gibraltar and head for the islands where dogs grow feathers.

The Romans found some islands in the Atlantic that were overrun with large dogs. So they called them the
Dog Islands
or
Canaria
. However, when the English finally got round to inspecting the Canaria a couple of millennia later, all they found there were birds, which they decided to call
canaries
, thus changing dogs into birds (and then into a pretty shade of yellow). Now let’s continue due west to get to the Cannibal Islands.

When Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic, he arrived at the Caribbean Islands, which he rather hopefully called the
West Indies
because the purpose of his voyage had been to find a western route to
India
, which everyone in Europe knew to be a rich country ruled by the Great Khan.

Columbus was therefore terribly pleased when he landed in Cuba and discovered that the people there called themselves
Canibs
, because he assumed that
Can
ibs must really be
Khan
ibs, which was a rare triumph of hope over etymology. At the next island Columbus came to, they told him they were
Caribs
, and at the island after that they were
Calibs
. This was because in the old languages of the Caribbean, Ns, Rs and Ls were pretty much interchangeable.

The sea got named the
Carib
bean after one pronunciation. But it was also believed in Europe that the islanders ate each other, and this gastronomic perversity came, on the basis of another pronunciation, to be called
cannib
alism. Whether they did actually eat each other is a subject that is still disputed. Some say they did, others say that it was just a projection of European fears – and it’s true that the European imagination was set humming by these stories of far-off islands. William Shakespeare’s play
The Tempest
was set on a desert island where a strange half-man half-fish is the only true native. There definitely aren’t any men-fish in the Caribbean, but that didn’t stop Shakespeare from naming his bestial character
Calib
an after the third possible pronunciation.

But now we sail onwards through the Panama canal
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to the last of our island chain, Hawaii, after which the world’s most popular snack was almost named.

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The neatest palindrome in English is undoubtedly: ‘A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.’

Sandwich Islands

The first European to stand on the shores of Hawaii was Captain James Cook, who arrived there in 1778 and died there in 1779 after an unsuccessful attempt to abduct the king. Captain Cook introduced the words
tattoo
and
taboo
into English, both having been practices that he came across in his Pacific voyages, but there was one name that he couldn’t get into the dictionary, or even the atlas.

European explorers loved to name the places that they discovered, a habit that didn’t always endear them to the natives, who felt that they must have discovered the place first as they were already living there. So, although Cook noted down that the locals called his new discovery
Owyhee
, he knew which side his bread was buttered and decided to rename the place in honour of the sponsor of his voyage. Captain Cook was, of course, thinking of his future career (something that he should probably have considered when abducting the king), for Cook’s sponsor was, at the time, the First Lord of the Admiralty: John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich.

But the name
Sandwich
didn’t stick, and Cook died before his sponsor could even hear of the attempt. The poor Earl of Sandwich has had to make do with the South Sandwich Islands (an uninhabited chain of rocks near the South Pole), Montague Island (an uninhabited island near Alaska), and every
sandwich
shop,
sandwich
-maker, and
sandwich
filling in the entire world. And he managed that latter feat without ever going near a breadknife.

The Earl of Sandwich was a gambler, and not just any sort of gambler. He was an addict who lost money hand over fist over hand over fist. Even by the British standards of the time he was considered a bit odd, and the British were famous for gambling. The first and only account of the origin of the world’s favourite snack comes from a French book of 1765 about what terrible gamblers the English are. It runs thus:

The English, who are profound thinkers, violent in their desires, and who carry all their passions to excess, are altogether extravagant in the art of gaming: several rich noblemen are said to have ruined themselves by it: others devote their whole time to it, at the expense of their repose and health. A minister of state passed four and twenty hours at a public gaming table, so absorbed in play, that, during the whole time, he had no subsistence but a bit of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he eat without ever quitting the game. The new dish grew highly in vogue, during my residence in London: it was called by the name of the minister who invented it.

The author didn’t mention the name of the minister, because he was a Frenchman writing for a French audience in French;
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so there would be no point in his explaining the origin of an English word. It’s therefore a delicious twist in the tale that
sandwich
is now one of the few English words that everybody in France knows too.

There’s a myth that the Earl of Sandwich
invented
the sandwich. He did not. He had servants and chefs to actually make his food for him. Sandwich simply made sandwiches cool. People have almost certainly been stuffing things between two slices of bread since the stuff was invented around the end of the last ice age. What the Earl of Sandwich did was to take a humble little snack that you wouldn’t think twice about, and give it associations of aristocracy, power, wealth, luxury and 24-hour gambling.

Great men and women do not busy themselves in the kitchen hoping to achieve the immortality that can be conferred by a recipe book. They simply wait until a food is named after them. Take Margherita Maria Teresa Giovanna, Queen of Italy and wife of Umberto I. She never climbed Mount Stanley, but Mount Stanley’s highest peak still bears her name. She certainly never cooked any pizzas: they were made for her, and they had to be fit for a queen.

Italian aristocrats of the nineteenth century didn’t eat pizza. It was peasant food, flavoured with that peasant favourite: garlic. However, in the 1880s, European royalty, wary of revolution, were all trying to be nice to the common men whom they ruled. So when King Umberto and Queen Margherita visited Naples, the home of the pizza, a man named Raffaele Esposito decided to make a pizza fit for the lips of the queen.

Esposito was the owner of the Pizzeria di Pietro e Basta Così, and he got over the garlic problem by simply not using any garlic, an idea that was previously unheard of. He then decided to make the pizza properly patriotic and Italian by modelling it on the colours of the flag: red, white and green. So he added tomatoes for the red (nobody had done this before), mozzarella for the white, and herbs for the green. He then named it
Pizza Margherita
and sent it, in June 1889, to the queen.

To be honest, Queen Margherita probably didn’t deign to eat the first margherita, but she did have one of her servants write a note saying thank you. Thus has her name become immortal, and a coded version of the Italian flag is on the menu of every pizza restaurant in the world.

The Italian flag consists of three vertical stripes. This design is based on
le Tricolore
, the flag of the French Revolution.