Modern horses (Equus ferus caballus) were first domesticated on the northern European steppes 6000 years ago by people we identify as the Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE). These Proto-Indo-Europeans called their new friend the ekwos. They used it to conquer Europe and Asia and to spread the descendents of their language firstly across these continents and ultimately to the world.
Ekwos became the Greek hippos, which has given us: hippodrome – a place where horses run, from hippos + dromos for racetrack; hippopotamus, or horse of the river from hippos + potamos for river; and a part of the brain that was thought to resemble the seahorse, the hippocampus from hippos + campus for sea monster.
The name Phillip is derived from the Greek Philippos meaning friend of horses. By implication, Phillips were of noble blood because only they could afford to own horses.
Ekwos also became the Latin equus which has given us: equine, of or pertaining to horses; equerry, originally an officer in charge of the horses; and equestrian, as of or pertaining to horse-riding.
The dignified Roman word equus was reserved for the best horses while the common slang word for a horse was caballus, referring to packhorses or work horses and implying they were hacks or nags. Caballus was picked up by Roman soldiers in their campaigns with the barbarian tribes and brought back into Roman language. Caballus became cavallo (Italian), cheval (French) caballo (Spanish), capall (Irish) and ceffyl (Welsh). Cheval, the French word, has given English chivalry, cavalry, cavalcade and cavalier.
Nag is a native English word for a small horse and has an unknown origin. A hack is a shortening of hackney, for an ordinary horse, referring to the horse breeding pastures of Hackney near London (and now very much in London). Many of the horses pulled taxi-cabs and the use of hack became associated with hired horses. This led to the identification of hack with being tired and broken down. It was applied to certain types of writers.
There was also an Old English word, eoh, derived from the PIE, ekwos, but it disappeared from the language to be replaced by horse. Horse is a Middle English word derived from the Old English word, hors. This is the most difficult word of all to trace.
Remarkably horse may also be a word that can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-Europeans. A strong argument is that horse is derived from kurs, the PIE word for run, which was used as a euphemism for horse instead of ekwos. Ekwos may not have been used as the everyday word due to a religious or hunters’ taboo on using the name of the animal.
The argument is that the PIE word kurs became khursa in Proto-Germanic which gave Old Norse, hross, Middle Dutch ros, German Roß and of course Old English, hors. Kurs also became the Latin currere, meaning to run and also gave rise to our Modern English hurry!
So while we wonder at the skills of equestrians as they ride their horses (Equus ferus caballus) around the hippodrome we should remember that the words we are using have their origins at least as long ago as there have been horsemen.
Rummaging through a junk shop recently I came across a poster for Ray Lawrence’s 1985 film, Bliss. The film was based closely on Peter Carey’s 1981 novel of the same name. Seeing the poster brought back memories of both the book and the film. These memories, quite appropriately, created a small moment of bliss.
I had been introduced to Peter Carey’s short stories at University and had devoured Bliss, his first novel, when it was first published. Carey is a wonderfully creative writer and Bliss delivered a wickedly comic satire of modern life in suburban Australia.
I lived in London for part of the Eighties and I remember taking some friends to see the film at a cinema near Picadilly Circus. I was delighted to see the wonderfully funny story played out in such distinctively Australian locations and against the Sydney skline. But my English friends found the film quite comfronting (as had, I found out later, some of the audience at its screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985). Some did not understand the satirical intentions and took the story at face value.
Bliss means extreme happiness or ecstasy. In a Christian, religious context it is the ecstasy of salvation or the joy that comes from spiritual connection with the divine.
In the opening pages of Bliss, the central character dies and has a post-life experience sliding “between the spaces in the air itself”. The character is Harry Joy and he is experiencing an ecstasy.
Harry Joy returns to life and as he appraises his life he comes to believe that he has been living in hell. One aspect of this is that he believes all of his advertising clients are producing products that cause cancer. Harry believes that he has been living in a state of bliss not seeing the evils around him.
Peter Carey ran a very successful advertising business and Ray Lawrence spent most of the time between Bliss and his next film, Lantana (2001), making television commercials. They both must have had a blissful time with their portrayal of the evils of advertising.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, the romantic poet, described clouds as the daughters of Earth and Water and the nurslings of the Sky. The word cloud comes from Old English, and from a most unpoetic source, originally meaning a lump of rock. It’s brother, clod, means a lump of soil and its cousin, clot, a lump in a liquid.
So how did our light and airy cloud manage to escape it’s family of clods and clots? The probable explanation is that large, dense cumulus clouds were thought to resemble lumps of rock so took the name, cloud, and the lumps of rock were left being called lumps of rock.
Meteorologists have named clouds in a very ordered and logical way as you might expect. The main types of cloud have good scientific names chosen from solid Latin roots:
Alto – high cloud – from Italian for high and from Latin Altus;
Cirrus – thin, wispy cloud – from Latin for curl, fringe;
Cumulus – tall, fluffy cloud – from Latin for a heap or pile;
Nimbus – rain-bearing cloud – from Latin for raincloud; and
Stratus – a broad flat cloud – from Latin for spread out.
These basic cloud types can be combined to describe in-between types, for instance, a cumulonimbus is a cumulus cloud bearing rain or a cirrostratus is thin and wispy and spread out.
However, there appears to be some mischievous meteorologists out there who find this all far too dull. Watch out for mammatocumulus or breast clouds (from Latin mamma for breast or udder); tuba clouds that look like trumpets hanging from cumulus clouds; and scud clouds that shoot along under storms (scud, related to scuttle, means to move quickly and perhaps comes from the Middle English scut meaning to race like a hare).
You can only think that Shelley would have been proud of them.
I have watched my first game of the World Cup. I was surprised by the constant, boring bee-drone of the crowd – I had never heard anything like it before. Of course, I soon found out it is the vuvuzela, the soccer horn. It is plastic, a metre long, brightly coloured and sounds like an amplified bee! The instrument is played with huge enthusiasm by the South African and visiting fans but is also causing a huge amount of annoyance to television viewers.
The vuvuzela can perhaps claim ancestry from the kudu horn. The kudu horn came from a large antelope and was the traditional call to African villagers to attend village meetings.
There are two explanations of the origins of the word vuvuzela One theory suggests it comes from isiZulu for making noise. The other, that it comes from township slang for shower, because it showers people with music and looks like a shower head.
The vuvuzela has created the tournament’s early controversy. Many people hate them and there have been calls to have them banned. BBC broadcasters are contemplating turning off the crowd noise after receiving hundreds of complaints. However, many of the local and visiting fans are enjoying the noise far too much. The FIFA president, Joseph Blatter, has ruled out a ban, saying on Twitter that:
I don’t see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country. … Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound.
Boogieblast, a South African manufacturer of vuvuzela, suggest a simple explanation (and a nice little piece of marketing):
We often hear about octogenarians, those folk aged between 80 and 89. Being an octogenarian is an achievement of an advanced age beyond our allocated three score years and ten (according to Psalm 90) so is something to be celebrated:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
But becoming a quinquagenarian, being fifty-something, a person aged between 50 and 59 years, is not an achievement that is happily celebrated. Being fifty is generally accepted as being the beginning of late middle age – not a milestone to be welcomed. Youth has flown away.
The effects of ageing have become undeniable; quinquagenarians have found their eyesight has deteriorated, their muscles ache and their memory matter is disappearing in a process of cognitive decline.
Quinquagenarians have started to realise that the process of ageing is inevitable. So they have started thinking about activities recommended to minimise the decline including staying mentally active (for instance, by reading word-of-the-week blogs), staying socially active, exercising, reducing stress, and maintaining a good diet.
Although there is no cure for ageing, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have recently discovered that feeding old rats a combination of acetyl-L-carnitine and alpha-lipoic acid has rejuvenated the rats. The research leader reported “these old rats got up and did the Macarena”. These supplements are available from health food stores.
However, Oscar Wilde probably summed it up for the majority of quinquagenarians when he wrote:
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
My daughter was laughing at me for reading the dictionary and I desperately needed to rescue myself. So I challenged her to guess how many words starting with fun were really fun and how many were not. For you, my fellow dictionary readers, I present the results. Please note that this will only work for the Concise Macquarie Dictionary, which was the particular book that I was enjoying.
We only count the non-compound words and find that fun words are not at all that much fun. There are 25 fun words listed in my Macquarie that start with ‘fun’. There are six words that are no fun at all: fundament, fundamentalism, funeral, funereal, fungicide & funk.
There are a lot of neutral words (thirteen): function, functional, functionalism, functionary, fund, fundamental, fundus, fungi, fungible, fungoid, fungus, funicular, & funnel. These excite no passions at all.
But once the survey is complete there are only six really fun words: fun, funambulist, funfair, funky, funnies, & funny.
This interpretation would be different if undertaken by a specialist. An economist might find fungible (where one unit or portion of something can be replaced by another) and fund to be quite exhilarating. A mycologist may find fungus and fungi exciting and a fungoid (fungus-like) absolutely distracting. Anatomists might find the fundament (the anus) and fundus (the base of an animal organ) the sort of words to raise their passions. However, we, as laypeople, shall remain un-emotional about them.
The fun words are undisputable: the funambulist, the tightrope walker, is fun and being funky is certainly not dull; I would spend time reading funnies (comic strips) if I didn’t have my dictionaries; and there is no doubt that a funfair is enjoyable.
Neither is there any dispute about the un-fun words. The fundament becomes, somehow – with -al and -ism added, religious fanaticism, a very serious business. There is very little fun at a funeral nor at something that is funereal (funeral-like). Fungicide (fungus killer) would send any mushroom into a funk (I am cheating a bit here counting funk as a black mood and not a bit of soul music but it has its representative in funky).
Statistically, fun has let us down. Only 24 per cent of fun words are actually happy words, the remainder, 76 per cent are just no fun whatsoever. This is, of course, what you learn when you read the dictionary!
Marcus Aurelius, was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD. We know him because he is the wise Caesar played by Richard Harris, with Russel Crowe as Maximus, in Ridley Scott’s film, Gladiator. He is known as a philosopher king and wrote several influential works, particularly supporting the Stoics.
Time, is perhaps one of the most difficult words to define because of its very conceptual nature. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as a continuous, measurable quantity in which events occur in a sequence proceeding from the past through the present to the future.
But Marcus Aurelius is much closer to the original meaning when he spoke of pinpricks of eternity. In Old English, tima, meant a limited space of time. It comes from Old German timon and is similar to the Old Norse timi. But the word has very old roots in the original language of Eurasia, the Proto-Indo-European word dimon, from the base da meaning to cut up, divide.
So, originally time meant not the continuous quantity that we now use it to mean, but bits of time. The word time is closely related to the word tide, which came from Old English tid for a point or portion of time. The tide has come to mean a portion of time defined by the rise and fall of the sea.
So when we say time and tide wait for no man - which is one of the oldest expressions in English - we risk being tautological. A thousand years ago another philosopher king, Canute, sat on the beach to prove the truth of this expression to his courtiers.
Tidings is also a derivative from the same origins. When we bring good tidings we bring good news of an event or an occurrence – a particularly pleasant moment in time.
As we sit down for dinner in Australia the polls are opening in Great Britain. Will Gordon Brown lose badly and end Labour’s run of power? Or will David Cameron resurrect the fortunes of the Conservative Party? The outsider, the Liberal Democrats are making a run on the outside with their leader, Nick Clegg. Will the British voters flock to the polls to vote away their expense-scamming politicians or stay away as they have been tending to do for the last couple of elections?
Some pundits are predicting a hung parliament; others a strong Conservative win; and there is an expected high voter turnout. I found a wonderful, 1989 quote from David S. Broder, currently the White House correspondent for the Washington Post:
The science of interpreting elections has a fancy name: psephology. A shorter, simpler and more accurate title for much election analysis is: fiction.
Psephology is the branch of sociology that studies elections and its practitioners are psephologists. It comes from the Greek word psephos for pebbles. Psephism is the process of voting.
Although the word is a recent concoction, it reminds us that democracy is very old and that votes were once cast by Greeks dropping pebbles in the urns of their chosen candidates. A ballot is the Roman or Italian version – a ballot comes from pallotte, for the small balls that were similarly used as counters.
In a less positive voting system, ostracism, comes to us from ostraka, the Greek for potsherds or pottery tokens that were used when Athenians voted to exile one of their citizens for ten years.
But in a British election with their first past the post system, there will be questions about whether the party that gets the most pebbles gets the most seats.
Beserk was a great warrior from Norse mythology, renowned for his bravery and for his fury in battle. He didn’t fight in armor but in his bera serkr, literally bear shirt or bearskin in Old Norse. He gave his name to the berserks, the wild, frenzied shock troops of the marauding Vikings.
The Icelandic poet, Snorri Sturluson, wrote the Ynglinga legendary saga in about 1225 and in it he gave a description of the berserks:
His [Odin's] men rushed forwards without armour, were as mad as dogs or wolves, bit their shields, and were strong as bears or wild bulls, and killed people at a blow, but neither fire nor iron told upon them. This was called Berserk-gang.
How the berserks, induced the frenzied state, called berserk-gang, is unknown. Various suggestions include a form of psychosis or induced madness, but it seems most likely that it was a secret ritual using a drug to bring on the frenzy.
The berkserk-gang might have resulted from ingestion of bog myrtle (Myrica gale), a plant used throughout Europe and Scandinavia as part of the gruit used to flavour and make beer bitter, which is known to have hallucinogenic properties.
The mushroom Amanita muscaria can produce temporary psychoses and is another candidate for causing berserk behaviour. It is also known as fly agaric or in Scandinavia, flugswamp. The mushrooms association with flies in both its common name, fly agaric, and in its scientific name, musca being the Latin for fly, stems from it having been known to kill flies that drank water steeped with it.
Berserks when not engaged in battle were a bit of a social nuisance so the practice gradually became outlawed throughout the viking kingdoms. By the 13th century there were no more of these rampaging Scandinavians to terrorise Europe and their own brethren.
Berserk, forgotten for centuries, found its way into English in 1822 when Sir Walter Scott’s wrote of them in his novel, The Pirate:
… the Berserkars were champions … who used to run like madmen on swords, and spears, and harpoons, and muskets, and snap them all into pieces, as a finner [a whale] would go through a herring-net…
Scott’s use of berserkar rather than berserk was probably a confusion and substitution of an -er agent suffix (i.e. as in builder for someone who builds, killer for someone who kills) for the old Norse use of -r to denote a masculine singular noun.
Thus beserk became used in recent times to denote not the agent but the activity, as in going berserk, and berserker became used for someone who fights recklessly and with disregard for his own life.
Yesterday (19 April 2010), Carl Williams, the criminal made famous by a series of books and the Australian Channel 9 drama, Underbelly, was beaten to death with part of an exercise bike inside Barwon Prison’s maximum security unit. Williams had been sentenced in 2007 to a minimum of 35 years in gaol for a series of gangland murders.
… the two prisoners suspected of being involved in Williams’ murder are notorious criminals.
State Corrections Minister, Bob Cameron, in a separate report, said:
We are very, very concerned that such a notorious criminal has been murdered. That’s why there are all of those investigations and we want to get to the bottom of it.
The use of the adjective, notorious, in these situations to describe these most dangerous of criminals may not be quite appropriate.
Notorious, has been around for quite a while and means being famous for some bad quality or deed. It originally came from the medieval Latin in about the 16th century and meant well-known or commonly known. It took on a negative connotation in the 18th century when it had become more ofen used in a similar sense to infamous: having an extremely bad reputation.
The lawyer is using the wrong adjective in describing the two inmates as notorious criminals. Since they are locked in a maximum security unit of a maximum security gaol it is rather obvious they are well known or famous for their deeds or actions otherwise they would not be there. If he is describing them as the worst sort of criminal he perhaps should use alternative adjectives such as dangerous, vicious, loathsome, despicable or even heinous.
The Minister, being concerned that such a well-known criminal has been murdered, is inadvertently suggesting that it is more acceptable for lesser-known criminals to be murdered. He perhaps should rethink his sentence.
If all is going well, you are confident and you achieve things effortlessly, you might say that your mojo is working. If you are musically inclined you might even sing about it.
Where does mojo come from?
Mojo is a word that has found its way into English from African via the American slave trade. The word became popular from blues songs which came out of the south of the US. Mojo probably derives from the Western African, Fula language word moco’o, meaning a medicine man. The African word is the probable ancestor of moco, meaning witchcraft or magic, used in the Gullah language of parts of southern US (South Carolina and Georgia). Gullah is creole meaning a language made up of elements of other languages – in this case English and Western African words and grammar.
What is a mojo?
A mojo is a charm made of a cloth bag tied with a drawstring that contains roots, herbs, animal parts or other objects associated with magic. It is often worn under clothing, sometimes between the legs and is sometimes sown into the shape of a hand. It was also known as a conjure bag or a prayer in a bag.
The mojo charm is part of hoodoo, North American folk magic (with some things in common with voodoo) that combines African and Native American beliefs with European magic and Christian beliefs.
What does mojo do?
When your mojo is working your lucky charm is delivering its spell. Mojo is often used to refer to a man’s success with women but this is only one of its spells.
Traditional hoodoo like most folk magic uses magic potions and charms to influence people’s luck, their success in love, their success with money (particularly in gambling) their health or to change other important aspects of their everyday lives.
Gamblers were particular users of the mojo charm and their bags contained ingredients such as lucky hand root and five-finger grass to help the fingers work well.
Who sang about mojo?
The great Mississippi bluesman, Robert Johnson, first used mojo in a lyric of his song, Little Queen of Spades, recorded in 1937.
He is attracted to the Little Queen of Spades, a gambling woman who has her own money due to her gambling prowess and mojo:
Well, a man don’t need a woman
hoo, fair brown, that he got to give all his money to
Everybody say she got a mojo
now, she’s been usin’ that stuff …
… Ooo hoo eee, since I am the King
baby, and you is a queen
Let’s put our heads together
hoo, fair brown, then we can make our money green
Mojo became more famous with a later bluesman’s standard: Muddy Waters released Got My Mojo Workin’ in 1957. He is often wrongly credited with authorship of the tune. It was written by Preston Foster and first recorded by Ann Cole (Muddy Waters had heard the song from Ann Cole while they were touring together and wrote his own version, similar enough to result in a copyright case, which he lost).
Here is an abbreviation of the Foster version:
Got my Mojo working but it just won’t work on you
Got my Mojo working but it just won’t work on you
I want to love you so ’til I don’t know what to do
I got my black cat bones all cured and dry
I got my four leaf clover all hanging high
I got my mojo workin’ but it just won’t work on you
I want to love you so ’til I don’t know what to do…
I got my hoodoo ashes all around your bed
I got my black snake roots underneath your head
I got my mojo workin’ …
I got a gypsy woman givin’ me advice
I got some red-hot tips I have to keep on ice
I got my mojo workin’ …
I got my rabbit foot I know it’s working right
I got this strand of hair I keep day and night
I got my Mojo workin’ …
The original song lyrics give a catalogue of the ingredients of a mojo love charm. It is obviously a good luck charm with a four-leaf clover and a rabbit’s foot, it also contains black cat bones, hoodoo ashes, black snake roots and a strand of the lover’s hair. Muddy Water’s version has the same chorus but his verses are different and without the mojo recipe:
I’m going down to Louisiana, to get me a mojo hand
I’m going down to Louisiana, to get me a mojo hand
I’m gonna have all you women, get you under my command
Water’s charm is a mojo hand. His charm has a different purpose than Cole’s, his is a charm to make him attractive to women whereas hers is a love potion to make her lover fall for her.
Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, was a fan of the Water’s song. He never recorded it but his alter-ego, Mr Mojo Risin’, an anagram on his name, appeared in the song LA Woman. It has been suggested that Mr Mojo Risin’ was a phallic reference but, even if it is, Morrison, always fascinated by the myths and magic of native Americans, would have understood its true hoodoo meaning.
Got My Mojo Workin’ has continued its life as a blues standard. It has been covered by many mainstream artists including the Grateful Dead, JJ Cale and Manfred Mann; even Elvis Presley had his own version.
This century, mojo has gone on to find its own mojo, developing a prominent place in the vocabulary of modern music.
The word fool comes from the Latin word follis, meaning a bag or sack, a large inflated ball, a pair of bellows. So a fool referred to a person that resembled the bellows or the inflated ball – a windbag.
Fool first meant a mentally deficient person, an idiot. Then it was used to describe a member of a royal or noble household who provided entertainment by joke telling or peculiar antics. It was not always clear whether the fool was a professional entertainer (otherwise known as a jester) or an amusing idiot.
So what is the modern fool? The negative definitions are someone who:
is deficient in judgment, sense, or understanding
acts unwisely on an occasion
has been tricked, duped or made to appear ridiculous
But to be called a fool is not always a bad thing. Nowadays a fool can be a person:
with a talent or enthusiasm for a certain activity (eg a dancing fool)
who subverts convention or varies from social conformity in order to reveal a spiritual or moral truth
In Tarot, The Fool card can stand for a new start. When it turns up you could be ready to make a move – it can be renewal and a brand new beginning.
So today? While everyone is being an April Fool telling people that their flies are undone or that their shoelaces are untied I encourage you to be a networking fool. Don’t waste your time on pranks. Make a brand new beginning to your networking efforts. How?
Treat the day as a day for enthusiastic networking activity. Get excited! Use the day to change the way you talk to people. If you are shy or just getting a bit jaded I want you to challenge yourself. Your homework today is to do at least three of the following:
Ring a friend that you haven’t spoken to for a year
Ring an old customer that you haven’t spoken to for a year
Talk to a complete stranger on the bus, train or in a café (but not in a park in the middle of the night)
Engage in a conversation with someone that you only ever say hello to – ask the waiter or waitress at the café if they are having a good day
Sign up to join a new club, Rotary, Lions, or a sporting club to meet people in the community – join the Chamber of Commerce
Is there a business referral that needs to be chased up? Do it today
What is the worst thing that can happen? You might look like a networking fool!
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
So says Matthew’s Gospel 5:5 (and also Psalm 37). This is the third of the eight beatitudes, preached by Jesus Christ in his Sermon on the Mount, which were presented as virtues that would be rewarded by God with salvation.
Meek was originally used to translate mansuetus (related to mansuetudo meaning tameness) from the Latin text of the Bible.
Meek comes from Middle English meke (around the 12th century) which meant gentle, courteous and kind. It originated in Old Norse from mjūkr, meaning soft. However in the 14th century it also took on a meaning of submissiveness. To find out the modern definition I did a little bit of a survey from online and my collection of out-of-date, international dictionaries.
My Shorter Oxford (Third Edition 1973) from the UK defines meek as:
gentle, courteous, kind, merciful, indulgent
free from self-will; piously humble and submissive; patient and unresentful
submissive, humble; easily put upon
My Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary (1976 Edition) from the US defines it:
Having a patient, gentle disposition
Lacking spirit or backbone, submissive
My Concise Macquarie (First Edition 1982) from Australia defines meek as:
humbly patient or submissive
On line the Dictionary.com (based on the Random House Dictionary 2010) :
humbly patient or docile, as under provocation from others
overly submissive or compliant; spiritless; tame
Obsolete. gentle; kind
But if we aspire to inherit the earth, how do we recognise the characteristics of meekness that we need. The difference between the gentle, courteous, pious and kind type of meek (the virtuous meek) and the submissive, compliant, spiritless type of meek (the non-virtuous meek) is quite large. The meaning, however, is seldom clear from the context. The difference between the good meek and the bad meek is not a matter of context but intent.
You can be meek because you choose to be gentle and courteous due to your pious and kind nature. This is a virtue resulting from choice and strength of character
Alternatively you can be meek because you are compliant and submissive due to your weak and spiritless nature. This is not a virtue as it comes without choice and from a weakness of character.
Meek is still used in the modern translation of the third beatitude to represent a virtuous state deserving of the future of the world. The Bible is an active and current publication and its use of meek, particularly in the Third Beatitude, demonstrates its sense as a virtue rather than its sense as a weakness.
In defining the quality of meekness last century, Arthur Walkington Pink (1886 – 1952), an influential biblical scholar, wrote:
Some regard it’s meaning as patience, a spirit of resignation; some as unselfishness, a spirit of self-abnegation; others as gentleness, a spirit of non-retaliation, bearing afflictions quietly.
So, dear dictionary writers, if the good meaning of meek is obsolete we must either get the biblical translators to replace it with something like:
Blessed are the patient, unselfish and gentle for they will inherit the earth.
Or be afraid for the future because your dictionaries have given the world away to the wrong people:
Blessed are the compliant, submissive and spiritless for they will inherit the world.
Since I started to watch American TV programs as a boy I have always been fascinated by the different vocabulary that Americans use to describe their domestic waste. Perhaps this interest started for me with Oscar the Grouch, from Sesame Street, who lived in a garbage can and not a rubbish bin. In the US suburban sitcoms of the sixties it seemed that the father/husband characters, were, without argument, responsible for taking out the trash every week. More recently watching the urban forensic dramas I see that the garbage ends up in a dumpster (along with the dead body, several pieces of evidence and quite often a homeless person).
Now the vocabulary is quite different in Australia. When we take the bin out (not the can) it contains our rubbish (as it does in the UK). Garbage is more often used to describe something lacking in value. If we have a lot of rubbish to throw out we use a skip (like a dumpster but mostly without a lid).
In the US the trash collector, and in Australia the garbageman (garbo), picks up the rubbish and takes it to a dump in his garbage truck. However in the UK a dustman will pick up the rubbish in his dustcart (perhaps a refuse lorry) and take it to a tip; these are historic carryovers from when the major waste from houses in England was the dust from their domestic fireplaces (or as Dickens describes it in Our Mutual Friend, “…coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bone-dust, crockery dust, rough dust and sifted dust, all manner of Dust”.)
But when we drop our lolly (Australian for US candy and UK sweet) wrappers on the ground we are all littering and the result is litter. However, when we pick it up in Australia it goes in a rubbish bin not a trash can (as it would in the US) or into a dustbin (as it would in the UK).
But why should Americans choose to use garbage or trash cans rather than rubbish bins? Is this a deliberate divergence or just happenstance?
Rubbish, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, dates from about 1400 and is derived from rubouses (1392), which relates to rubble and is of unknown origin. (By the way, the verb to rubbish meaning to disparage and criticize harshly was first used in Australian and New Zealand slang).
Garbage, first seen in 1422, originally meant giblets of a fowl and waste parts of an animal, and was likely later confused with garble in its sense of siftings and refuse. It may be related to the Old French, jarbage, which meant a bundle of sheaves, entrails.
Trash, meaning anything of little use or value, was first used in 1518, perhaps from a Scandinavian source as the Old Norse word, tros, means rubbish, fallen leaves and twigs; the Norwegian trask forlumber, trash, baggage; and the Swedish trasa for rags, tatters. Trash was first applied to domestic refuse or garbage in 1906 in the US. (It was first applied to ill-bred persons by Shakespeare).
Litter, has evolved from the Latin, lectus, for a bed, to the straw used for bedding (the 1400s) and eventually to scattered and disorderly debris similar to what you see with strewn straw. To litter as to strew with objects is from 1713, litterbug is from the 1940s, and littering as in the dropping of litter is from 1960.
Trying to find a modern difference in meaning between garbage, rubbish and trash is almost impossible. However, the Americans, using garbage in preference to rubbish for domestic waste are probably closer to the original meaning of garbage as animal offal, which, in the days before junk mail and packaging, would have been the only household waste apart from, of course, dust.
I was working at my computer when my son asks me: “Dad, what’s a luchador?”
Since he had spent the last week continuously playing Smack Down versus Raw 2010, a pro-wrestling game on his Playstation (and beating up his little brother), I hazarded a guess it was a type of wrestler. I had to make sure so did a bit of googling.
Wonderful Wikipedia tells me that a luchador (a fighter, from Spanish) is a professional Mexican wrestler, and that lucha libre (free fighting, from Spanish) is the form of wrestling performed. Lucha libre is distinctive from other forms of professional wrestling because of its wide array of wrestling holds and high-flying acrobatics moves. The luchador most often wears a mask.
In Argentina lucha libre is also known as catch, or as catch as catch can. In Peru they call it cachascán and wrestlers are known as cachascanistas.
As in professional wrestling, the luchadores divide into two main categories: rudos, the rude ones (who are the bad guys, and equivalent to professional wrestling’s heels), and técnicos, the technicians (the good guys, and equivalent to pro-wrestling’s faces). Técnicos play by the rules and have formal, spectacular combat styles whereas the rudos tend to be brawlers.
The luchador’s mask plays an important part. It is grounds for disqualification for a luchador to remove an opponent’s mask. The masks reflect the wrestlers’ characters and are designed to resemble heroes, animals, or gods. The characters tend to be abstractions such as: the Fear, the Horror, or the Nazi. There is also a Médico Asesino (Dr. Death).
Half-comatose on a long-haul flight a few years ago, I found myself watching Jack Black in Nacho Libre. I did not realise at the time that the film was loosely based on the life of Father Sergio Gutierrez, known to Mexicans as Fray Tormenta (Brother Tempest), a priest who financed his orphanage by working as a luchador. There is a very good Sports Illustrated story online about Fray Tormento and the lucha libre which I recommend and from which I also sourced much.
Once upon a time you bought your fish from a fishmonger, your hardware from an ironmonger, and your apples from a costermonger (a coster was an old variety of apple). This was as long ago as eight hundred years.
Monger evolved from the Old English word mangere, which meant a dealer or trader. As time went by, it started to take on an overtone of being petty and disreputable (probably because of its connection with street peddlers) and became used most often in a derogatory sense. It has had a very keen usage in this insulting sense for four hundred years. New usages are invented in all ages.
Spenser used warmonger in his poem the Faerie Queene (completed in 1596). A warmonger is someone who encourages war. Fashionmonger was used about the same time (equivalent to our modern fashionista, someone overly devoted to fashion), as was meritmonger, which referred to a do-gooder. There was even wordmonger for a writer who uses words pretentiously or without regard for their meanings.
Scaremonger (and also fearmonger) comes from the late 19th century. Scaremongering when used in advertising is called shockvertising where it is often used in an attempt to change undesirable behaviours such as binge drinking or smoking by showing their worst effects. The 19th century also had the first uses of rumourmonger and gossipmonger.
The latest of the mongers is ecomonger. It is a derisory term used to describe greenies who push an extreme environmental agenda. In the great climate change debate the against side is represented by climate change sceptics and the for side by the ecomongers. The rest of us sit somewhere in between, hoping that the apocalypse is exaggerated and that the politicians really can do something to encourage consumers to reduce their energy use.
In North Yorkshire (where I was born), if you dance nine times counterclockwise around a ring of toadstools it was believed you will come under the spell of the fairies. I remember this story from my childhood although it was a ring of mushrooms of which we needed to be wary.
In the ancient folklore of pagan Britain, to go widdershins (widershins or withershins), was to walk around an object counter-clockwise. In a magical sense it was to walk against the light, or in the opposite way to the movement of the sun, making it an act contrary to God (in the Northern Hemisphere at least). To go widdershins while reading prayers backwards was considered to be a way of connecting with the devil.
In religious senses walking around an object for sacred purposes is called circumambulation. It is very much a part of modern religions, in Islam pilgrims circle the Kaaba in Mecca; Hindus circle shrines as a form of prayer, and in Judaism the priests will circle the altar in one direction. However, the direction and number of times vary between religions.
The Victorian’s, in 19th century England, revived a lot of the pagan myths and folk stories as so-called fairy tales (and thus we assume avoided the ire of the church). One folklorist was Joseph Jacobs (an Australian-born Jewish scholar educated at Sydney Grammar and Sydney University). One of Jacobs’ best known fairy tales is Childe Rowland that clearly explains the consequences of going widdershins.
Rowland and his elder brothers lose their sister, Burd Ellen, when she disappears after chasing their football around a church. Rowland seeking an explanation goes to the “Warlock Merlin” who tells him that she:
… must have been carried off by the fairies, because she went round the church “wider shins”–the opposite way to the sun.
Childe Rowland, after both his brothers fail, rescues his sister. The story ends with:
And they reached home, and the good queen, their mother, and Burd Ellen never went round a church widershins again.
Which is good sense, considering all the trouble everyone had gone to.
In Scotland there were many forms of pagan circumambulation being practised up until about 150 years ago. Among them were circling the fields with torches at Halloween to ensure fertility the following year; circling a patient three times before administering cures; or circling to approach a grave during a funeral. These rituals involved circuiting deisual (or making the deasil), which meant in the direction of the sun, which was therefore sacred. This is the opposite to widdershins.
Avatar is a word from the ancient, cultured, Sanskrit language of India. Sanskrit is part of the Indo-European family of languages, which includes Greek, Latin and, of course, English.
Avatar has a long history in Sanskrit literature having been used in the works of Pāṇini, the world’s first grammarian who wrote the Ashtadhyayi (the eight chapters), a book of Sanskrit grammar in the 4th century BC.
The Oxford Dictionary defines avatar as the form a deity takes when descending to earth in an incarnate form (that is embodied in flesh). Although it is translated into English as incarnation, it is perhaps better described as a manifestation. In Sanskrit avatar means descent; it comes from ava meaning off, away, down and tar to pass over.
Avatar is most commonly used to refer to the forms that Vishnu (one of Hinduism’s major gods) took when he appeared on Earth. The ten most famous incarnations of Vishnu are known as the Dashavatara (they are the fish, tortoise, boar, half-man/half-lion, dwarf, Rama-of-the-axe, Lord Rama, Krishna, Buddha and Kalki).
An early Christian gnostic sect, the Docetae (from the Greek dokesis, meaning appearance or semblance), also known as the Illusionists, believed that Christ did not come to earth in the form of a man but only inhabited the semblance of a body, a concept similar to that of an avatar. This concept the Catholic church considers heretical.
The concept of the avatar has been picked up in the information age by Internet users to describe their online representations. It can be any visual representation from a simple, logo-like picture to the complex animated figures used to inhabit the virtual communities or gaming environments of the web. The animated online avatars come in many forms but can be divided into three main types: the combat avatar used in shoot-em-up games such as World of Warcraft; the social avatar that provide the opportunity for social interaction; and the commercial avatar (known as a bot), used by an organization to interact with its customers.
The recent film, Avatar, combines both concepts: the hero lives in another world by using the avatar, a flesh and blood alien representation of his body which he controls by computerised mind control. On one hand it is a real world manifestation of the man but on the other it is a virtual body controlled by a computer interface.
It is unusual for the language of information technologists to have such a conceptual and spiritual basis. There are various suggestions as to who first used avatar to refer to the online personality or manifestation of a person. However, considering that avatar originally described the earthly manifestation of a heavenly god and that an online animated character represents the manifestation of a real person, it is more difficult to understand why you wouldn’t use this most appropriate word.
It is Australia Day today (26 January), our national day. Today was chosen because it is the day the First Fleet arrived from England with Australia’s first immigrants from Europe.
Consequently, Australia had its language replaced with a mix of formal English and a collection of odd dialect words from working class London and rural Britain. However, many native words were adopted for the unusual and unique animals that the Europeans had never seen before and for which they had no words. There are also words taken from other rather unexpected places.
bandicoot
Bandicoot originally described several species of large rat from southeast Asia. Early settlers mistaking Australia’s marsupial Peramelids for the Asian rodents mistakingly called them bandicoots. It is a Telugu word from central India, which means pig-rat.
The rabbit bandicoot is also known as a bilby; which comes from the Yuwaalaraay Aboriginal language of northern New South Wales.
barramundi
Barramundi is said to be word from a Queensland Australian Aboriginal language meaning large-scaled river fish and probably referred to the lungfish (Ceratodus forsteri)of the central coastal areas.
The name, once picked up by the Europeans, spread across northern Queensland and was used to refer to a range of large freshwater fish. It is now used to refer to the Asian Seabass species, Lates calcarifer and has become a powerful brand!
budgerigar
The budgerigar, Melopsittacus undulates, was given its scientific name in 1840 by John Gould (Australia’s great ornithologist). Melopsittacus comes from Greek and means melodious parrot while the species name, undulates, is Latin for undulated or wave-patterned.
Several possible origins for the English name budgerigar have been proposed but it seems to be a compound between the Gamilaraay language gidjirrigaa (perhaps gijirr yellow or small and gā head) and a word of unknown language, budgery or boojery meaning good.
cicada
Cicadas are a family of insects that are not native to Australia so the word was already known. The name is directly derived from the Latin cicada, meaning buzzer. In classical Greek, it was called a tettix, and in modern Greek tzitzikas. Wonderfully imitative!
cockatoo
The word cockatoo dates from well before Australia was settled by Europeans, and is a derivation from the Malay, kakatuwah. There are several explanations: it means vice or grip, that is, from its strong beak; it is a representation of the birds call; or it comes from the Malay kakak for elder brother or sister and tua for old.
Seventeenth-century variants include cacato, cockatoon and crockadore. Cokato, cocatore and cocatoo were used in the eighteenth century.
dingo
Dingo, comes from the Dharruk language, originally spoken in the area around Sydney. It referred to the tame dogs of the Aboriginal people although the English also used it to describe wild dogs. Some bushmen continue to call the wild animal by the Dharruk term: warrigal.
echidna
The echidna is an egg-laying, hedgehog-like mammal. Its name is usually explained as coming from the Greek word, echidna, meaning snake or viper but this makes little sense. It is much more likely to have come from the Greek, ekhinos, meaning hedgehog. Ekhinos may be translated as snake eater, and as hedgehogs eat worms it may be a more sensible explanation.
emu
The derivation of the emu’s name is uncertain. It may come from Portuguese explorers who used ema to describe large birds such as cranes and ostriches. They may have picked it up from the Moluccan word eme. The language of the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, in Indonesia was heavily influenced by Arabic traders in the 12-13th century.
galah
The galah, the pink-breasted parrot, is derived from gilaa, a word found in Yuwaalaraay and neighbouring Aboriginal languages.
kangaroo
A widely held belief is that when Captain Cook (the first Englishman to discover Australia) asked a native what a kangaroo was called; the Aboriginal answered “I don’t know” thus giving it the name. It is a nice story but untrue.
Cook first reported kangaroos in 1770 when he landed to make repairs at the Endeavour River in northeast Queensland. The word gangurru is a word for kangaroo in the northeast Aboriginal language of Guugu Yimidhirr.
koala
The word koala comes from the Dharuk language’s word gula. There is a mistaken belief that koala means doesn’t drink.
The scientific name of the koala’s genus, Phascolarctos, is derived from Greek phaskolos pouch and arktos bear. Its species name, cinereus, is Latin and means ash-coloured.
kookaburra
Kookaburras are large kingfishers native to Australia and New Guinea; the name comes from the Wiradjuri language, guuguubarra, which is an imitation of its call.
platypus
The platypus’s genus, Ornithorhynchus, is derived from a combination of the Latin word, ornitho, for bird-like and the Greek, rhunkus for bill. Platypus, the original scientific name, comes from the Greek for flat-footed. The scientific name had to be changed as it had already been allocated to a genus of beetle.
There is no agreed term for the plural of platypus, with platypus, platypuses and even platypoda being used.
possum
Possum is a shortened form of opossum. Opossums are marsupials of the Americas and the name, wapathemwa, comes from the native American language, Algonquian.
rosella
The brightly coloured parrot we call the rosella, genus Platycercus, was often seen at Rose Hilll near Parramatta (in western Sydney) by the early migrants and so was called the Rosehill Parakeet. This became the Rosehiller and was eventually pronounced Rosella. Platycercus means broad-tailed or flat-tailed.
taipan
The taipans belong to a genus of large, highly venomous snakes native to Northern Australia and New Guinea. The inland taipan, endemic to Northern Queensland, has the most toxic venom of any snake in the world. Taipan comes from the Wik-Mungkan Aboriginal language of central Cape York Peninsula, Queensland.
The word taipan also describes a foreign businessman or a trader in China, often the chief executive of a business. Taipan, in this sense (and surprisingly), has no relationship to the snake and is derived from the Cantonese: tái, meaning big or great and bān, meaning class. A near synonym is tycoon, a Japanese word for great lord or prince that originated from the Chinese: tai meaning great and kiun, meaning lord.
wallaby
The smaller cousins of the kangaroos picked up their name from Dharuk, the local Aboriginal dialect of Sydney, where they were called walaba.
witchetty grub
Witchetty grubs are the large insect larvae of several moth species, they are traditional Aboriginal bush tucker (foraged food). Witchetty comes from the Adynyamathanha language: wityu meaning hooked stick and vartu, meaning grub. The word originally referred to a hooked stick used for foraging for the grubs but then was given to the grubs themselves.
Ten witchetty grubs per day are sufficient for survival in the bush. The flavour is almond-like and similar to peanut butter.
wobbegong
Wobbegongs are a species of carpet shark that can grow up to three metres long; they have razor-like teeth and are said to be moody and short-tempered. They are not generally dangerous. Wobbegong is believed to come from an Australian Aboriginal language, it means shaggy beard, which refers to the growths around its mouth.
wombat
The word wombat, for our large burrowing marsupial, was recorded in 1798, from the Aboriginal Australian womback, wombar. The Oxford Dictionary describes it as having a general resemblance to a small bear.
We leave the noughties, the first decade of the 21st century, and are now in the Year 2010. Common usage will determine whether this is going to be two thousand and ten, twenty-ten or Oh-ten but nonetheless it is the Year Something Ten and not the Year Something Decem, as it would be in Latin, or SomethingDeka, as it would be in Greek.
Ten is proudly an Old English word, uninfluenced for more than a millennium by foreign language pretensions or even by marauding heathen hordes. Old English was a Germanic language and had four main forms: Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon corresponding to four independent kingdoms in ninth-century Britain.
We can thank Alfred the Great (849-899), the King of Wessex, for the success of ten. Ten comes from the Mercian dialect (tien being the West Saxon version). Alfred protected parts of Mercia from being invaded by the Vikings.
In 865 the Great Heathen Army of Danish Vikings arrived in England. To them 10 was tiu. They soon overwhelmed Northumbria, East Anglia and Kent on the eastern coast. Wessex, in the south-west, was invaded but Alfred, after early setbacks, managed to stay Viking-free.
The eastern parts of Mercia, which had stretched across the English Midlands, succumbed to the Viking hordes while the western portion survived in a strong alliance with Alfred (the combined armies of Mercia and Wessex eventually defeated the Vikings about three decades later).
Alfred managed to push back the Vikings to the northeast and eventually he became King of England. He ruled much of the south of England. His scholarship and patronage of literature led to the adoption of Late West Saxon as the first standard for written English. The borrowing of ten from the Mercian dialect probably dates from this time.
Alfred the Great’s achievement was to resist the marauding Viking invaders who were intent on imposing their heathen culture on the Christian, civilized Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain. Had the Vikings triumphed we could well be living in the Year Two Thousand and Ti (ti is the modern Danish word for ten) but because of Alfred we are living in Two Thousand and Ten instead.
del.icio.us
digg
Furl
Spurl
Technorati
Yahoo My Web
