The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (8 page)

People started importing helmeted guinea fowl from Madagascar to Europe, and the people who did the importing were usually Turkish traders. They were known as Turkey merchants, and the birds that they brought were therefore called
turkeys
. But those aren’t the turkeys that we eat at Christmas with bread sauce and relatives. That bird is
Meleagris gallopavo
, which is also delicious.

It was the Spanish conquistadors who found
Meleagris gallopavo
in the magnolia forests and brought it back to Europe. It became popular in Spain and then in North Africa. And though it’s a different species from the helmeted guinea fowl, the two birds do look surprisingly alike.

People got confused. The birds looked the same, tasted similar and both were exotic new dishes brought from Somewhere Foreign. So it was assumed that they were the same thing, and the American bird got called turkey as well, in the mistaken belief that it was a bird that was mistakenly believed to come from Turkey.

In Turkey itself, of course, they didn’t make this mistake. They knew the bird wasn’t theirs. So the Turks made a completely different mistake and called it a
hindi
, because they thought the bird was probably Indian. The French thought the same and they still call turkey
dindon
or
d’Inde
, which also means
from India
. It’s a most confusing bird but delicious.

In fact it was so delicious that, though it was introduced to England only in the 1520s or 30s, it had become the standard Christmas meal by the 1570s. None of which explains why people occasionally
talk turkey
. Indeed, they demand to talk turkey. This all goes back to an old joke, that isn’t, I’m afraid, very funny.

The joke involves a turkey and a buzzard. Now, it may be possible to eat buzzard. I don’t know. But the bird’s absence from any menu that I’ve ever encountered makes me suspicious. I suspect the buzzard is a foul fowl, and that’s certainly the point of the story.

Once upon a time, a white man and a Red Indian went out hunting together. They killed a tasty turkey and a buzzard. So the white man said to his companion: ‘You take the buzzard and I’ll take the turkey, or, if you prefer, I can take the turkey and you can take the buzzard.’

To which the Red Indian replied: ‘You don’t talk turkey at all.’

This joke was immensely popular in nineteenth-century America. It was even quoted in Congress, though history doesn’t recall whether anybody laughed. But it was popular enough to spawn
two
phrases.

By 1919
talking turkey
had been altered somewhat: people had started inserting the adjective
cold
.
Talking cold turkey
is like talking turkey only more so. You were getting beyond the brass tacks and down to the barest of bare essentials. Talking cold turkey was the bluntest, directest form of speech.

And a couple of years later, in 1921, people started to use the phrase
cold turkey
to describe the bluntest, most direct method of giving up drugs.

So going cold turkey has nothing whatsoever to do with the miserable leftovers so sorrowfully consumed in the week after Christmas. Cold turkey isn’t a food at all, even though it sounds like one. It’s a blunt way of talking, and a blunt way of giving up drugs.

However, when you
give someone the
cold shoulder
, that is a food.

Insulting Foods

There are two sorts of guests: welcome and unwelcome. The host is not permitted to tell you which you are, though he may give you a clue.

If your host cooks you a nice hot dinner, you’re probably welcome. If he gives you yesterday’s leftovers – for example a
cold shoulder
of mutton – then he probably wishes you hadn’t come around.

It could have been worse, though – he could have made you eat
humble pie
. Humble pie is made using the
umbles
or innards of a deer. Here’s a recipe from Nathan Bailey’s
Dictionarium Domesticum
of 1736:

Boil the umbles of a deer until they are very tender, set them by till they are cold, and chop them as small as meat for minc’d pyes, and shred to them as much beef suet, six large apples and half a pound of currants, as much sugar; seasoning with salt, pepper, cloves and nutmegs, according to your palate; mix all well together, and when you put them into the paste, pour in half a pint of sack, the juice of one orange and two lemons, then close the pie, bake it, and serve it hot to table.

Of course, the umbles are the worst parts of the deer. After a hard day’s stag-hunting a rich man will dine on venison. Only his servants beneath the stairs would have to make do with umble (and therefore humble) pie.

Folk Etymology

The addition of the H to
umble
is an example of what’s known as folk etymology. Somebody who didn’t know what an
umble
was saw the words
umble pie
and got confused. Then they saw that umble pie was a humble dish, assumed that somebody had just missed off the H, and decided to put it back. Thus umble pie becomes humble pie. That’s folk etymology.

A
duckling
is a little duck and a
gosling
is a little goose and a
darling
is a little dear, and on the same principle a little fellow who stood at an important chap’s side used to be known as a
sideling
.

Then the origin of the word
sideling
was forgotten and in the seventeenth century people decided that it must be the participle of a verb, just as
leaping
and
sleeping
are participles of
leap
and
sleep
. There was only one problem with this theory: there didn’t seem to be a verb to fit the noun. So one was invented and from then on a
sideling
became somebody who
sidled
. These days there aren’t nearly as many lords and servant boys and so
sideling
itself has vanished. People still
sidle
around
and
sidle up
to each other, but they are able to do so only because of a mistake of folk etymology and the backformation of a new word.

Another common form of folk etymology happens when people alter the spelling of strange or unfamiliar words so that they appear to make more sense. For example, there’s a drowsy little rodent that the French therefore used to call a
dormeuse
, which meant
she who sleeps
. In English we call the same creature a
dormouse
. That’s despite the fact that it isn’t a mouse and has no particular affinity for doors. The reason is that the English had
field mice
and
town mice
and so they were, of course, going to look at the word
dormeuse
and conclude that someone just didn’t know how to spell.

The same principle applies to fairies, or rather to the disappearance of fairies. Once upon a time, belief in fairies was commonplace. They lived not at the bottom of the garden, but in the woods, where they would play all sorts of mysterious games. They would milk people’s cattle in the night, or hide in flowers and under trees, and generally do the sorts of things that would get you or me arrested. They were known as the Folks. When it was cold the Folks liked to wear gloves, which is why there is, or used to be, a flower called a
folks’ glove
.

But the fairies have all died (or maybe just got better at hiding) and people stopped referring to them as Folks many years ago, which is why the name
folks’ glove
became rather peculiar. Then some clever fellow decided that they weren’t
folks’ gloves
after all, they must be
foxgloves
because foxes have such dinky little feet, and the error set in. They are foxgloves now, and foxgloves they will remain, until somebody makes a better mistake.

By the same system, the old word
crevis
is now spelled and pronounced
crayfish
, even though it’s not very fishlike. The Spanish
cucaracha
became a
cockroach
, and most wonderfully of all, the Indian
mangus
became a
mongoose
, although there’s not a huge similarity between the furry, snake-devouring mammal and a goose.

An exception to these folk etymologies is the
butterfly
. Butterflies do have something to do with butter, although nobody is quite sure what. They like to flutter around milk pails and butter churns, which might explain it. Many butterflies are yellow, which would be a good reason for the name. But there’s another, more troubling possibility: butterflies, like the rest of us, are subject to the call of the lavatory, and butterfly poo is yellow, just like butter.

Now, you may ask yourself, what sort of person goes around peering at butterfly poo and then naming an insect after it? The answer, it would appear, is that Dutch people do that. Or at least, an old Dutch word for butterfly was
boterschijte
.

Of course, you may dismiss that last theory as poppycock, but if you do, please remember that
poppycock
comes from the Dutch
pappe-cack
, meaning
soft shit
.

Before the next link, can you guess what butterflies have to do with psychiatry and pasta?

Butterflies of the World

For some reason the languages of the world put more effort into the names of butterflies than those of any other creature. From Norway to Malaysia the words are extraordinary.

Malay doesn’t have plurals like ours. In English you simply add an S to the end of the word. But in Malay you form your plural by repeating the noun, so
tables
would become
table table
. It’s a system with some sort of logic to it. When there’s more than one word, that means there’s more than one thing.

It works out fine for the speaker of Malay, so long as the original singular noun wasn’t formed by reduplication itself, as is the case with their butterflies. The Malay for
butterfly
is
rama-rama
, so
butterflies
is
rama-rama rama-rama.
And it doesn’t stop there. The Malays also repeat verbs to intensify them, so
I really like
would be rendered as
I like like
, or
suka suka
. We occasionally do this in English, when somebody says, ‘I’ve got to,
got to
see that film’. All of which means that the Malay for
I love butterflies
is:

Saya suka suka rama-rama rama-rama

In Italian, butterflies are called
farfalle
and there’s a kind of butterfly-shaped pasta named after them that you can buy in most supermarkets. Outside Italy, though, most people don’t realise that it’s
butterfly pasta
, and in America they ignore the Italian name entirely and call
farfalle
bowties
, because a butterfly resembles a bow-tie, and in an emergency could probably serve as a substitute.

This is a point of dress not lost upon the Russians, who call a bow-tie a butterfly. And as a butterfly is, in Russian, a little lady, bowties, butterflies and girls are all called
babochkas
(like
babushkas
).

In the bleak Norwegian winter there are no butterflies at all, so when they emerge from their chrysalises in the bleak Norwegian summer they are called
summer-birds
,
or somerfogl
.