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,
There’s an avid reader of “Vogue” in my house (not me), so the word caught my eye when recently its roots were disputed and nearly landed before the courts.
Part of my daughter’s “Vogue” collection
The word vogue arrived in English in the late 1500s as something being the accepted fashion or the height of popularity. It was a direct borrowing from French where it had the same meaning, and a second one – the swaying motion of a boat – because in Old French the verb voguer meant to row, sway, or sail. The French may have borrowed in their own turn from German verb wagon (to float or to balance oneself) and ultimately the Proto Indo European root word wegh (to go, to move).
Apparently there’s a French expression vogue la galère (row the galley) which urges us to keep on no matter what happens.
Other languages have similar words and expressions from the same Germanic source. Italian has voga (a rowing) and Spanish has boga (rowing) but also used for fashion.
It’s not entirely clear how vogue moved from moving on the water to sweeping down a catwalk but it predates the famous magazine of the same name by centuries. In vogue meant to have a prominent place in fashion since the 1600s but the magazine was first published in 1892. It wasn’t until 1990 that Madonna released her song “Vogue” and popularised voguing dance moves thanks to the iconic video for her song. She didn’t invent the moves, however. They emerged in the late 1980s as an evolution of the 1960s Harlem ballroom scene.
Vogue has another, and older, history entirely and this is where we reach the realms of legal threats and then apologies.
As a famous brand, “Vogue” keeps an eye on enterprises using similar names. Their lawyers leaped into action in 2022 when they noticed the Star Inn Vogue being registered at Companies House in the U.K. (where you register limited companies). Unfortunately they didn’t do enough research before getting upset.
The Star Inn is a pub in the village of Vogue in Cornwall and had no intention of encroaching on the fashion sector. They also believe they have first British claim to the name – no matter what magazines or Madonna might say.
Vogue is a small village and has held the name since medieval times. The name Vogue in this case isn’t English at all, it’s Cornish, and it means a smelting house or furnace (vogue means fog in Cornish – like the smoke and fumes from such a building) which makes sense as the village was the location of mining activities for hundreds of years.
All this was pointed out in good humour by the owners of the 200 year old inn to the multinational publishers and both sides are happy there’s no risk of confusion between their respective businesses now.
Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
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. New issue coming this week (17th Feb 2024), don’t miss out.
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,
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.
This week it’s another word suggested by the Teen Book Club members at Academy Books and it’s one with a long and convoluted history – gazebo. Clarity when it comes to gazebos is tough to come by so I’ll take this one step by step.
Step One – how do you say gazebo?
I say gah-zee-bow (bow like bow and arrow) but apparently it’s guh-ZEE-bow. There’s an audio file here, if you’re confused. There’s a slight difference on US vs UK English pronunciation, just to add a little spice to proceedings.
Step Two – what is a gazebo exactly?
The Cambridge dictionary says it’s (1) a small decorated building with roof and open sides usually in a garden, (2) a tent with open sides used for outdoor events, (3) a small shelter without walls in an open space where people can rest and relax.
Italian style gazebo at the wonderful gardens on Garnish Island, Co. Cork
Step Three – what’s the history of the gazebo?
Gazebos have been around much longer than their name. Similar structures pop up throughout ancient history. I’m going to summarise here but if you’d like a longer discussion check out this link.
As early as 2,600 BC the Egyptians had gazebos in their gardens, often placed beside fish ponds, and possibly to serve as temples. These are shown in tomb paintings from that period. The Greeks used their public gazebos to shelter from the sun while discussing politics and the issues of the day and they sometimes contained statues of the gods. The Romans reserved theirs for the gardens of the wealthy.
The Persians, famous for their hanging gardens to Babylon, brought gazebos to the next level. Despite gardening in the desert of what is now Iran, their engineers brought melted snow water from the mountains to provide irrigation. Their two-storey gazebos included marble floors cooled by underground water.
The French brought the gazebo to Europe and in Tudor times your garden gazebo would mimic the style of your grand house in England. Parallel to all these were the oriental versions of such structures. China began with garden temples and pagodas around the 4th century and this spread to Japan where sometimes the structures were used for their tea ceremony.
Step Four – Where does the word come from?
The word entered English in the mid 1700s and was popularised thanks to the book “New Design for Chinese Temples” by William Halfpenny (still available on Amazon if you’re curious). There are two theories on the source of the word itself. The first, and least accepted, is that it comes from the French phrase “que c’est beau” (how beautiful). If you say this with a French accent and speak quickly it can be misheard as gazebo. Many words form in this fashion, Santa Claus is an example.
The more likely story is that gazebo is a Latin joke. Such language jokes were surprisingly common during that time period and a few of them have appeared on this blog in previous posts. With Latin widely taught at English fee-paying schools it was popular to create words using it. The idea on this one is that it was compounded from the English word gaze (to view) with the Latin suffix ebo (I shall).
Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
p.s. Garnish Island, whose gazebo is pictured above, is well worth a visit, by the way. It’s on the Wild Atlantic Way in Cork and you take a short boat-ride out to view the island which is entirely covered in amazing gardens. You can read more about it here.
I was out gallivanting at the weekend and it reminded me to check the history of the word. It was a long overdue meeting of close friends who traveled to a central meeting point. It ran late into the night, as every good gallivant should, in my opinion.
Appropriately enough my transport card features a gallivanting frog
The Cambridge Dictionary tells me that to gallivant is to “visit a lot of different places, enjoying yourself and not worrying about other things you should be doing”. Yes, that’s definitely what we were at. All attendees have numerous responsibilities and long task lists, but sometimes it’s important to throw those things aside and have fun.
Gallivanting didn’t always relate to carefree roaming pleasure. When it entered the English language in the early 1800s is was about spending time seeking pleasure with somebody of the opposite sex, to gad about, to be frivolous. An early print use was in 1824 in “Wine and Walnuts” by W.H. Pyne. I checked and this book is still in print today. Apparently, despite the intriguing title, it’s a collection of legal wisdom in an after dinner style (hence the title) by various experts.
Gallivant is one of those words whose true origin is unknown. Educated guesses from various dictionaries suggest it’s a playful twist on gallant (i.e. to play the gallant with a young lady, for example). There’s a French dialect word, galvauder, which may have played its part in gallivant’s transfer to English, but the reality is that nobody is sure where we got gallivanting.
This didn’t stop it becoming a very popular word during the 1800s, thanks to the British writer William Makepeace Thackery, who used it for any gadding about or flirting activity. As Thackery enjoyed travel writing as well as novel-writing I suspect he enjoyed gallivanting too.
The flirting meaning is less used now, but traveling in pursuit of pleasure is still a popular pursuit.
Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Welcome to the new subscribers and thanks to all who took part in the book launch last week. It feels great to finally have “Words the Vikings Gave Us” out in the world and landing on people’s shelves.
This week’s word is euneirophrenia and it comes with a word of warning. I stumbled across it on Pinterest and now I can’t find it in Websters, Collins, the OED, or Etymologyonline which makes me suspect this one is a recent creation for clicks and likes. However, it describes a state of being which I cannot name in any other way so there’s a need for this word. Perhaps it will catch on?
Euneirophrenia is the peaceful state of mind you achieve upon waking from pleasant dreams.
Ted woke from dreams of honey
A few online sources suggest euneirophrenia’s roots lie in Greek, eu (good), oneiro (dream), phrenia (state of mind) and I’d give that one about a 50% credibility grade. Yes, the prefix eu can be used that way. I found oneiromancy defined as “divination through dreams,” (in English since the 1600s) and it is formed from oneiro (dream) and mancy (divination) from Greek. You could even be an oneiromantis back then, an interpreter of dreams. That would be a fun on to put on your resume/cv.
Phrenia presents some issues though. The closest I could get was phrenic, an English adjective since the 1700s describing the diaphragm. It reached English via Latin phrenicus and Greek phren (the diaphragm muscle). Its etymology demonstrates neatly both my issues with euneirophrenia’s roots.
Although theories abound about eating at night causing bad dreams you can’t really link “state of mind” directly to “diaphragm” without some major anatomical contortions.
It is pretty rare to find a word in English that came directly from Greek without a clear story attached (a Greek myth, for example, or an object English borrowed from Greece). It is much more common for the word to have traveled to English via Latin and probably French or Italian as well.
I’ve found exceptions to this, of course, usually when somebody in the 1800s decided to coin a word and using their knowledge of schoolboy Greek compounded a few Greek words together to create a term. Honestly, I think euneirophrenia falls into this category. If anybody can provide any further information on its history or examples of its use earlier than the year 2000, then please comment below and I’ll update this post. If I’ve learned anything in 13 years of wordfooling here it is that it’s impossible to know everything about every word, and to be suspicious of cute obscure words on Pinterest posts.
I explored two other slumber related words previously on the blog – uhtceare and dormiveglia which you might also enjoy.
Before I finish, a couple of post-launch tidbits. The launch day competition for a necklace of replica Viking beads has closed. The winner was Nell Jenda and her prize has been dispatched.
The very lovely Dan and Shauna ofBunny Trails podcast had me on to chat about “Words the Vikings Gave Us” and you can listen to our chat here. Their enthusiasm is infectious and their podcast (available wherever you get your podcasts) about the origin of phrases is well worth a listen.
Also since my last blog, Sharon Bennett Connolly – author of four nonfiction books about Norman England and host of the brilliantly named History The Interesting Bits blog was kind enough to let me share a guest post titled “Six Misunderstandings about the Vikings”. She has had some great guests on the blog over the years so if you enjoy history I can definitely recommend spending some time scrolling over there.
I’ll let you know as they go live but brace yourselves because Wordfoolery is going on podcast tour this year with stops at The Endless Knot, Words for Granted, What in the Word, Lexitecture, and Mark Lestrange. Etymology is alive and well in the pod world.
Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
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,
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.
Note: If you order through the affiliate links in this post, a tiny fee is paid towards supporting this blog.
That’s not a typo in the title of this post, by the way. I really did mean to spell title with an extra t. This week’s word is tittle and yes, it does have a link to the phrase tittle-tattle, but more on that in a moment.
A tittle is a small stroke or point in writing (or printing) and has been an English word since the 1300s, although not much used outside certain circles. You use a tittle when you dot your lowercase i or j, for example.
A tittle can also be used in many languages to indicate specific pronunciations. French-speakers will recall the acute accent, cedilla, circumflex, grave, and trema while German-speakers know the umlaut (the scharfes S is officially a letter in the alphabet), and Spanish experts will be familiar with the wavy tilde amongst others. Tittles used in this way allow written languages to indicate how they should be spoken.
A tittle can also be a stroke, or dot, to indicate omitted letters in a word. For example, in English we use a tittle to show missing letters such as the missing letter O in the word don’t.
Tittle, because it is a small thing is also sometimes used as a word to describe a tiny amount or a part of something, along the same lines as the word jot. For example, “There wasn’t a tittle of common sense in the politician’s speech”.
Tittle entered English as a translation of apex from Latin. Apex came from the Greek word keraia (little horn), which itself came from Hebrew word qots (thorn) which described little lines projecting from letters to distinguish them from each other. Each of those languages used such flourishes and needed a word to describe them.
Related words are titulus (title) from Latin for a stroke to show missing letters (like my example “don’t”). There’s also the Provençal word titule (the dot over an i), and tilde which is the Spanish form of the same word.
You may also know the phrase “to a T”. It is likely this has it’s origins with the word tittle as an earlier phrase “to a tittle” had been used.
Another phrase also sprang to mind when I stumbled across tittle, “tittle-tattle” meaning gossip or idle chatter. Tattle arrived in English after tittle (the late 1400s) and meant to stammer or prattle possibly from Middle Flemish tatelen (to stutter) or East Frisian tateren (to chatter or babble). It wasn’t until the 1580s that tattle became associated with the telling of secrets. Certainly in my school-days you didn’t want to be tagged as tattle-tale, one who told incriminating details to your teacher about other students.
Tattler is now perhaps best known without its double-T, Tatler magazine had a run in the early 1700s and is still popular today, perhaps because everybody loves to know secrets?
Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
In honour of the forthcoming feast of Halloween (or Samhain depending on your viewpoint) I’ve chose eldritch as the word this week.
Eldritch describes something as weird, sinister, or ghostly. The left-handed amongst you won’t be happy with sinister being in that grouping, but that’s another day’s exploration. Either way eldritch seems appropriate for the season when the darkness gathers earlier and earlier in the day, mists swirl through forests, and numerous smaller folk jump out demanding treats.
There is considerable confusion about the origin of the word eldritch, which is about 500 years old. Merriam Webster reckon it originally meant fairyland thanks to Middle English’s elfriche. The word riche or rice was an Old English word for realm or kingdom. YourDictionary points out that el means strange or other, so the reference is to something otherworldly. Others connect the el to elves. Either way we’re talking about the malicious, scary forms of fairies here, rather than the twinkly type who live in pretty garden flowers.
My favourite source with contentious word histories is Etymology Online and they lean towards el being else or otherwise and ritch relating to realm or kingdom making eldritch describe something which comes from the otherworld, a land which is not like ours. That would certainly describe some of the eldritch creatures who will arrive at my door after dark on Halloween looking for sweet bribes to leave me in peace. I think I’ll pay up!
Light a pumpkin to scare away the eldritch creatures!
If you’re interested in other spooky words – check out Macabre and Samhainophobia and Gaelic Halloween, previous Wordfoolery posts at this eldritch time of year when the veil between our world and the otherworld is weak and porous. Next week I’ll be exploring the word guy and its link to the 5th of November.
p.s. Are any of you taking on the NaNoWriMo novel-writing challenge during November? It will be my 13th year so I’m busy sharpening pencils and crafting my outline this week. Later today I’ll be hosting the Kick Off event for my region – Ireland North East.
This week’s word is rigmarole. It’s one I use in speech fairly often (usually entreating my teens to get to the point of their story) but I hadn’t seen it in print for a while so when I spotted it in “A Crown of Swords”, the seventh book in the Wheel of Time fantasy series by Robert Jordan, which I’m enjoying at the moment, it reminded me to hunt up its origins.
A rigmarole (pronunciation here) is defined as a confused or meaningless story or a complex and sometimes a ritualised procedure. Hence it can either be a verbal thing like the rambling story which never reaches a logical conclusion, or it can be an overly elaborate approach to a task. As a writer, both those things are to be avoided.
Rigamarole doesn’t have the clearest of origin stories but I’ll do my best. It arrived in mainstream English in the 1700s to describe a long, rambling verbal story, possibly from a local expression in Kent. In the 1500s, in Middle English, there was a thing called a ragman’s roll and that was probably the source of the Kent expression.
What was a ragman’s roll? I assumed it was a rolled up pack by a traveling salesman, but apparently not. The roll in this case was more akin to a school roll (list of enrolled pupils). The roll was a long list or catalogue, in this case describing, in verse, characters in a medieval game of chance called Rageman. The fact that the game was complex probably added to the meaning of rigmarole over time.
Rageman probably came into English from Anglo-French Ragemon le bon (Ragemon the good) who was both a character on this list and the title of one of the verses.
A long list – my rigmarole of craft projects to be completed
I was unable to get clear instructions on how to play Ragman’s Roll but it was widely popular in Anglo-Norman households. Some descriptions claim there were up to 50 mini verses (often bawdy) from which each player would draw one at random to tell their fortune, particularly as it related to matters of love. Thanks to Philip G Hunt’s blog for those details.
By 1939 the idea of a rigmarole being a long list had transformed into foolish or complex activities as well as such stories and lists.
Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
p.s. Are any of you taking on the
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