Etymology

When Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’, I was willing to believe that the word gloomster existed. Well, it does now. English abounds in elements like the suffix ster by which new words may be generated. We know without thinking about it that words ending in ster are slightly derogatory. A rhymer is romantic, and a rhymester vulgar. Originally all sters were feminine. Before the Conquest, a seamestre was a sempstress and a bæcestre a baker. Among the Anglo-Saxons, it seems those trades were followed only by women. Of medieval coinages for trade-pursuits, only spinster survives as solely feminine in application, although its meaning has changed

‘I’m a learned doctor,’ cried my husband, pulling at the hems of his tweed coat and doing a little jig. He’d heard that Jacob Rees-Mogg had directed his office to use Esq of all non-titled males. There’s something of the Charles Pooter about Esquire. Its last redoubt had been envelopes from the Inland Revenue. Since it became HM Revenue & Customs, honorifics have melted away. Americans use Esquire principally of attorneys, who do creep into British notions of those reckoned by courtesy gentlemen, and hence called Esquire. Deploying Esquire is a question of U and non-U language; the higher snobbism currently favours its disuse. But when Shakespeare and his father

How might an oath lend its name in England to a religious extremist and in Spain to a moustache? That has been the claim for the German bei Gott as the origin of English bigot and Spanish bigote. In his Gatherings from Spain (1846), the great English traveller Richard Ford did not doubt the origin of bigote, ‘moustache’. ‘The free-riding followers of Charles V, who wore these tremendous appendages of manhood,’ he explains, ‘swore like troopers.’ The Spanish connected their oath bei Gott with their moustaches, and named the one thing from the other. Did not the French in the Peninsular War, he observes, call the English soldiers Goddams? The

‘Ha, ha,’ said my husband, as though he’d made a joke. ‘Here’s one for you.’ He waved a page of the Guardian. A piece by Afua Hirsch about Archie Mountbatten-Windsor called him ‘a child who will have to navigate for themselves the madness of all the ways in which we have been taught to essentialise and fetishise race’. The plural pronoun as a gender-neutral device, ‘navigate for themselves’, makes Mountbatten-Windsor sound more like a firm of solicitors than a single baby. But what I want to focus on is essentialise. When Justin Webb asked Rachel Shabi on Today last week whether it was fair to call her a Jewish supporter

I agree with James Joyce on the spelling ballocks. The Liberal Democrats made their MEPs wear T-shirts printed with ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ to the European parliament. But ballocks are to balls what hillocks are to hills. An old word, it appears in a manuscript glossary from the early 10th century. To spell it bollocks is like spelling bastard as bastid, to which many walls bear witness. It appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1885 under ballock, as it still does in Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang. The OED notes, unsmilingly, that the spelling bollock ‘shows rounding’. Also without a smile, it remarks that it is found ‘usually in the

Two rules of grammar are certain: never split an infinitive and never end a sentence with a preposition. As for the origins of words, it is universally known that the origin of posh is from ships’ tickets to and from India stamped ‘Port Out, Starboard Home’. None of this triad of certainties is true. Let me touch upon posh, about which I wrote here in 2002. Since then, the admirable philologist Michael Quinion has published a book called Port Out, Starboard Home, a title emblematic of popular etymology. He doesn’t think that this was the origin of posh, of course. No one has ever found such a ticket or any reference

In Casablanca, Mr and Mrs Leuchtag resolve to speak English to each other in preparation for emigration to America. Mr Leuchtag asks: ‘Liebchen — sweetness heart, what watch?’ Mrs Leuchtag: ‘Ten watch.’ Mr Leuchtag: ‘Such much?’ The head waiter, Carl (played by S.Z. Sakall) comments: ‘Hmm. You will get along beautiful in America.’ A development in the use of watch, as a verb, has emerged recently. ‘Harry Kane was forced to watch on as Spurs scraped through,’ reported the Sun, and the Guardian wrote of Amish women playing volleyball ‘as their husbands watch on and cheer’. To me, it should either be look on or simply watch. I can’t find that

Doggy sounds childish. ‘How much is that doggie in the window?’ asks the popular song. (The song title used the spelling doggie, being American, though Britain enjoyed a cover version by Lita Roza in 1953, the same year as Patti Page’s original.). Doggo sounds cooler (like daddy-o in hep talk), but in the strange world of internet image-sharing it goes with a sentimentality which would shame the nursery. The internet has said ‘Aaah’ (or in America ‘Aaaw’) to cute cats, but people post pictures a-plenty of cute dogs. One Twitter account, WeRateDogs, has 8.13 million followers and simply tweets photos of dogs with a caption and a rating out of

‘How many words will you use today, first used by Thomas Browne in the 17th century?’ asked a trailer on Twitter for Radio 4’s In Our Time. A tweeter called Adam B replied that, of the examples given, ambidextrous, carnivorous and medical could all be found before Browne. He added: ‘I love Browne, will be listening.’ So do I, and I enjoyed the programme. But I agree that it is no use looking in the Oxford English Dictionary and concluding that words first cited from any author were coined by him. In the dictionary, 4,156 quotations are taken from Browne, 60 per cent from Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), his longest book

My husband has been growling: ‘You cross-legged hartichoak.’ He tries it on obstructive pedestrians hypnotised by their mobile phones. He thus hopes, optimistically, to utter insults while avoiding any ism that could get him into trouble. This imprecation hartichoak he took from the mouth of Young Tom Strowd, a Norfolk man, in The Blind-Beggar of Bednal Green, a play from 1600 by John Day (a Norfolk man) and Henry Chettle (in and out of debtors’ prison). The artichoke jokes went down so well that two sequels were performed, though their text, sadly or not, does not survive. Artichoke displays a modest degree of folk etymology. It came into English in

After he invented the term young fogey (in The Spectator in 1984), the much lamented journalist Alan Watkins coined the term men in suits. Of course other people before him had used the phrases young fogey and men in suits as nonce formations. Watkins identified both as what has since been denominated ‘a thing’. By his own account, even before Margaret Thatcher had been dislodged by them in 1990, the men in suits (identified as a group by the definite article) had been transformed into the men in grey suits. This, he observed, was inaccurate: ‘The typical Conservative grandee tends to wear a dark blue or black suit, with chalk-

‘Is it like a packet of fags?’ asked my husband, less annoyingly than usual, but still in some confusion. I had been telling him why a book was like a sarcophagus, which I admit has the ring of a Victorian riddle. It has long been accepted that book shares the same derivation as beech. I used to be reminded of that by Beech’s bookshop in Salisbury, now no more. After all, the Latin liber, ‘book’, came from a word for a tree’s inner bark, just as codex (earlier caudex), ‘wooden tablet’ or ‘book’ in Latin, came from a word for ‘tree trunk’. People made letters or runes on wood or

A pleasant menagerie of words grazes in the field of architectural mouldings (the projecting or incised bands that serve useful and aesthetic purposes): gadroon, astragal, larmier and rabbet, but none is chunkier or more mysterious than bolection. Bolection mouldings cover joints, especially between surfaces of different levels, such as round the panels of a door. Such three-dimensional things are hard to describe clearly in words. No one knows the origin of bolection and even its proper form is uncertain: balection, belection, bilection, bolexion. It sounds like the Liberal Democrat attitude to Brexit. Gadroon derives from the name of a round convex fold sewn into a piece of textile, found as

‘No darling,’ I said, ‘nothing to do with mushrooms.’ My husband had responded to my exclaiming ‘What does she think that means?’ on hearing Theresa May use the word fungible. This rare word now crops up in discussion of Brexit, perhaps caught from lawyers and business types. They seem to think it means ‘porous, malleable, flexible, convertible’. Dominic Grieve told the Commons last month that he’d prefer ‘a longer and fungible extension’ to the Article 50 process. Stephen Doughty spoke of a ‘flextension, fungible extension or whatever’. Jo Johnson said on another day that he wanted train tickets to be ‘fungible between operators’. Claire Perry assured the House that ‘scientists

Some birds seem inherently comical. I can’t help being amused by the duck taking its name from its habit of ducking. In English it has enjoyed this name for some time — a thousand years or so. Before that it was called ened, a word related to the Latin anas, anatem. Similarly, the swift is so called because it is swift. That name seems to go back fewer than 400 years, and I’m not sure what it was called before that. Swallow, perhaps, since it has something in common with it. But there are some false friends among the feathered tribes. The lapwing was itself friendless last week, when Natural

Someone on The Kitchen Cabinet remarked that sambusa, as samosa is known in Somalia, came from Arabic. Perhaps it does, for the Hindi samosa, which we have borrowed for the fried triangles, comes from Persian sambose. Loan words weave in and out of the routes of trade and cultural conquest between the Near East and the East Indies. Far more mysterious is haggis. Before the 18th century, this dish was not regarded as particularly Scottish. Thomas Hobbes did not think it ridiculous to use it in a translation of the Odyssey: ‘Antinous a haggas brought, fill’d up / With fat and blood’, to be enjoyed with bread and wine. But

In 1663, just before Samuel Pepys visited the stables of the elegant Thomas Povey, where he found the walls were covered with Dutch tiles, like his own fireplaces, he was worrying about Navy pay. People who were owed money by the Navy had to apply for it at a goldsmith’s shop, where they would have to forgo 15 or 20 per cent to secure it. Pepys called this ‘a most horrid shame’. Pepys also used the phrase horrid shame about a case of mistreatment of a watchman by the Lord Chief Justice, and of the King climbing over the garden wall of Somerset House to visit the Duchess of Richmond. It was what

My husband sat in his usual chair, interrogating the contents of his whisky glass with his old, tired nose. In 20 years’ time that sentence may seem normal. To me it seems at best whimsical, perhaps arch. There’s a lot of interrogating at the moment, quite apart from the traditional kind by unpleasant policemen. Jay Rayner, in the Observer, said that he saw some people in a restaurant interrogate their plates. In the Guardian someone suggested we should ‘interrogate the things that make us want to drink too much’. In the Guardian again someone else declared: ‘It’s important to challenge and interrogate sexist beauty ideals, of course.’ Of course. These examples