The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (3 page)

I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: And I will make thee swear by the LORD, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth

Now, that
may
be the correct translation, but the Hebrew doesn’t say thigh, it says
yarek
, which means, approximately,
soft bits
. Nobody knows how oaths were sworn in the ancient world, but many scholars believe that people didn’t put their hands on their hearts or their thighs, but on the testicles of the man to whom they were swearing, which would make the connection between
testis
and
testes
rather more direct.

Testicles. Bollocks. Balls. Nuts. Cullions. Cojones. Goolies. Tallywags. Twiddle-diddles. Bawbles, trinkets, spermaria. There are a hundred words for the danglers and they get everywhere. It’s enough to make a respectable fellow blush. Do you enjoy the taste of avocado? So did I, until the terrible day when I realised that I was eating Aztec balls. You see, the Aztecs noticed the avocado’s shape and decided that it resembled nothing so much as a big, green bollock. So they called it an
ahuakatl
, their word for testicle. When the Spanish arrived they misheard this slightly and called it
aguacate
, and the English changed this slightly to
avocado
. To remember that I used to like avocados with a touch of walnut oil only adds to my shame.

Even if you flee to an ivory tower and sit there wearing an orchid and a scowl, it still means that you have a testicle in your buttonhole, because that’s what an orchid’s root resembles, and
orchis
was the Greek for testicle. Indeed, the green-winged orchid used to rejoice in the name
Fool’s Ballocks
. The technical term for somebody who has
a lot of balls
is a
polyorchid
.

And it’s very possible that this
orb
on which we all live comes from the same root as
orchid
, in which case we are whirling around the Sun on a giant testis, six billion trillion tons of gonad or
cod
, which is where
cod-philosophy
,
codswallop
and
codpiece
come from.

There are two codpieces at the top right of your computer keyboard, and how they got there is a rather odd story.

Parenthetical Codpieces

Your computer keyboard contains two pictures of codpieces, and it’s all the fault of the ancient Gauls, the original inhabitants of France. Gauls spoke Gaulish until Julius Caesar came and cut them all into three parts. One of the Gaulish words that the Gauls used to speak was
braca
meaning trousers. The Romans didn’t have a word for trousers because they all wore togas, and that’s why the Gaulish term survived.

From
braca
came the early French
brague
meaning trousers, and when they wanted a word for a codpiece they decided to call it a
braguette
or
little trousers
. This is not to be confused with
baguette
, meaning stick. In fact a Frenchman might brag that his baguette was too big for his braguette, but then Frenchmen will claim anything. They’re
braggarts
(literally
one who shows off his codpiece
).

Braguettes were much more important in the olden days, especially in armour. On the medieval battlefield, with arrows flying hither and thither, a knight knew where he wanted the most protection. Henry VIII’s codpiece, for example, was a gargantuan combination of efficiency and obscenity. It was big enough and shiny enough to frighten any enemy into disorganised retreat. It bulged out from the royal groin and stretched up to a metal plate that protected the royal belly.

And that is significant. What do you call the bit of stone that bulges out from a pillar to support a balcony or a roof? Until the sixteenth century nobody had been certain what to call them; but one day somebody must have been gazing at a cathedral wall and, in a moment of sudden clarity, realised that the architectural supports looked like nothing so much as Henry VIII’s groin.

And so such architectural structures came to be known as
braggets
, and that brings us to Pocahontas.

Pocahontas was a princess of the Powhatan tribe, which lived in Virginia. Of course, the Powhatan tribe didn’t
know
they lived in Virginia. They thought they lived in Tenakomakah, and so the English thoughtfully came with guns to explain their mistake. But the Powhatan tribe were obstinate and went so far as to take one of the Englishmen prisoner. They were planning to kill him until Pocahontas intervened with her father and Captain John Smith was freed. The story goes that she had fallen madly in love with him and that they had a passionate affair, but as Pocahontas was only ten years old at the time, we should probably move swiftly on.

Of course, it may not have happened exactly that way. The story has been improved beyond repair. But there definitely
was
a Pocahontas and there definitely
was
a Captain John Smith, and they seem to have been rather fond of each other. Then he had an accident with one of his guns and had to return to England. The cruel colonists told Pocahontas that John Smith was dead, and she pined away in tears thinking that he was lost for ever. In fact, he wasn’t dead, he was writing a dictionary.

The Sea-Man’s Grammar and Dictionary: Explaining all the Difficult Terms of Navigation
hit the bookstands in 1627. It had all sorts of nautical jargon for the aspiring sailor to learn. But, for our story, the important thing is that Captain Smith spelt
braggets
as
brackets
, and the spelling stuck.

The original architectural device was called a bragget/bracket, because it looked like a codpiece. But what about a double bracket, which connects two horizontals to a vertical? An architectural double bracket looks like this: [

Look around you: there’s probably one on the nearest bookshelf. And just as a physical bracket got its name because it resembled a codpiece, so the punctuation bracket got its name because it resembled the structural component.

In 1711 a man called William Whiston published a book called
Primitive Christianity Revived
. The book often quotes from Greek sources and when it does, it gives both Whiston’s translation
and
the original in what he was the first man to call [brackets].

And that’s why, if you look at the top right-hand corner of your computer keyboard, you will see two little codpieces [] lingering obscenely beside the letter P for
pants
.

Suffering for my Underwear

Once upon a time there was a chap who probably didn’t exist and who probably wasn’t called Pantaleon. Legend has it that he was personal physician to Emperor Maximianus. When the emperor discovered that his doctor was a Christian he got terribly upset and decreed that the doctor should die.

The execution went badly. They tried to burn him alive, but the fire went out. They threw him into molten lead but it turned out to be cold. They lashed a stone to him and chucked him into the sea, but the stone floated. They threw him to wild beasts, which were tamed. They tried to hang him and the rope broke. They tried to chop his head off but the sword bent and he forgave the executioner.

This last kindness was what earned the doctor the name
Pantaleon
, which means
All-Compassionate
.

In the end they got Pantaleon’s head off and he died, thus becoming one of the
megalomartyrs
(the great martyrs) of Greece. By the tenth century Saint Pantaleon had become the patron saint of Venice.
Pantalon
therefore became a popular Venetian name and the Venetians themselves were often called the
Pantaloni
.

Then, in the sixteenth century, came the
Commedia Dell’Arte
: short comic plays performed by travelling troupes and always involving the same stock characters like Harlequin and Scaramouch.

In these plays Pantalone was the stereotypical Venetian. He was a merchant and a miser and a lustful old man, and he wore one-piece breeches, like Venetians did. These long breeches therefore became known as
pantaloons
. Pantaloons
were shortened to
pants
and the English (though not the Americans) called their underwear
underpants
.
Underpants
were again shortened to
pants
, which is what I am now wearing.

Pants are all-compassionate. Pants are saints. This means that my underwear is named after an early Christian martyr.

Pans

So
pants
and
panties
come from Saint Pantaleon and your undies are all-compassionate and your small-clothes are martyred.

St Pantaleon was therefore a linguistic relation of St Pancras (who
held everything
) and Pandora, who was
given everything
in a box that she really shouldn’t have opened.

Pan
is one of those elements that gets everywhere. It’s panpresent. For example, when a film camera
pans
across from one face to another, that
pan
comes from the same Greek word that you’ll find in your underpants. Cinematic
panning
is short for the
Panoramic Camera
, which was patented back in 1868 and so called because a
panorama
is where you see everything.

A
panacea
cures absolutely everything, which is useful if you’re in the middle of a
pandemic
, which is one up from an
epidemic
. An epidemic is only
among the people
, whereas a pandemic means
all the peoples of the world
are infected.

Pan also gives you all sorts of terribly useful words that for some reason loiter in dark and musty corners of the dictionary.
Pantophobia
, for example, is the granddaddy of all phobias as it means
a morbid fear of absolutely everything
. Pantophobia is the inevitable outcome of
pandiabolism
– the belief that the Devil runs the world – and, in its milder forms, is a
panpathy
, or
one of those feelings that everybody has now and then
.

However, not all
pans
mean
all
. It’s one of the great problems of etymology that there are no hard and fast rules: nothing is panapplicable. The pans and pots in your kitchen have nothing whatsoever to do with panoramas and pan-Africanism. Panic is not a fear of everything; it is, in fact, the terror that the Greek god Pan, who rules the forests, is able to induce in anybody who takes a walk in the woods after dark. And the Greek god Pan is not panipotent. Nobody knows where his name comes from – all we’re sure of is that he played the pan-pipes.

Back in 27 BC the Roman general Marcus Agrippa built a big temple on the edge of Rome and, in a fit of indecision, decided to dedicate it to all the gods at once. Six hundred years later the building was still standing and the Pope decided to turn it into a Christian church dedicated to St Mary and the Martyrs. Fourteen hundred years after that it’s still standing and still has its original roof. Technically it’s now called the Church of Saint Mary, but the tourists still call it the
Pantheon
, or
All the Gods
.

The exact opposite of the Pantheon is
Pandemonium
, the place of all the demons. These days pandemonium is just a word we use to mean that everything is a bit chaotic, but originally it was a particular palace in Hell. It was one of the hundreds of English words that were invented by John Milton.