butterfly /’bʌtəˌflaɪ/

So I just got back from the movies. In an age of digital downloads, large screen TV’s, and on-demand video, I still prefer the big-screen cinematic experience. Sure, having a 60-inch LCD and a Panasonic surround sound DVD player is a great way to watch films at home, but even then, I tend to do that after seeing them at a local theater. It’s just that sitting in the fifth row and enveloped in sound lets me fall into the story rather than just be a viewer sitting on the couch.

This evening’s escape was The American with George Clooney and the stunningly attractive Violante Placido. Set in Italy, it tells the story of a hit man trying to quit his profession. Visually it’s engaging, and it runs as a slow pace, which is exactly want the movie needs.

Placido and Clooney

About 30 minutes or so into the narrative, there was a close-up shot of Clooney who, during a conversation, turns up the corner of his mouth in a rare, semi-smile. Just like Clint Eastwood in his earlier movies. It was at that point that I realized what I was actually watching: a Spaghetti Western. Just like the westerns of the 70’s, the film is set in Italy; instead of horses, there are cars; and Clooney plays Eastwood.

The giveaway was during a later scene in a bar where folks are watching Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. I was almost expecting Clooney to turn to the camera and give a little wink! He didn’t – of course – but it was enough to confirm my suspicions.

Spaghetti Western

Called simply Jack, Clooney has a tattoo on his back of a butterfly and Placido calls him affectionately Mr. Farfalle – the Italian for butterfly. If it had been set in France, presumably he would have been Monsieur Papillon.

The word butterfly first appears around 1000 AD in the works of Aelfric of Eynsham, where it’s written as the Old English buttorfleoge. The word fleoge referred at that time to any winged insect, which in turn derived from the hypothesized Old Teutonic *fleugan meaning “to fly.” The prefacing buttor referred to our modern meaning of butter – churned and creamed milk.

The jury is still out on why the butterfly has that name. One suggestion is that butterflies would fly through windows and land on pats of butter, which would seem reasonable if that was typical butterfly behavior. However, it isn’t. Think quickly: when was the last time you saw a butterfly sitting on butter? My guess for most folk is never.

A second – and to me a little more plausible, is that it refers to the buttery color of some butterflies. That has the advantage of at least having some truth even today. There are, of course, some non-butter colored examples, but there is a ring of possibility about it.

Butterfly

A third is based on a Dutch synonym, boterschijte – literally “butter shit,” which refers to the color of butterfly feces. I can’t say that I have spent any time checking this assertion out empirically, and I can also say with some certainty that I don’t intend to be checking out butterfly shit in the near or distant future. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating derivation and as such I would so like it to be true.

Shakespeare appears to have been the first to use it in a figurative sense as meaning:

A vain, gaudily attired person (e.g. a courtier who flutters about the court); a light-headed, inconstant person; a giddy trifler. (OED).

In his King Lear (1605), he writes;

So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news…

The motion of butterflies as they flit from place to place was the inspiration for another metaphorical use of the word in 1890, where an article in Chamber’s Journal said, “A ‘butterfly’ man rests for a moment to wipe his streaming brow, when the warder’s stern voice bids him proceed with his work.” This use refers to a person or persons whose periods of work or occupation of a place are transitory or seasonal. It appears that this use was also transitory and it is currently rarely used in this manner.

What is still commonly used since its first appearance in 1908 is to describe the fluttering feelings in the stomach caused by stress or tension. By 1944, this reference had become fairly common, as evidenced by an article in an edition of Word Study:

“The expression some aviators use to describe their condition before taking off. They have ‘butterfly stomach’, they say, so marked is the fluttering in the Department of the Interior.”

These days, it’s typically used as part of the phrase, “I have butterflies in my stomach,” with that body part being a common companion to butterfly itself.

It’s also interesting to follow the historical development of butterfly in that the Latin papilionis gave rise to the French papillon, retaining that intial “p” sound, whereas the Italian word became farfalle, with the “p” being substituted by an “f.” This is an example of a process that can happen in languages whereby a specific sound can become weaker and result in a change in how a word is pronounced. In this case, the harder voiceless plosive sound, /p/, loses its explosive quality to become a hissier fricative sound, /f/.

Similar examples can be seen with words like the Latin pedis becoming foot (/p/ to /f/); the Latin pater becoming father, and going back a little more, the Greel pyr became fire. These types of change fascinated the German collector of fairy tales, Jacob Grimm, who went on to realize that there was a general tendency for words to change in this way over time. This notion became knows as “Grimm’s Law.” Jakob also went on, along with his brother , Wilhelm, to establish one of the worlds’ definitive collections of fairy stories and legends.

Finally, a more recent use of butterfly metaphor is in the phrase, the butterfly effect. The specific use of this phrase is usually taken to have originated in 1972 when meteorologist Edward Lorenz presented a paper entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly‘s Wings in Brazil Set a Tornado in Texas? The notion is that small events can have very large consequences, and that there is an element of unpredictability built into the universe.

Oh, and The Butterfly Effect is also the name of a movie from 2004 starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart. Despite the fact that it’s Kutcher, the film is surprisingly good and well worth renting. Kutcher is also the most followed personality on Twitter. Who would have thought that one tweet could cause a storm of interest.

symbol /’sɪmbəl/

The recent kerfuffle regarding the non-burning of the Koran is an object lesson in the more depressing aspects of human nature. Ironically,  one of the very things that makes us human and distinct from animals that simultaneously makes us intolerant and aggressive. That’s the ability to use symbols.

A Koran

In modern usage, the OED defines a symbol as:

Something that stands for, represents, or denotes something else (not by exact resemblance, but by vague suggestion, or by some accidental or conventional relation); esp. a material object representing or taken to represent something immaterial or abstract, as a being, idea, quality, or condition.

Language is an example, par excellence, of symbolic behavior. When we use the word “dog” to stand for a four-legged animal that barks and wags its tail when happy, the word itself is just an arbitrary collection of sounds. There’s no inherent relationship between the word and the object it represents, which is why different languages can have different words for the same thing. Thus, the French have a “chien, ” the Spanish have a “perro,” the Turks have a “kopek,” and the Chinese have a “gau.”

Dogs

In a different example, very young children play with boxes and use them as cars, boats, houses, hats, and any other number of objects, simply because they can.  Little Frank can use a stick as a sword, an airplane, a wand, or a guitar; a chimp uses a stick as… well, a stick. Some folks might want to debate this on the basis that some studies seem to suggest that chimps demonstrate evidence of symbolic understanding, but it’s hardly overwhelming and of limited magnitude when compared to the almost limitless symbolism that rattles through the brain of homo sapiens.

As an extension of the ability to use objects symbolically is the tendency to create taboos – and more specifically, taboo objects. This is no more obvious than in religious mythology. For Christians, a small piece of bread – called a “host” –  can be magically transformed into the body of Jesus Christ. For Catholics, abuse of a consecrated host is viewed as being a mortal sin, which ranks as an 8 or 9 on the “Sin Scale” and can lead to the desecrator ending up spending the whole of eternity burning in the flames of Hell: All for messing with a piece of bread. In less enlightened times, offenders could be tortured and beheaded for host desecration – which is relatively mild when compared with eternal damnation.

John Martin, 1841, "Pandemonium"

And pity the poor pig, an animal that for no particular reason whatsoever is shunned by Jews and Muslims as being unclean. Not for them the guilty pleasure of a freshly made hot bacon sandwich with a dash of Worcestershire sauce.  Meanwhile, for Hindus, anything that comes from the humble cow is to be avoided. Other taboo foods include bats (non-kosher), cats (too cute), fungi (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness say they “excite passions”), rabbits (OK for Sunni Muslims, not for Shias), lettuce (according to one branch of Islam, the lettuce is evil), and humans.

The thing about taboos is that they carry with them an awful lot of emotional baggage. Not only do humans have the capacity to create symbols but they also imbue them with powerful feelings. Symbols are also, for the most part, culturally specific, and difficult to understand from an outside perspective. Although it’s easy to pass them off as “primitive” or “stupid,” even the “sophisticated” cultures have their quirks. Your average American would almost choke if you suggested putting cat or horse on the menu at the local bar, yet other countries have no taboo against it. After all, what’s the difference? Why should we be OK to eat pigs and sheep and cows but balk at horses?

And how about flag burning? Take a large piece of cotton, paint some stripes in red and white across it, and them dab some stars in the corner. Now set fire to it. It’s just painted cloth, right? But it was only four years ago that there was a vote on whether or not to criminalize the burning of the US flag. So how “civilized” or “sophisticated” is a country that wants to lock people up for setting fire to something akin to a bed-sheet? And next time you’re on a trip that involves flying to a hotel, try asking to sit in seat 13 or book a room on the 13th floor. There’s a good chance you’ll be unable to do either of them because even in the 21st century, the number 13 is taboo in many countries.

It’s really, really, really hard for people to see past symbols. Once a symbol takes on a taboo status, all reason goes out of the window and the emotions take over. Be it a piece of colored cloth, a collection of pieces of paper bound together, or a ham sandwich, someone, somewhere, is going to hold it in reverence and even be prepared to kill others to maintain that sacred state.

In fact, the word symbol was originally used strictly in a religious sense to refer to;

A formal authoritative statement or summary of the religious belief of the Christian church, or of a particular church or sect; a creed or confession of faith, spec. the Apostles’ Creed.

This use can be traced back to Saint Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage, who was born around 208 CE. He used the Latin word symbolum to refer to the baptismal creed. This was because accepting baptism was a mark that differentiated a Christian from a heathen, and the word symbolum means “mark.”

St. Cyprian of Carthage

In fact, it can traced further back to the Greek σύμβολος meaning “mark,” “ticket,” or “token.” This in turn comes from the prefix, sym-, which means “together” followed by bolos meaning “a throw.” So the underlying notion is of things thrown or put together, which can then be compared using a token. This evolved over the centuries to refer to a token (or symbol) that can be compared with another object (or sign).

In 1590, Spenser used the word in The Faery Queen in its current sense of a representation:

That, as a sacred Symbole, it [sc. a blood-stain] may dwell
In her sonnes flesh.

Shakespeare also used it in Othello in the sentence, “To renownce his Baptisme, All Seales, and Simbols of redeemed sin.”

Yet paralleling this was its continued use to refer to any object regarded as sacred, especially the bread and wine of the Christian eucharist as representing the body and blood of Christ:

After the prayer..the symbols become changed into the body and blood of Christ, after a sacramental, spiritual, and real manner. (John Evelyn, 1671, Letter to Father Patrick).

And from 1620, the word was already being used to refer to any “…written character or mark used to represent something; a letter, figure, or sign conventionally standing for some object, process, etc.” (OED). Certainly in the worlds of physics and mathematics, the prime meaning of symbol is as an element in an equation.

Bu the psychological reality of symbolism is so ingrained into ourselves that we forget it’s there. Part of the reason it’s so difficult to identify something as symbolic is that symbols can become transparent and, in a sense, disappear.  And when a symbol is also taboo, it is extremely hard to see past it, which in turn makes it almost impossible to diffuse the emotional component. Knowing and understanding that the “Old Glory” is in reality a bundle of colored threads doesn’t stop some people from feeling angry when it’s burning. And knowing that a Koran is just a bundle of printed pages doesn’t stop some people from going on a riot and killing people.

But cheer up! It is possible – with a little willpower and perception – to see through symbolism, and even ignore it altogether. Once, when asked about what his The Old Man and the Sea “meant,” Hemingway said;

There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit.

And Freud came out with the classic;

Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

Sometimes, a cigar...

dunce /’dʌns/

Way back in 1988, a relatively unknown professor of Physics became an international celebrity by writing a book that few people have actually read but many people cite as a “classic” of popular science writing. The professor was Stephen Hawking and the book was A Brief History of Time. Prior to the release of this best seller, Hawking had already made a name for himself in the world of Physics in the field of cosmology – the origin and development of the universe – and he had been awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1982. However, it was the Brief History that catapulted him to world-wide recognition.

Physicist Stephen Hawking

By the beginning of the 21st century, his fame became obvious: He began to appear on TV. His “acting” career includes guest roles – either as himself or a cartoon – in The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Family Guy, and many others. He also “sang” on Pink Floyd’s “Keep Talking” from their final album, The Division Bell.

Considered as a genius and successor to Einstein, Hawking has garnered a string (theory?) of academic awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

Hawking receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom

However, his latest book, released only a few days ago, has already caused him to lose the respect of a number of people throughout the world, and not because of his stand on theoretical physics but his attitude to God. Or lack of.

The Grand Design

You see, in his latest work, co-authored by Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking has suggested that as far as the creation of the universe is concerned, God isn’t necessary. The offending passage seems to be the following:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.  Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch-paper and set the universe going.

Suddenly, Hawking – to some – went from hero to zero faster than the universe is expanding. For years, it has been OK for Hawking to comment on the universe as a physicist but now he is treading on the toes of theologians, and that upsets them because scientist are not allowed to talk about religion. The theologians, however, feel quite at home to pretend to be physicists and denounce Hawking as being at best, “mistaken” or at worst, “an agent of Satan.” Neither of the arguments is backed up by any reference to alternative theories but that’s not something to bother theologians.

One blogger was more charitable when he said, “I do suspect that Dr. Hawking might actually be clever, since you probably don’t get to be Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (a seat formerly occupied by Sir Isaac Newton) by being a dunce.”

Now here’s an interesting word: dunce. In cultural imagery, it evokes a picture of some hapless child standing in the corner of a classroom wearing a tall, pointed hat with a “D” on it. Talk about The Scarlet Letter!

So where does the word comes from? It turns out to be an eponym, a word coined from the name of an actual person who lived in the Middle Ages.

John Duns Scotus was born in 1265 in the village of Duns close to the northern border with England. He went to study at Oxford University in 1288 and was ordained as a Franciscan monk in 1291. Unlike Hawking, Scotus was keen to find a place for God in the universe and wrote on Natural Theology- a branch of theology that seeks to prove the existence of God by rational and natural means, without resorting to revelation of faith. His proofs were similar to those of theologians who opt for the “First Cause” solution – that because all effects demand a cause, there had to be a first cause, and that first cause was God. it also ties into the other common notion that “something cannot come from nothing”; a premise many modern cosmologists eschew by saying that there is no such thing as “nothing” – there is only “something.

John Duns Scotus

Although he died in 1308, his influence and ideas continued into the 16th century, with his supporters initially being know as “Scotists” but eventually becoming “Dunsmen” or “Dunses.” In 1530, William Tindale wrote an article called An answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores dialoge in which he said;

Remember ye not how..the old barkyng curres, Dunces disciples & lyke draffe called Scotistes, the children of darkenesse, raged in euery pulpit agaynst Greke Latin and Hebrue.

These 16th century critics of Scotus accused the Dunses of being pedantic and unchangeable, seeking to stick rigidly to old ideas rather than listen to or accept new ideas. One of those critics, the Catholic writer Richard Stanyhurst, penned the following in 1577;

Duns, which tearme is so triuiall and common in all schools, that whoso surpasseth others either in cauilling sophistrie, or subtill philosophie, is forthwith nickenamed a Duns.

This pejorative meaning of the word dunce is the one that is used today, as the OED puts it, “One who shows no capacity for learning; a dull-witted, stupid person; a dullard, blockhead.”

During the 17th century, there was a brief flirtation with the use of dunce as a verb meaning “to puzzle, pose, prove to be a dunce” or “to make a dunce of.” However, after a first appearance in 1611, the last example offered by the OED is a mere 50 years later, after which it fell into obscurity. The Corpus of Contemporary American shows no examples of dunce as anything other than a noun – or as part of a noun phrase such as “dunce cap.”

Sometime between 1711 and 1726, the popular satirist Jonathan Swift came up with this epigraph;

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

The phrase provided the inspiration for the title of a novel by John Kennedy Toole called The Confederacy of Dunces, which was published in 1980, a full 11 years after the author had committed suicide, and has gone on to become a modern classic.

The Confederacy of Dunces

So what about the dunce‘s cap? Well, that makes an appearance in Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, first published in 1840, where he says, “And on a small shelf, the dunce‘s cap.” The use of a pointy cap is culturally very old, with the earliest being traced to the Bronze Age and as far back as 1400 BC. During the Inquisition, penitents would have to wear the capirote, a pointed hood that is used even today by Spanish Nazareno priests during Holy Week. In mythology, wizards and witches use pointed hats, as do dwarfs and gnomes. So the pointy hat for dunces could be from any of a number of sources.

Nazareno priest in capirotes

And the practice of sending a child to the “dunce‘s corner” continues even today. An article in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper on 5th January, 2010, describes how many schools are moving away from using this as a form of punishment. They say that, “health and safety chiefs have warned that the practice is cruel, describing it as a ‘stress position’ that could breach a child’s human rights.” The recommendation is that instead of damaging a child’s self esteem and humiliating him or her in public, an unruly child should instead be made “to explain to the class why he is interrupting the lesson.” Gosh, now there’s a deterrent to some 17-year-old knife-carrying thug.

Oh my self esteem!

Still, the fact that the dunce‘s corner is being discussed at all means it is still around, even though Dickens isn’t.

nightfly /’naɪtflaɪ/

Asking people about their favorite books, music, and movies is always a fun way to indulge in some amateur psychoanalysis, Freudian or otherwise. The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) used the concept when it started the show Desert Island Discs back in 1942. Its originator, Roy Plomley, hosted the show for 43 years until his death in 1985 at the age of 71. The concept was, and still is, that the guest had to choose eight pieces of music that they would want to have while cast away on a desert island.

Desert Island Discs

The show is still being broadcast by the BBC and is the second longest-running radio show in the world after Nashville’s Grand Old Opry, which has been on the air since 1925. As a sign of the times, Desert Island Discs is now available as a regular podcast, tipping its hat to the MP3 generation.

I’ve tried to identify my own eight but failed miserably. Not even eighteen. The best I’ve been able to do is come up with as a “Top Eight albums” – and even that changes with my mood. However, in that eight is usually Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly, his first solo offering distinct from his residency with Steely Dan. Released in 1982, Fagen described it as a collection of songs about;

“…certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build.”

Fagen has since used his personal visions in 1993’s Kamakiriad, and his 2006 offering, Morph the Cat. Not one to rush out new albums, the current turn out rate suggests he’ll release the next one around 2019 – pre-order now to avoid the download rush!

Donald Fagen, The Nightfly, 1982

What’s etymologically interesting is that the use of the word nightfly to describe the character in the album’s title song seems to be the first instance of being applied in such a fashion.

It’s first ever recorded use is in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2:

Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee
And hush’d with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lull’d with sound of sweetest melody?

Here the word has the literal meaning of, as the OED puts it, “a flying insect which is active at night.” Ultimately this comes in the first part from night, a tremendously old word that appears in many of the Germanic languages (c.f. Old Frisian/Middle Dutch/Middle Low German nacht, Old Saxon and Old High German naht, and Old Icelandic nátt.) Classical Latin gives us noct and nox (c.f. nocturnal meaning “at night), and Ancient Greek has nύξ meaning “night” and personified as Nyx, goddess of the night and mother of Thanatos (death) and Hypnos (sleep).

Ultimately, we can trace the word back to Sanskrit nak or nakt, and digging even further back, Shipley (1984) and Mallory and Adams (2006) suggest the Proto-Indo-European form, *nekut, meaning “dark,” “night,” or even “death,” and “die.”

In turn, fly comes from Old English fléoge, a winged insect, cognate with Middle Dutch vlieghe, Old High German flioga, and probably ultimately from the verb *fleugan, meaning “to fly.”

The word was transferred to the angling world in 1799 to refer to an artificial fly used in night fishing. The meaning remains to this day, as demonstrated in Auckland, NZ’s Sunday News, 23rd June, 1996; “Select night flies that are the shape of crayfish, cockabullies, smelt or any locally common surface food.”  [A cockabully is a small New Zealand fish, the word itself possibly coming from the Maori word, kokapuru, meaning “small fish.”]

The Ginger Pearl - A night fly

In Donald Fagen’s song, the word appears in the following context:

I’m Lester the Nightfly
Hello Baton Rouge
Won’t you turn your radio down
Respect the seven second delay we use.

The meaning here is closer to that of a night-flyer, which, according to the OED, refers to “a person who or animal (esp. a moth) which flies by night.” The word is first recorded in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, in the sentence;

I knew one fellow, that while I was a prisoner in Newgate, was one of those they called then Night-fliers,..who by connivance was admitted to go abroad every evening.

In this context, it refers specifically to a prisoner who was released each evening – which sounds something of a recipe for trouble – and in return for freedom would reveal the details of the activities of other criminals. An earlier stool pigeon?

With the invention of the airplane, pilots became night flyers: “What the night flyer needs… is the power to change his vision quickly from the illuminated cockpit and instrument panel to the outside world and back again.” Science, 10th March, 1939.

Horror writer, Stephen King, penned the short story, the Night Flier, a story that involves a man who flys a plane by night but also a vampire – another type of “night flier.”

Clearly Fagen uses the word – unhyphenated – metaphorically, as Lester is the DJ who works the night shift, playing Jazz and listening to calls from the sleepless, the lonely, and the disaffected.

And the album is on my top eight list. So go ahead, Dr. Freud, make of that what you will.

References
Mallory, J.P. and Adams, D.Q. (2006). The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press: New York.

Shipley, J.T. (1984). The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Words. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.

jaded /’dʒeɪˌdɪd/

Anyone who has taken to checking out this site on a regular basis will have noticed that I haven’t posted in three weeks. With my avowed aim of providing weekly content, that’s what might be termed an “epic fail.” Part of the reason is that I’ve been feeling particularly jaded lately. I know you don’t read The Word Guy to find out what’s happening in my personal life, nor is my personal life interesting enough to warrant any curiosity on your part, but my weekly word of choice is often influenced by my immediate circumstances – consciously and unconsciously.

Jaded: Female metal band

Freud, with whose writings I am passingly familiar, once wrote the following:

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. (Freud, 1905, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria)

This is the basis behind the popular notion of the Freudian Slip, those little verbal slips-of-the-tongue that tell the hearer more about the speaker than the speaker would want them to know. This notion of the subconscious influencing speech was used by Carl Jung as the basis of his technique of Word Association, where he would say a word and ask his patients to then say the first word that came into their heads.  Armed with his list and a stopwatch, Jung became the darling of Freud until their big fall out in 1912.

Freud and his slip

So in order to spare you the time trying to work out why I chose jaded for this week’s post, I decided to save you the time and come straight out with it: I chose jaded because I am jaded!

The word goes back to the 14th century and is defined by the OED as;

A contemptuous name for a horse; a horse of inferior breed, e.g. a cart- or draught-horse as opposed to a riding horse; a roadster, a hack; a sorry, ill-conditioned, wearied, or worn-out horse; a vicious, worthless, ill-tempered horse; rarely applied to a donkey.

It first appears in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, specifically the Nun’s Priest Prologue, where he writes, “Be blithe though thou ryde vp-on a Iade, What thogh thyn hors be bothe foule and lene.”

Tired, worn out old jade

Although the origin of the word is a little uncertain, it has been thought to be a version of the Scottish dialectal word yaud, a poetic word for “mare.” Old Norse has the word jalda that means the same, and so there does seem to be a link between the words.

By the 16th century, the word had taken on a negative meaning as a term of abuse for a woman, although it also appears to have been used in a more playful sense as in hussy, minx, or dame. In his Diaries, Samuel Pepys wrote, “Mrs. Pierce says she [Miss Davis] is a most homely jade as ever she saw (1668)” and in the Times newspaper of January 14th, 1883, “A procession of scamps and jades, who marched through Paris wearing in mockery vestments robbed from the churches.”

It’s use as a verb is first seen in Shakespeare’s 1606 Anthony and Cleopatra, Act III, Scene I:

I’ll humbly signify what in his name,
That magical word of war, we have effected;
How, with his banners and his well-paid ranks,
The ne’er-yet-beaten horse of Parthia
We have jaded out o’ the field.

The word is being used figuratively to describe the act of turning a horse into a jade by wearing it out and making it tired. In 1620, Bishop Robert Sanderson used it intransitively in one of his Sermons in the sentence, “As an horse that is good at hand, but naught at length, so is the Hypocrite; free and fiery for a spurt, but he jadeth and tyreth in a journey.”

Then, in 1623,  the -ed participle is used to create an adjective by Sir Charles Sidley in a critique of untalented poets and playwright when he said, “But when on spurs their Pegasus they force, their jaded Muse is distanced in the course.” From around the mid-17th century, the word took on the meaning of describing the feeling of being dull or sated by constant use or indulgence, as well as worn out and fatigued. The idea of jaded meaning weariness exists to this day.

Aerosmith gave the word star billing in their 2000 single, Jaded, the video for which was a showcase for actress Mila Kunis, who had already been playing Jackie Burkhart on the hit Fox TV comedy, That 70’s Show.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the word jade as applied to the ornamental stone has a different origin. It comes from the 16th century Spanish phrase piedra de ijada, which means “stone of the side” and canb e traced further back to the Latin ilia, meaning side, flank, or groin. The jade stone was reputed to cure ailments located in these regions.

triumph /’traɪəmf/

Given a choice between investigating a word’s origins and going for a ride on my motorcycle, the weighting is heavily determined by the weather. So while the sun shines down in NE Ohio and the temperatures stick around the 80’s, there’s little mystery as to why there’s been a delay in the weekly posting. This, of course, is the correct decision to make because life is’ after all, about experiences and not writing about experiences. As Nikos Kazantzakis says in his masterpiece, Zorba the Greek;

I felt once more how simple a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else. And all that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.

In the movie – a rare case of where a film actually does justice to a novel – you get to see how the English, bookish, academic character played by Alan Bates learns a valuable lesson from Zorba, played by Anthony Quinn, about what it means to be alive. Those of you who have neither read the book nor seen the movie are in for a treat when you finish reading this and rush out to buy them (or order them online – whichever is your preference.)

Zorba teaches Basil

My motorcycle is a Triumph Bonneville America, perhaps not an unusual choice for an English ex-pat, I suppose. It is, without doubt, one of the most stylish bikes on the planet – although I may be a little biased. I can guarantee that whenever I park up, someone is going to come over and talk to me and tell me how much they like it. I’d like to say it was a “chick magnet” but it’s more of a “geezer magnet,” so the typical discussion revolves around engines, torque, valves, and other items about which I have no clue. To paraphrase Star Trek‘s Leonard McCoy, “I’m a linguist, dammit, not an engineer.”

2003 Triumph Bonneville America

The word triumph is of Greek origin, θρίαμβος, and means a hymn to Dionysus sung in processions to his honor. Dionysos, who was to become Bacchus for the Romans, was the Greek god of wine, women, and song. Well, in the sense that he was in charge of wine, agriculture, fertility in nature, and the Greek stage.

Dionysus

The Romans took the notion of the “hymn of praise” to use the word as follows:

The entrance of a victorious commander with his army and spoils in solemn procession into Rome, permission for which was granted by the senate in honour of an important achievement in war.

The word appears to have slipped into the Latin via Etruscan, according to Liddell and Scott, authors of the definitive Greek-English Lexicon, first published in 1819.  From there it morphed into Old French triumpher, the Provençal triomfar, Spanish triunfar, Portuguese triumphar, and Italian trionfare. So all in all, quite a popular and useful word.

Triumphant entry: Spring by Alma-Tadema

There’s an early use of the word by King Aelfred in 893, but we can see it in Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite (1374)  where he says. “With his tryumphe and laurer corovned thus… Let I this noble prince Theseus Towarde Athenes in his wey ryding.” By the 16th century, it had slipped across the border from noun-hood to verbiness;

I tryumphe for a conquest or a victorye gotten… It was a marvaylouse syght to se the Romanynes tryumphe, whan they had the vyctorie of their ennemyes. (Palsgrave (1530), Lesclarcissement de la langue françoyse).

At around the same time, specifically in 1529, a priest named Hugh Latimer gave a controversial Christmas sermon on playing cards. Although this was a pastime sanctioned by the church at Christmastime, the Reformers were antagonistic, even though Latimer used the metaphor to teach a spiritual truth based on the triumph or trump card. In fact, he uses the words triumph and trump synonymously. Compare the following:

Heartes is trumpe. Cast thy tromp vnto them both, and gather them all three together.

And then;

Lette therefore euery Christian manne and woman playe at these cardes, that they maye haue and obteyne the triumph; you must marke also that the triumphe muste apply to fetche home vnto hym all the other cardes, whatsoeuer sute they bee of.

So the word trump, as used in cards, comes from the word triumph. Incidentally, the Sermon on the Cards may well be the original precursor of the popular Text Ritter country song from 1948, The Deck of Cards. This tells the story of a soldier arrested for playing cards but who talks his way out of the charge by saying that the deck is his bible, with the Ace representing God, the two the Old and New Testaments, the three Holy Trinity, and so on.

Deck of cards

Other noun variations are triumphator or triumpher – one who triumphs; triumphress – a woman who triumphs; triumphalism – the sense of pride after achieving a triumph; and triumphancy – the state of being triumphant. Although these are not likely to be tripping off the tongue on a regular basis, they do illustrate how the word has blossomed since its early days.

As well as sitting happily in the noun and verb camps, triumph‘s promiscuity extends to its sleeping with adjectives and adverbs. The popular triumphant can be traced back to the late 15th century, and it’s less frequently used analog, triumphal even further back to the beginning of that century. Triumphous pops up at around the same time, and by sticking the adjectival -ing on the end, triumphing appears as yet another option in the earlier 16th century, with poet William Dunbar offering “O hye trivmphing peradiss of joy (Poems, 1500-1520). Why, there’s even the existence of triumphable (capable of being triumphed over), but a quick Google search reveals a ghit score of 106, of which most are in sentence pairs where one ends in triumph and the next starts with able (“…triumph. Able…)

In terms of adverbs, you can do things triumphantly, or even triumphally, as evidenced in an article from the Miami Herald in 1984, where we read, “Mike Zeck returns triumphally as… the local kid who actually did break into the business.”

It’s heating up outside. The sun is still shining. My bike is waiting. Write no more.

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. D.H. Lawrence

shoat /ˈʃəʊt/

It’s been a cruel day and now it’s late in the evening and I’m taking the opportunity to relax with a bottle of Russell’s Reserve bourbon (created by the good folks at Wild Turkey) and a book of crosswords. I don’t profess to be a connoisseur of corn whiskey and freely admit to buying the stuff simply because I saw my name on the bottle as I cruised the liquor store. Shallow? Perhaps.

But frankly there are many “connoisseurs” out there whose level of sophistication and expertise is inversely proportional to their actual knowledge, and if there is a skill that many Americans are good at it’s called bullshitting. Wine snobs are particularly adept at this. Here, for example, is a snippet from a writer who refers to a piece of research done in 2001 with blind taste testing:

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The phrase “not a single one” is particularly damning considering that all 57 of the subjects considered themselves “experts.” The same goes for “management consultants” who charge enormous fees to tell people what they already know and to spout absolute claptrap using deceptive words and flowery phrases. For years, “guru” Stephen Covey told us that there were the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and built a very profitable empire on selling that to people. Yet then, in 2004, the business wunderkind reveals that there’s an eight habit he’s failed to mention previously. What a crock! I don’t recall his offering to refund folks for their being short changed by the spectacular omission of this critical eighth. Doubtless when the revenue from the eight habits starts to fall, an ninth will suddenly appear and the franchise will once again milk the teat of human credulity. As H.L. Mencken said, “No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

An 8th? Dude, you kept THAT quiet!

So being one of the “great masses” myself, I make no claim to any special skills at identifying and preferring specific bourbons. If it tastes good to me and the cork top comes off with a satisfying “plop,” then that’s all I need to be happy and any doyen or guru of the distilleries can go suck a corn cob.

Which leads me to the fact that as I sipped the Russell’s and worked on the crossword, one of the clues was, “A small pig.” Cruciverbalist that I am (Lover of crosswords, from Latin “crux”=cross and “verbum”=word), my first thought was piglet – a not unlikely choice. Except that it had five blanks. Hmm.

The amount of bourbon I had consumed at this point might have been an excuse for not knowing the answer, but as it turns out, I could have been as sober as a Puritan in a church on National “Drinker’s Go To Hell” day, and still not have remembered the word. Because I didn’t know it! By completing the “across” clues, the five-word “down” answer was revealed as shoat. Naturally, this sent me scurrying for the dictionary and another glass of Russell’s.

Rainbow trout - not shoat enough

The first recorded shoat appeared in a manuscript by Aelfric, the Abbott of Eynsham, written around 1000 CE, where it appears as scoetan and seems to refer to a fish resembling a trout found in Devon and Cornwall in England. A more definite reference to the fishy interpretation comes 600 years later in Richard Carew’s The survey of Cornwall (1602) where he says;

The Shote [is] in a maner peculiar to Deuon and Cornwall, in shape and colour he resembleth the Trowt: howbeit in bignesse and goodnesse, commeth farre behind him.

The best suggestion of the word’s origin is the  Old English scéotan, which means “to shoot around” as in movement – a characteristic of fish, and thus by extension to the sceota, or trout.

This is in contrast to the use of the word in 1413 to refer to a pig under one year old. The word seems to be from the same root as West Flemish, which uses schote, schoteling to refer to weaned pigs. Here was the origin of the crossword puzzle answer.

Shoats

By 1800, shoat had taken on a pejorative air to refer to someone who was estimated as being idle and worthless. In The Clockmaker: The sayings and doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville (1840), Thomas C. Haliburton made a pun when he wrote, “I am the poorest shot in the world. Poorest shote, said he, you mean, for you have no soul in you.”

More recently in 1969, the word shoat was used in Australia to describe the offspring of a sheep and a goat. According to a 1969 “letter to the editor,” writer D.F. Elder said, “Although it has not appeared in print, the radio and television news programmes have also been using the word ‘shoats.’” The New Scientist of 1977 reinforced this meaning; “Hundreds of people have claimed success in breeding shoats or geep.”

Both shoat and geep are portmanteau words – those made from taking two (possibly more) words and squashing them together to make a combine word. The word portmanteau itself derives from Middle French portmanteau < porter=to carry + manteau=mantle.

Currently, the word seems to be languishing in the “where are they now?” category, omitted totally from the ever-popular Eric Partridge’s Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, scoring a measly 8 in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and a pathetic one in the British National Corpus. This might explain why is has also never left its noun status and made a bid for verbiness.

It’s interesting that the Urban Dictionary includes another portmanteau derivation and meaning for shoat; in this case, the words shitty and coat to refer to a really awful coat – a shoat. This particular definition hasn’t made it into the OED but I suppose we can all start lobbying now.

Katherine Heigl wears a shoat

hyperbole /haiˈpɜbəli/

Just yesterday, I received a tweet with a link to an article about the culture of whales. No, that wasn’t a misspelling of “Wales” but a reference to those huge, blubbery mammals that produce exotic whoops and whistles in order to communicate with one another.  I say “communicate” because I’m not one of those linguists who believe that “talking” is the right way to describe what whales do.

"Do you think my hump looks fat?"

Bees are able to do quirky little dances in order to communicate – without the New Jersey fist-pumping element – but you’d have to be very flexible with your definitions to describe is as a conversation. The bees can transmit data about distance and direction but there’s no “Hey dude, did you hear about Ralph getting a guest spot on ‘Springer’ and stinging some trailer park chick in the ass?”

"So, back to your hive or mine?"

Of course, this doesn’t stop some people from wanting to claim that such communication activities are evidence of an underlying intelligence and consciousness that is close to being human. At the top of the wacko food chain are the self-proclaimed “Pet Psychics” who are not as dumb as the people who believe them, and who are smart enough to get paid by gullible pet owners for spouting total crap (“Fido tells me he is unhappy, and that switching to a premium doggy chow would enhance his self-esteem.”)

In the case of the whales, the story originally comes from a 2001 scholarly article (and for “scholarly” read “we got paid to do this from a grant”) that’s entitled Culture in whales and dolphins by Luke Rendell and Hal Whitehead[1]. The more recent revival of the story makes an appearance in the online publication, The Daily Galaxy, where the following gem of hyperbole appears when the author talks about how whale songs have changed:

Why did the song change? It’s not clear, but what is clear is that whales have a sophisticated culture. And who knows, it may be a culture that provides them with the tools to outlive that of homo sapiens. The fact that they took the opposite revolutionary route of human’s by going from land to sea 50 million years ago was a stroke of genius. After all, this the water planet.

“Sophisticated culture?” “Outlive homo sapiens?” “Stroke of genius?” As far as I can remember, it was Melville who wrote Moby Dick, and not Moby Dick who wrote “Melville.” And in the great list of the cultural contributions of whales, I suppose sucking krill is their most significant achievement. Apart from the egregiously erroneous notion that somehow the whales sat down and thought, “Gee guys, let’s not evolve legs and stick around in the water instead,” the paragraph practically defines the word hyperbole for us.

Here’s how the OED defines it:

A figure of speech consisting in exaggerated or extravagant statement, used to express strong feeling or produce a strong impression, and not intended to be understood literally.

Alas for some speakers – and writers – hyperbole IS intended to be understood literally.

The word comes from the Greek, ύπερβολή, meaning excess or exaggeration, and is made up from ύπέρ = over and βάλλειν = to throw. Sometimes an example of hyperbole seems more like it should mean “throw up” rather than “throw over.”

One of the earliest uses in English is by Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), a famous English figure who is recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic church. In his enthrallingly titled A dyaloge wherin he treatyd dyvers maters as of the veneration and worshyp of ymagys from 1529, he writes, “By a maner of speking which is among lerned men called yperbole, for the more vehement expressyng of a mater.” The spelling variation here probably a French influence.

Thomas More (1478-1535)

In 1653, another More decided to enhance the word by sticking an “-ism” suffix one. Henry More (1614-1687) was an English philosopher and born in Grantham, the same town as Britain’s first Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. He spent most of his life teaching at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and during that time wrote An antidote against atheisme, which included the comment, “Nor is there anything here of Hyperbolism or high-flown Language.”

Henry More (1614-1687)

As a verb, the word is rare.  Philosopher John Locke uses it as such in the comment “Your poor solitary verger who suffers here under the deep winter of frost and snow: I do not hyperbole in the case” (Letter to E. Masham, April 29th, 1698). But other than that, there appear to be no other instances readily available. It is more frequent (but maybe only just) when it appears as the form hyperbolize. It appears in a letter of 1599 in the sentence “Will you hyperbolize aboue S. Gregorie, who is contented to marshall the foure generall Councels?” and in the “-ing” form in 1619 in Martin Fotherby’s gripping Atheomastix; clearing foure truthes against atheists and infidels; “Atheomastix; clearing foure truthes against atheists and infidels.”

The Corpus of Contemporary American cites only three examples in recent history; one from Men’s Health magazine in 1996, one from a National Public Radio interview of 2004, and one from an academic article in 2005. So not exactly a form that trips of the tongue at cocktail parties.

Interestingly, as an adjective, you might expect it to be hyperbolic, but in this form, it means “Of, belonging to, or of the form or nature of a hyperbola.” The OED recognizes hyperbolical as meaning “Of the nature of, involving, or using hyperbole; exaggerated, extravagant.” The sense of the word is clearly important in determining the form of the adjective.

Meanwhile, the Welsh can take comfort in the observation that when I typed “the language and culture of whales” into the Google search engine, the top returned reference was to the Wikipedia page for Wales. Seems that the culture of the land and people is still infinitely more important than that of corpulent cetaceans. Or is that just hyperbole?

References

[1] , L. and Whitehead, H. 2001. Culture in whales and dolphins. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(2): 309-382 Abstract PDF.

palimpsest /’pælɪmpˌsɛst/

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an aging man in possession of a good intellect, must know that he gets more stupid by the year. The older one gets, the less one knows. There is so much I realize I don’t now that I seriously doubt any knowledge I think I do! This is regularly reinforced when I find that a word I thought I knew turns out to be totally wrong.

The Oxford University Press has a new blogger; Lauren Appelwick. In her inaugural blog, I asked her what her favorite three words are, to which she answered palimpsest, legit, and curdle. Now palimpsest is a word I know of, but not about. By that, I mean I sort of know that it’s a word, recall having heard it during my life,  but not know what it means.

But what made seeing the word particularly irritating was that I could have sworn blind that the word was actually *palimpset. Honestly. Ironically, I had to check the OED itself to confirm my error – an error that has clearly been in my head for decades.

Another example of how little I know and how inaccurate what I think I know may be.

Palimpsest derives from the Latin palimpsestus, which refers to a piece of paper or parchment that has been written on again. In a sense, palimpsests represent an ancient form of recycling, where old writing would be removed from a parchment and new script added. Either that or a precursor to the Magic Slate or Etch A Sketch®.

Codex Armenicus palimpsest

Incidentally (and what’s a Word Guy article without an “incidentally”) the Etch a Sketch was invented in the late 1950’s by a Frenchman called Andre Cassagnes, an electrician by trade but a toy designer at heart. He developed a toy that he modeled on the shape of a TV screen, which used two knobs to move a pointer across a glass screen covered in aluminum dust. He called it the Telecran, itself derived from télévision and écran, the French for screen. Cassagnes took the toy to the International Toy Fair in Germany in 1959 under the name of L’Ecran Magique, where the Ohio Art Company took a look at it and promptly said “non!” Fortunately for the Cassagnes, the “non” became a “oui” on a deuxième viewing, and in 1960, the Etch A Sketch burst forth onto American TV screens and became a huge hit.

Telecran

So thousands of years earlier, Hellenistic Greek had the word παλὶπφηστος meaning “scraped again,” which derived from Ancient Greek πὰλιν = again along with φηστός = to rub smooth. φηστός has the same Indo-European base as the Sanskrit bhas, which means “to crush, chew, or devour.”

In 1661, Robert Lovell mentions the palimpsest in his A compleat history of animals and minerals when he says, “The chalked skinne for a palimpsestus, serving in stead of a table book.” A full definition appeared in 1701 in Phillips’s New World of Words, Vol 6. as;

… a sort of Paper or Parchment, that was generally us’d for making the first draught of things, which might be wip’d out, and new wrote in the same Place.

It is also used to refer to brass plates that have been reused on the back

By the 19th century, the word had taken on extended meaning as “a thing likened to such a writing surface, esp. in having been reused or altered while still retaining traces of its earlier form; a multi-layered record.”

Palimpsest was used to described the brain (“What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?” – De Quincey, 1845); the soul (“Let who says ‘The soul’s a clean white paper’ rather say a palimpsest… defiled” – Browning, 1856); history (“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary” – Orwell, 1949); and even entire countries (“The absurdity and high emotion that characterises the palimpsest that is India” – The Times, 9 Mar., 1995).

At the beginning of the 20th century, the word was assimilated by the fields of physical geography and geology to specifically refer to structures that are characterized by superimposed features, produced at two or more distinct time periods. In 1914, an article by Taylor in the Geographic Journal contained the line “I explain the topography as follows (in accord with the ‘palimpsest’ theory)…”

The word can be used as an adjective to described things of a palimpsest nature, as evidenced by The Times in 2001:

They [sc. television reruns] are another manifestation of today’s palimpsest pop culture, in which everything is ripe for sampling and nothing stays dead.

By adding the “-ic” suffix, it’s possible to turn the adjective palimpsest to – the adjective palimpsestic! This is referred to as a pleonasm, the addition of a redundant morpheme or word. If I were pretentious, I might want to suggest that a pleonasm is a type of linguistic palimpsest: but I am not pretentious 😉

Hmm, it’s surprising that no-one at Rolling Stone has yet used the phrase “palimpsestic rap” or “palimpsestic dance remixes” – or maybe they have.

The word also exists as a verb, to palimpsest, but it sounds weird when you see it inflected in a sentence. For example, in Scribes and Scholars (1991), Reynolds and Wilson wrote “The toll of classical authors was very heavy: amongst those palimpsested we find Plautus and Terence, Cicero and Livy.” And in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) Pynchon wrote, “Down both the man’s cheeks runs a terrible rash, palimpsested over older pockmarks.”

It’s hardly a popular verb. The Corpus of Contemporary American doesn’t have an example of palimpsested, palimpsests, or palimpsesting. Nor does the British National Corpus. Here’s an opportunity for wordies to start promoting

So now I know enough about the word palimpsest to feel temporarily content that in the infinite universe of things I don’t know, there’s at least one more word that I can be reasonably confident about. Until someone makes a comment…

Catherynne M. Valente's "Palimpsest"

soccer /’sɒkə/

The much-anticipated – and some might say hyped – World Cup match between the US and England was always, from the English perspective, a “no-win” event. After all, in the grand scheme of things, England’s winning would be seen as expected. Anything other than a win would be viewed from the American perspective as a win, where win is defined as “not losing to the Brits.” So when the match ended up as a 1-1 draw, there was the inevitable wailing and gnashing of teeth in pubs across the “green and pleasant land,” while US commentators had a hard time avoiding smugness – and by “holding back” I mean “not holding back.”

US vs. England 2010

The special relationship between the US and the UK has always been less of the English “Greeks” to the American “Romans” but independent child to rapidly aging parents. Every year on the 4th of July my American colleagues feel it necessary to remind me how they “whooped British asses” and created a better nation, while I feel obliged to remind them that many of those actually fighting for independence were British and that a significant number of folks living in the UK were also for US independence. There has always been something of an anti-English element in America, which is being sorely tested at this moment in time with the devastating oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the culprit of which being BP – British Petroleum. Never mind that BP is an international company, with a sizable number of American investors, American employees, American managers, and American business relationships. As of 2009,  40 per cent of BP’s shares were owned in Britain, with a comparable 39 per cent owned in the US. It also has six British directors and six American, and employs 22,000 Americans against only 10,000 Britons.[1]

BP: Bringing Pain - Burning Petroleum

Nope, the big thing here is that the word British is right up there, allowing for the upsurge of latent anti-English feelings to resurface. The truth is that is doesn’t matter if the oil company responsible is British, American, Saudi Arabian, or Elvish; oil is spewing out into the sea and the Blame Game can wait until after a solution has been found.

So what better time to take on the Old Country via through the international medium of soccer -or as the rest of the world calls it, football. It’s also an opportunity to whip out the cudgels to fight on that other Anglo-American battleground – the English Language. Hardly a day goes by in the world without someone in the UK bemoaning the devastating effect those ugly Americanisms are having on the purity of English, while/whilst the US literati (an oxymoron for some little Englanders) use the same argument to promote the vitality and vivacity of the New Linguistic World order, with American English now being seen as the true heir to the language, with the fuddy-duddy whinging poms being stuck in a time warp, never having been able to get over the loss of the Empire.

It’s this on-going rivalry that fuels the squabbling over the word soccer, used primarily by Americans to describe a game played by the rest of the world in a different manner to their own game called football. But is the US predilection to use soccer in opposition to everyone else just another show of imperialism or a historical linguistic expedient? To understand this, we first have to forget the word soccer and go back to football.

Typical English Football Team

The ancient Greeks were not averse to a spot of knocking a ball around as a form of exercise and entertainment. The game, ἐπίσκυρος, was first mentioned in the writings of Antiphanes, and involved two teams of 12 players with a ball. The word ἐπίσκυρος is itself a variation on ἐπίκοινος, which Liddell and Scott translate as “common to many,” i.e. the ball is common to all the players.

Socrates Centre Forward

In the 2nd century AD, the writer Pollux described the game as follows:

This is played by teams of equal numbers standing opposite one another. They mark out a line between them with stone chips; this is the skuros on which the ball is placed. They then mark out two lines, one behind each team. The team which secures possession of the ball throws it over their opponents who then try to get hold of the ball and throw it back, until one side pushes the other over the line behind them. The game might be called a Ball Battle.

The Romans played a ball game called harpastum, the word being a romanization of the Greek ἁρπαστόν, from the word ἁρπάζω, which means “to grab,” which suggests some handling of the ball was expected.

The specific word football kicked off in English way back in 1424 when it appeared in a legal document issued by King James I of Scotland – not to be confused with King James I of Cleveland, OH, who also goes under the name of basketball player LeBron James. The act itself appears to have come about because too many wastrels were spending time playing the game instead of doing things the King felt more productive, so the edict was issued that “the King forbids that any man play at the ‘fut bal’ under payne of fines.” King Edward II also issued a ban, this time under “pain of imprisonment” – clearer he felt a little more strongly about it.

As might be expected with such an old game, over time, many variations on a theme began to appear, giving rise to different types of football. Thus is became necessary to distinguish the various forms by using some type of adjective to mark the specific set of rules being used. In England, for example, a particular version was developed and played at a school in the town of Rugby (thought to derive from Anglo-Saxon hruch burh = rook’s fortress, with rook referring either to the bird or a person’s name) and thus being designated Rugby football. In Ireland, they play Gaelic football, which is, in turn different from Australian rules football.

Rugby School. Warwickshire

In 1863, the newly formed Football Association (or FA) codified a set of rules that became the standard for Association Football, which involved the kicking of a round ball with only a goal-keeper being allowed to physically handle the ball. At around the same time, colleges in the US were playing a form of football that was more similar to Rugby football, where holding an oval-shaped ball and running with it was the main activity. This was referred to as collegiate football, the precursor the the run-of-the-century professional or grid-iron football.

Typical American Football Team

Now here’s where it gets interesting. In the UK, the phrase “association football” followed the path of simplification by shortening the adjective to soccer, similar to the way in which rugby football had become rugger. In 1889, the English poet and writer Ernest Dowson’s Letters was published, in which he wrote, “I absolutely decline to see socca’ matches.” The misspelling may, in fact, be due to the word not actually having a standard form at that point.

Dowson, as an aside, was one of those tragic figures who had a short life and dead at the age of 32 due to chronic alcoholism. When he was 23, he fell in love with an 11-year-old, Adelaide Foltinowicz, the daughter of a Polish restaurateur. Although nothing came of this infatuation, her marriage in 1897 to one of her father’s waiters became the third element of a tragic trifecta that included the suicide of his father by an overdose of chloral hydrate in 1894, and the suicide of his mother by hanging in 1895. Dowson left for France saying, “I have no lungs left to speak of, an apology for a liver, and a broken heart.” Thus began his slow decline into alcoholism and death back in England in 1900.

Ernest Dowson 1867-1900

In the US, the adjective was dropped rather than shortened and references to collegiate or grid-iron football simply fell back to football alone. An article in the New York Herald of November 1881 said that, “A splendid game of football was played yesterday at the Polo Grounds between… Harvard and Princeton.”

But now for the flip-flop.

The English-originated word soccer was primarily used by the then upper classes, when public school chappies would play rugger, soccer, and cricket, and export them across the empire where the natives would learn to play them and ultimately beat the English in all of them! But the working classes of the 19th and 20th century still played common or garden football, a much more logical name for a game that involved kicking a ball with your foot. So gradually, the popular word for the game in England became football and not soccer.

Meanwhile, on the ranch, the official body for the game of soccer as played in the UK was created in 1913 as the United States of America Foot Ball Association, and became one of the early members of the international body that overseas the World Cup, FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). It wasn’t until 1945 that it became the United States Soccer Football Association (and notice how the word association is used along with the word derived from association in the first place!) Then, the flip ultimately flopped in 1974 as the word football was dropped altogether to leave the United States Soccer Federation. With football now firmly associated with American football, using soccer served to make the distinction between the two ball games.

Which brings us back to June 2010, with the Americans using the British English word soccer to refer to… well… soccer! Rather than being some sort of snub to the sons and daughters of Mad King George, it seems that the heirs to the Revolution are preserving a word coined by the 19th century’s Empire Builders.  It turns out, therefore, that perhaps in certain respects, the Americans are actually preserving the English language.

Bet we don’t see a letter to the UK’s Daily Telegraph about THAT analysis!

[1] Source: UK Times newspaper article, June 10, 2010: Boris Johnson attacks America’s ‘anti-British’ rhetoric on BP.

Postscript: Germany vs. Greece