The South American History of Demerara

Hello,

This week’s word history is a sweet one – demerara. The word joined English in 1848 but it’s come all the way from South America. It describes “a coarse light-brown raw sugar” (Merriam Webster) and is a regular item in my baking cupboard and recipes.

Demerara is a toponym becuase it’s named for a river and historical region on the north coast of South America, an area which is now part of the country of Guyana. It was colonised by the Dutch West India Company in the 1600s for trading purposes but by the 1700s the area was known for large scale sugar plantations. By 1762 a third of the plantations were owned by the British. Control of the area moved between the Dutch, British, French, and British again in the years thereafter.

The plantations were worked by slaves of African origin in dreadful conditions which led to a large scale revolt in 1823, suppression by troops, and eventual abolition of slavery in Britain’s colonies in 1833. Guyana gained its independence from British rule in 1966. They still produce demerara and rice. The discovery of oil off their coast in 2019 has helped their economy grow in recent years.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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The Colourful History of Bellini and Carpaccio

Hello,

Between editing “Words Christmas Gave Us” (my next Wordfoolery book, releasing in 2024) this month, I’ve been working on my downloads for readers. Did you know I have a downloads page with free articles? I’ve created some wonderful ones for the Christmas release (not yet available, sorry) and I’ve started work on “Words People and Places Gave Us” for the same page. It will contain all the eponyms and toponyms I’ve stumbled across since publishing “How to Get Your Name in the Dictionary”, a sequel of sorts. As these downloads go live, I’ll mention it here.

One of those eponyms was the bellini. It’s a word Venice gave us. Sometimes we can forget that Venice was a hugely influential city state, but its influence remains in the English language. We have all of these words thanks to Venice – gondola, regatta, quarantine, zany, bellini, and carpaccio. I’d make a case for casanova too.

The bellini cocktail was invented in the 1930s or 1940s by Giuseppe Cipriani, the founder of Harry’s Bar in Venice. The drink mixes puréed white peaches and the Italian sparkling wine called prosecco, sometimes with a dash of raspberry or cherry juice to enhance the colour. Initially this was a seasonal tipple as white peaches are only in season from midsummer to early autumn, but now the peach purée is more widely available.

Cipriani named the drink the bellini because its unique pink colour reminded him of the toga of a saint in a painting by the 15th-century Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini. Its variants are also eponymous. If you replace the peach with mandarin you get a puccini (Italian composer), a rossini (Italian composer) uses strawberry purée and a tintoretto (Venetian painter) deploys pomegranate juice.

Cipriani was an inventive chap. He also created carpaccio, the raw beef dish, which is named for Vittore Carpaccio, the Venetian painter known for the red and white tones in his work.

Now all I have to do is come up with an excuse to sample a bellini in Venice.

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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Guinness – a Word Dublin Gave to the Dictionary

Hello,

As a word geek from Dublin I always have one eye looking for words the Irish gave to the dictionary. There aren’t as many as you’d think, although I managed to create a chapter of some in my first book “How To Get Your Name in the Dictionary” featuring boycott, the Beaufort scale, burke, garryowen, Ireland, hooligan, limerick, murphy’s law, and the wellington boot.

One which featured there was Guinness but since publication I’ve gathered a few more facts about this word and so here’s an expanded history of perhaps Dublin’s most famous export (apologies to U2).

Guinness is an Irish dry stout named for its first brewer, Arthur Guinness (1725-1803). Arthur established his brewery at St. James’ Gate, Dublin in 1759, signing a 9,000 year lease at £45 per year. His signature is still copied onto every bottle of Guinness sold.

Ten years later Arthur shipped his first casks of stout and the now Diageo-owned brewery is one of the largest worldwide. The brewery tour is always a popular stop on tourist itineraries.

The brewery took the Irish harp as its logo in 1876. It is based on the antique Brian Boru harp which is now in the Trinity College Dublin library, along with the famous Book of Kells. In the Guinness emblem the harp’s curved edge is to the right. When the Irish state was founded and they wanted to use the harp emblem on our coinage (where it remains to this day), the harp had to curve to the left instead because Guinness had the prior claim.

Arthur and his wife Olivia had 21 children, of whom ten survived to adulthood. Their descendants include missionaries, “It girls”, and politicians. During the 1798 United Irishman rebellion in Ireland, Arthur was accused of spying for the British. His nickname in Dublin is Uncle Arthur.

The Guinness family, thanks to stout sales, didn’t lack funds and were famously generous employers. Their many country estates around Ireland have, in some cases, returned to state ownership over time. Examples include Iveagh Gardens, St. Anne’s Park (where I explored as a child and teen), Luggala estate (now part of Wicklow Mountains National Park), and Ashford Castle hotel (not owned by the state!).

“The Guinness Book of World Records” is published annually, since 1955, to list the many and often strange records established worldwide. It began as an idea by Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of the Guinness Brewery to resolve disputes over trivia questions amongst bar patrons. He’d encountered a debate over which was the fastest game bird in Europe during a shooting party and it gave him the notion of the reference book which is still published today and has inspired countless record-breaking efforts around the world.

According to “Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable” the favourite drink of Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), the Iron Chancellor, was a Black Velvet which is equal parts champagne and Guinness. Perhaps it helped him achieve German unification?

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. Want more Wordfoolery? Subscribe to the monthly newsletter “Wordfoolery Whispers”. Don’t forget to click on the confirmation email, which might hide in your spam folder.

Eponyms – Names as Words

Hello,

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time a little girl was given a dictionary among her school books. Over the coming years she used that dictionary until it looked very shabby but it helped her to develop a love for reading and words which persists to this day. She was regularly accused of having “eaten the dictionary” by her classmates.

When, in 2009, she started a blog as a fun writing experiment, she decided on the history of unusual words as her topic. With time two themes emerged – nautical words and eponyms (dictionary words which originated as people’s names) and the idea of a book grew.

The first Wordfoolery book, “How To Get Your Name in the Dictionary”, arrived in 2018 and tells the stories of 260 soldiers, inventors, style icons, and villains who gave their names to the English language. From atlas to zeppelin English is full of words named for Greek gods, heroes and heroines, explorers, scientists, and chefs throughout world history.

The chapters cover food, Irish history, calendars, hats, inventions, words named after places, Greek gods, military history, politics, astronomy, fashion, popular phrases, villains, science, and more but what each story has in common is that the person’s life was extraordinary. You don’t get into the dictionary by being dull.

Some other eponyms which have featured on the blog include – guillotine, braille, celsius, rugby, curie, martinet, dumdum, magenta, cardigan, bowler hat, ferris wheel. They were all people (or places) and their lives were fascinating – women who defied convention to make great strides, inventors trying to make the world a better place, soldiers in grave danger. Read the book and you’ll think of them when you use their words.

One of my favourite rascals from the book is Casanova. Here’s his story from the book (note copyright Grace Tierney 2018) –

A casanova is a womaniser noted for his romantic adventures, typically with many partners. The term comes from Italian adventurer and author Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (1725-1798) whose biography reads like a work of fiction.

He was born in Venice, the son of an actor and actress. He was expelled at the age of 16 from a seminary for monks for his immoral behaviour and later, something of a dandy already, studied at the University of Padua and graduated with a degree in law. He took “minor orders” to become a monk while still a student and an inveterate gambler.

His first patron, an elderly Venetian senator, taught him about food, wine, and how to behave in society but drove him out when he discovered Casanova had already seduced the actress he had his eye on.

His second patron, a cardinal, set him to writing love letters on his behalf and introduced him to the Pope before dismissing him for scandal.

He joined the army but by the age of 21 he had abandoned that career for professional gambling and then work as a violinist. This didn’t last long. He saved the life of a nobleman, thus acquiring his third patron until a prank of his involving a fresh corpse went badly wrong and he had to flee the city.

He want on to live in many European cities, making and losing friends and money along the way. He worked as a preacher, philosopher, diplomat, gambler, spy, violinist, and broke hearts everywhere. He wrote plays and other works including science fiction. He met many of the celebrities of the day – Catherine the Great, King George III of England, Benjamin Franklin, Madame de Pompadour, Rousseau, Mozart, Voltaire, and Goethe.

His romantic dalliances were like the plot of an opera. He once escaped prison in the Doge’s palace by digging his way out of the roof with a priest, climbing down a bed sheet rope, and convincing a guard they’d been locked in by mistake at the end of a function.

He finally settled down in his fifties as a librarian to Count von Waldstein in Bohemia and wrote his twelve volume memoirs which were published 1826-1838.

{end of extract}

If you enjoy stories like these then pick up a copy of “How To Get Your Name in the Dictionary” by Grace Tierney in paperback or ebook from Amazon, or the many other stockists. All the places to buy it are listed on this page.

I’ll be talking about one of my books every day this week, so stay tuned for “Words the Sea Gave Us” tomorrow.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. Want more Wordfoolery? Subscribe to the monthly newsletter “Wordfoolery Whispers”. Issue Three is due in mid-December. Don’t forget to click on the confirmation email.

p.p.s. I won NaNoWriMo 2023! My fifteenth win in a row with 60,129 words of “The Librarian’s Secret Diary” – my serialised story for Channillo, the reading platform.

Why Draconian Means Strict

Hello,

Despite writing about the history of words for 15 years, I still fall into the trap of assuming roots for words based purely on similarity of spelling. An example is this week’s word – draconian. I was convinced it was related to dragons. There is a tiny link, but no, we don’t get it from dragons.

This is Bashful the Dragon. He’s very gentle, hardly ever starts fires, and love pearls.

Draconian is used to describe rules, or laws, which are particularly harsh and we have the ancient Greeks to thank for this one. The Draconian Code was a set of laws created by Draco, an Athenian of the 7th century B.C. and they were noted for their severity. In a time when punishment didn’t exactly include community service or reduced sentences for good behaviour, they stood out. Nearly every violation of Draco’s code was a capital crime. Demades, the orator, said at the time that Draco’s code was written in blood.

It is possible that Draco wasn’t a real person and we have few biographical details, but he was the first person to provide Athens with written laws instead of the blood feuds in use prior to his efforts. Perhaps his draconian laws were kinder than what they replaced. One story recounts his tragic death. The tradition was to throw hats or cloaks onto the stage in approval. Apparently he was so approved that he suffocated beneath all the garments in a theatre in Aegina.

Regular readers of the blog will spot that draconian is hence an eponymous adjective, another one for edition two of “How To Get Your Name in the Dictionary” (my book about words borrowed from people’s names and placenames).

Draconian, despite coming from ancient times, wasn’t adopted into English until the 1700. Although they did have draconic from the 1600s with the same meaning. Draco is the Latinised form for the Greek name Drakon. Drakon’s name translated literally as sharp-sighted and this is where we get that small link to the dragons.

Dragon, originally spelled dragoun, arrived in English in the mid 1200s from Old French dragon and Latin draconem (huge serpent, dragon) from Greek drakon (serpent, giant seafish). Draco who composed those laws was basically called Dragon, a pretty scary name to have, unless it was a reference to his acute vision.

The source of drakon in Greek was drak (to see clearly) and ultimately a Proto Indo European root derk (to see) which provides related words in Sanskrit, Old Irish (adcondarc – I have seen), Gothic, Old High German, and Albanian.

This would seem to imply that dragons had particularly good eyesight. The young of dragons were called dragonets (c. 1300) and there was a female form – dragoness (1630s). Sometimes they were called drakes from the same roots. Despite our more recent concept of a dragon being airborn and breathing fire the word itself is closely linked to sea monsters. I hope never to find out the truth of the matter via practical experience!

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. this post contains affiliate links which make a small payment to the blog if you choose to purchase through them. #CommissionsEarned. Alternatively, you can use my digital tip jar to say thanks for my work.

Neanderthals and Poetry – a Word History

Hello,

Neanderthals are not commonly associated with poetry but the word caught my attention today and poetry formed part of the story as I explored its etymology.

I was listening to a podcast last night (“You’re Dead to Me”, a comedy history podcast hosted by Greg Jenner of Horrible Histories fame on BBC sounds – a great source for world history) and one of the guests mentioned in passing that Neanderthals are named for the Neander Valley.

This attracted my attention as a few years back I published a book (“How To Get Your Name in the Dictionary”) about words which entered the dictionary from the names of people and places. The first is an eponym (e.g. Tupperware is named for a man called Tupper), the second is a toponym (e.g. Hunky dory is named after a street). Since then I’ve stumbled on a few more words I missed in that book and I gather them in case I ever decide to publish a second edition. Neanderthal is now on that list but it’s a toponym and an eponym, which is fun.

Neanderthal is defined as an extinct species of human that was widely distributed in Ice Age Europe. It first appeared in English in the 1860s to refer to a specific extinct hominid from Neanderthal in Germany where their fossilised remains were found in 1856. Neander Thal is the name of a gorge near Düsseldorf. Thal means valley apparently.

The place name comes from Joachim Neumann (1650-1680) who was a German pastor, poet, and writer of hymns who particularly loved this spot. Neumann translates literally as new man and in Greek would have been neo-ander. It was popular in Germany during his lifetime to adopt a Greek or Latin form of your surname – hence Neander for his name, and ultimately Neanderthal for the place. It’s a wonderful piece of wordy luck that a man called New Man gave his name to the place where a new form of human was found.

Neanderthal as a word was being used to describe a large stupid person by the 1920s although the science doesn’t support that jibe. It was long disputed if they had bred with modern humans but DNA settled that question in 2013 – they did. We have no idea if they enjoyed poetry, but a poet gave them his name thanks a beautiful piece of the German landscape where both spent time.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. this post contains affiliate links which make a small payment to the blog if you choose to purchase through them. #CommissionsEarned. Alternatively, you can use my digital tip jar to say thanks for my work.

Gargantuan and the Pilgrim Salad

Hello,

This week’s word, gargantuan, is with thanks to the excellent copy of “Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable” which I found second-hand in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop in Galway city. It’s a wonderful maze of a shop and I struggle to leave without buying many books. You have been warned.

I’m reading slowly through the book and am currently on page 497 of 1213 because I’m making notes as I go – wordy inspiration for future books and of course for the Wordfoolery blog.

The word gargantuan is an eponym as Gargantua was a character created in 1534 by the French author, physician, and priest François Rabelais (1494-1553) for his four novel masterpiece “Gargantua and Pantagruel”. The books, written for an educated court audience, were satires which drew on legends, romances, and classical works. His life was varied in the extreme and his work was accused of heresy and obscenity. You can read more about him here.

The gargantuan head of the Cailleach Beara at Slieve Gullion park

It’s believed that Gargantua’s name came from the Spanish and Portuguese word garganta (gullet or throat). It’s worth noting that Old French had the word gargole (throat) whose roots lie in Latin’s gula (throat) and lead us to the verb gargle.

Gargantuan is nowadays used to describe something as large or nearly impossible (a gargantuan task, for example). Gargantua was a giant, but he was best known as a voracious giant so perhaps gargantuan should refer to a giant appetite rather than a large task. Either way the use of gargantuan as a word for enormous dates to the late 1500s in English.

Brewer adds some extra information to this giant tale. Gargantua was borrowed by Rabelais from either Celtic or Medieval legends where he was famous for his large appetite. In Rabelais’ story Gargantua once swallowed five pilgrims and their staves, in a salad. Somehow I hadn’t imagined pilgrim salad being standard giant fare, but I’m not an expert on the eating habits of giants. The giant later became proverbial as a big guzzler – he was referenced for this in “As You Like It” by William Shakespeare c. 1598, for example.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace

p.s. some subscribers to the blog have reported not getting the blog emails – please let me know in the comments if this is happening to you. I’m following up.

The Eponym Series – Celsius

Hello,

Every writer who has submitted their work for publication, or even feedback and critique, knows the feeling. You press send, or drop the letter in the postbox (or mailbox), and then realise you’ve missed a comma, split an infinitive, or messed up in some way. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve edited the piece, although of course that helps enormously and there are great tricks like reading it aloud, or backwards (yes really) which reduce the issue. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are. Something will be wrong. Some silly thing will have been missed. I know my writing isn’t perfect every time, or even most of the time. To err is human, and all that.

So when I wrote the Modern Vikings chapter in “Words The Vikings Gave Us” (my next word history book, due out later this year) I groaned upon discovering that the word celsius is eponymous. It’s not like I spent three years writing about and researching the people behind the eponyms in the English language. Or that I published a book on the subject which had a science chapter where celsius would have fitted perfectly.

Ah well. I may include it in a second edition one day, but in the meantime here’s the story of celsius and the man who gave us the most widely-used temperature scale in the world.

The Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701-1744) invented the centigrade temperature scale in 1742. The Celsius scale, as it was renamed in 1948 in his honour, is used to measure temperatures in all countries except the United States, Bahamas, Belize, Cayman Islands, and Liberia. Its previous name, centigrade, was rooted in Latin – centum (a hundred) and gradus (steps).

The celsius scale is based on the freezing and boiling points for water – 0 degrees for freezing and 100 for boiling. Hence a warm summer day might be 20-35 degrees depending on your location and anything below zero will be literally “freezing outside”.

Celsius was best-known for his astronomy work but he was also a noted mathematician and physicist whose father and grandfather were renowned scientists. He was the first to notice a relationship between the aurora borealis and the Earth’s magnetic field, for example.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

Interested in eponyms like celsius? I’ve written a book about nearly 300 of them and the lives of the fascinating people who gave their name to English. “How To Get Your Name In The Dictionary” is out now in Amazon paperback (USA and UK), and ebook for Kindle, iBooks, and on Kobo.

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Apgar – the Woman Who Changed Small Lives

Hello and Happy International Women’s Day,

Recently I was asked to write a short piece about an under-appreciated woman for today and two names sprang to mind, thanks to my book “How to Get Your Name In The Dictionary” (exploring the extraordinary lives of people who gave their names to the English language as words) – Apgar and Montessori. They both made the world a better place and despite using their names in the past, before writing the book I had no idea they were women.

As it transpired I needed to write about an Irish woman for the short piece and I chose Anna Catherine Parnell (1852-1911), the younger sister of Charles Stewart Parnell who, along with other women at a time when women weren’t expected to be political, kept his Land League movement going while he was in jail. Once he was released he insisted she step back and she never forgave him.

So, in honour of the day, here is Apgar’s story from my book. If you’ve ever been a parent you will have heard your offspring being given an apgar score at birth, now you’ll know who to thank. Like Plimsoll’s overloading line on ship hulls and Heimlich’s anti-choking move, the apgar score has saved many lives and the woman behind it deserves to be celebrated.

Apgar Score (extract from “How To Get Your Name In The Dictionary”, copyright Grace Tierney}

The apgar score was invented by Virginia Apgar (1909-1974) in 1952. She was an American pediatrician who as a young anesthetist saved many newborns with earlier interventions as a result of this scoring system for a newborn’s adjustment to life outside the womb.

Apgar wanted to be doctor from a young age and with the help of several scholarships became the first female full professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She specialised in anesthesia at a time when it was barely respected and the pay was low.

When she studied the effects of anesthesia on mothers in labour she made her greatest contribution to the field – a standard method to assess the newborn on heart rate, respiratory effort, muscle tone, reflex response, and colour. After some resistance the scoring system was adopted for use at one minute after birth and again at five minutes.

In 1959, while on sabbatical, she earned her masters in public health from John Hopkins and devoted the rest of her career to prevention of birth defects through public education and research fundraising. She received many honours for her work.

Despite breaking into many areas previously seen as male-only in an era long before feminism, she maintained that “women are liberated from the time they leave the womb”.

Not content with a hectic scientific career she also learned how to make musical instruments,  was a talented chamber quartet musician, an enthusiastic fly-fisherwoman, and an amateur pilot.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. this post contains affiliate links which make a small payment to the blog if you choose to purchase through them. #CommissionsEarned. Alternatively, you can use my digital tip jar.

 

Gobbledygook and the Politician

Hello,

This week’s word is gobbledygook (also spelled gobbledegook) because I love the way it sounds, its meaning, and its obscure link to a favourite eponym of mine.

Gobbledygook is one of the English language’s many wonderful words for gibberish or nonsense. The language always seems to be particularly well-supplied with terms for deriding the foolish behaviour of others. You can draw your own conclusions on why that might be so. Gobbledygook is defined as “the over-involved, pompous talk of officialdom” so it’s a specific type of gibberish.

The reason why it refers to officialdom is explained when you take a look at its origins and history. Unlike most older words we can pin gobbledygook to a specific date when it joined the dictionary (the American English dictionary initially but it’s used in British English too), 1944. Although it was during World War II gobbledygook isn’t a military term, although I’m sure there was plenty of gobbledygook afoot in that arena at the time, as explained below.

Gobbledygook was first used by a Texan politician Maury Maverick (1895-1954) in a memo on the 30th of March 1944. He was the chair of the Smaller War Plants Corporation and he used the memo to ban “gobbledygook language”. He even threatened to shoot “anyone using the words activation or implementation”. He later explained he invented the word in imitation of the noises a turkey makes.

Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

Anybody who has read my book “How to Get Your Name in the Dictionary” about the amazing people whose names ended up in the English language may remember his grandfather, Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870), a firebrand politician, rancher, and goldminer, who gave us the word maverick for a non-conformist and narrowly avoided death three times, including at the Alamo. There aren’t many families who have contributed two words to the dictionary.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. this post contains affiliate links which make a small payment to the blog if you choose to purchase through them. #CommissionsEarned. Alternatively, you can use my digital tip jar.