English Actually

ENGLISH ACTUALLY

Bob Yareham

Obrapropia

© Texto: Bob Yareham

© Edición: OBRAPROPIA, S.L.

Calle Martí, 18

46005 VALENCIA

www.obrapropia.com

ISBN: 978-84-16717-99-6

Queda prohibida, salvo excepción prevista en la ley, cualquier forma de reproducción, distribución, comunicación pública y transformación de esta obra sin contar con la autorización de los titulares de la propiedad intelectual. La infracción de los derechos mencionados puede ser constitutiva de un delito contra la propiedad intelectual (arts. 270 y ss. del Código Penal)

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

ORIGINS

Back to the Future (Geeks Like Greeks)

Alpha Beta

Apocalypse Now, Armageddon Later

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Passing The Acid Test

Me Paranoid? Who Said That?

Peeping Toms and Doubting Thomases

Declining Values

Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte?

Something should be done

Where You Lead I Will Grovel

Mine’s Barmy

Slightly Off Balance On A Greek Pedestal

All Change!

Beyond Good and Evil

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Coming in from out of the World.

Under the Stars

Falling Standards

Tantrums and doldrums

MEN, WOMEN AND OTHERS

Your Wildest Dreams

All Men are Beasts

Ho, ho, ho

Sex and the Single Married Man

Viagra Falls (In Praise of Spanish Women)

Divide By Life

Le Vice Anglais

Understanding Women

Evil Women

A Flick of the Wrist

I’ve Got You Under My Skin

Dear Sir or Madam

The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Woman

POLITICS, RELIGION AND FOOTBALL

The Sunny Side of the Planet

Slightly Armageddon

God, Horses and Women

History Lesions: Gulf War II

History Lesions: A Good War

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Voter

So that was Easter……

My Fellow Europeans

The Language of Politics

God Bless Ye Merry Atheists!

English for killing people

Do You Speak Churchill? Britain’s Other Winnie (Part Twelve)

All men are…….

Burn the Bible!

Burn the priests!

At Your Service: a preliminary manifesto

Did Jesus Wear A Kilt?

MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR LEFT!

Englishlessness

Stealing from Foreigners

English Racism!

Uncle Sam, We have A Problem!

There’s a Place for us

Nothing Good Ever Came out of Scotland

A little bit of gratuitous anti-Americanism

It may all be Greek to you………..!

The Past Present

Shakespeare’s Children

A Plague on all your Houses!

Curry and Chips (Starters)

Curry and Chips (Main Course)

Common as Muck

A House Is Not A Home

A Cake too Far

All the colours of the rainbow

As Far As It Goes

Across the Pond

Heave Away

The Burden of Being British

Gluttons for Pun-ishment

SUBJECTS MATTER

The Floor Rushed up to meet me

The Target Rich Language of War

The Beastly Sixties

Swallows and Sparrows

Pumping the Seed Inside

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and the other one.

On the Cards

Mind our Language Part One: Sweet FA

Mind our Language Part Two: A Nice Shag

Love Can’t Buy me Money

Kleenex Culture

Footnotes

Flower Power

Say it with Flowers

Dress Senselessness

Bird Flew

Death and taxes

Cat Food

Business Language for Beginners.

The Wonderful World of Nature

Food for thought

Fly like a penguin, sting like a beer!

I slept with David Beckham

Potty-Training

Divine

What’s So Great About War?

All the Rages

All You Need

Reading the Daily Mail

Beat to Quarters!

The Old Man and the Sea

On Certainty

As Brisk as Ketchup

THE LANGUAGE THAT YOU USE

As Sliced Bread

The Eric Speeves Guide to Good Writing

The Irreplaceable Eric Speeves

Da Shakespeare Code

The Hair of the Dog

Plumbing the Depths and Scraping the Barrel

Word Droppings

Stating the Obvious

Making Do With English

Playing with words

Opposites Attract

A Rational Supposition Regarding Conspiracy

The Line’s Busy

The Things we Say.

The Long and the Short of Things

Roaming, Wandering, Pondering, Paddling.

Offshowmanship

Time for a Quickie

GRAMMARIANS, LIBRARIANS AND OTHER OCTOGENARIANS

Come Pound with Me

Jekyll and Hidden

Order And Law

The Ups and Downs of Phrasal Verbs

When the Ship Comes In

Presumably Prepositional Perplexity

I Must Be Off

Help, I Need Some Auxiliaries.

Jargon: Big words in small ponds.

Pretty Polysemy

Skyscrapers, Suitcases and Underwear

The Short, The Sweet and The Curly

The Great Bowel Shift

Up mine, up Theirs, up Yours.

The Catchphrase in the Corn

The Human Conditional

Grievous Bodily Shaw

POSTLOGUE

Football and Philosophy

Given the choice between naked truth and thinly veiled lies, I would always opt for discretion.

Eric Speeves

Teaching English means never not having to say ‘it depends’.

Bob Yareham

For all those people who encouraged me to keep going instead of earning some real money; among them:

Harald Weissling, Peter Baker, Jeff Whittington, John Hill, Andy Birch, Salvador Capuz, Jaime Almenar And The Late, Great Mike Binns.

Thanks to some of my better-known Valencian students: Agnes Noguera, Eduardo Beut, Pablo Romà, José Miguel Cortés, Carlos Bertomeu, Salvador Capuz, Francisco Mora, Jaime Almenar, Carmen Dolz, and also to the lesser known Hoi Polloi; you know who you are.

PROLOGUE

I can remember very clearly the first time I became aware of the English language as an objective reality. It was in the summer of 1978 in Reading when I noticed that a lot of English verbs suddenly adopt an –ed at the end when you’re talking about the past.

It was I suppose unfortunate that this moment of blinding clarity should have come ten minutes into my first ever lesson as a teacher of English as a foreign language, and not before.

Fortunately, people can be kind, even students, and I was helped through the rest of the lesson, and the rest of the course in fact, by the intelligent suggestions and observations of the very people who were paying serious money to learn from me, as if ‘native speaker’ were a bonafide profession.

Speaking a language fluently doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the slightest idea how it works, but languages have structure, and they have history, and their words and expressions tell stories.

I’ve been teaching English for some time now since that day in 1978, and I think I might be getting better. The English language is a thing of great beauty and it still manages to surprise and delight me. I’ve become a bit of an etymologist over the years, and one of those insufferable bores at parties who interrupts a perfectly interesting conversation that actually has a topic to say: did you know…..? and then prattles on about the undeniable practicality of the non-defining relative clause, or that Wednesday has a D in it because it was originally Woden’s day.

Being born English has been a happy accident for me, allowing me to ripen as a teacher and earn a reasonable living without ever having had to actually develop any practical skills other than those of dissembling, subterfuge and obfuscation.

ORIGINS

Back to the Future (Geeks Like Greeks)

It is a curious fact that innovators on the cutting edge of state of the art vanguard developments in technology often look back in time when moving human history forwards. There’s nothing like a nice bit of Ancient Greek it seems to give a name to your latest world-shattering app.

Francisco de Orellana 1511-1546 was not in the technological vanguard, although he did blaze new trails in South America, where he came across indigenous female warriors. These reminded him of stories from Ancient Greece of hardy women-folk who would cut off a breast in order to shoot their bows and arrows better.

The Greek words for without and breast are ‘a’ and ‘mazon,’ which is what he decided to call a rather large river flowing by. In 1994, Jeff Bezos was looking for a name to describe his company, with which he wanted to flood the market with products in great volume, and so chose the river with the most volume, Amazon.

The Greeks, who had Gods and Goddesses for just about everything, were not into monotheistic multi-tasking, preferring task-specific deities. The Goddess of strength, speed, and victory, whose job was to fly around battlefields rewarding victors with laurel crowns, was called Nike, as sportswear company founder Phil Knight knew full well back in ancient 1971.

When the Ancient Greeks were looking for predictions, wanting to know their fortunes, usually on the battlefield, they would hustle down to Delphi and consult an old lady or sometimes a veritable coven of them. This was considered a good enough reason for Ed Oates, Bruce Scott, Bob Miner and Larry Ellison to name their company after her/them, Oracle, founded in 1977 and the second largest software company after Microsoft.

Think of Microsoft and you think of e mail; but who put the e in e mail? The e stands for electronic, and electricity was another Greek-borne gift, as the Greek word ‘electra’ means amber, a stone that produces sparks when struck. And of course when your e mail doesn’t work because of a Trojan virus, it is so called remembering what the Greeks snuck their soldiers into Troy inside a wooden horse.

Bill English may not have been thinking of Greeks when he decided to name the device we use to move around our computer screens a ‘mouse,’ nevertheless it comes from the Greek word ‘mys,’ meaning mouse or muscle, as the Greeks were reminded of mice running up and down their arms when they flexed their muscles.

The Greeks also gave us television, telescope and telegraph; not literally, but ‘tele’ meant far off and so Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi used it for the first time in 1900.

But it isn’t only the Greeks that scientists and innovators look back to. The Zoroastrianism religion is a pre-Christian belief dating back to the 4th century BCE. The main God was Ahura Mazda, God of Gods, and especially of fire and light, and therefore eminently suitable to name a lightbulb company after.

When Jim Kardach read a story about the Vikings, one of the characters stuck in his mind, and so when he was striving to unite a telephone and a computer, he remembered the 10th century King, as one would who strove to unite the Danish tribes, and called his device Bluetooth after that monarch.

All computer calculations are made with Algorithms, named after Muhammad ibn Mûsâ al-Khwârizmî (780-850 AD), the father of Algebra. The Latin form of his name was ‘Algoritmi.’

Albertus Magnus (1206-1280) was a German theologian who was credited with building a machine that could answer questions. When Star Wars was still only a sub-particle in some ancestor’s gene pool, he decided to call it an ‘android,’

Taking the Latin words ‘anthrop’ (human being) and the suffix -oid (having the form or likeness of).

Karel Capek was a Czech writer. In 1920, he first used the word robot, which means ‘slave’ in Czech. The book, Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots), was about a factory that made artificial people.

Computer programmer Ward Cunningham was hanging around Honolulu airport one day and was told to take the shuttle bus to another terminal. The bus had a name, ‘fast’ in the Polynesian language: ‘Wiki Wiki.’

Jerry Yang and David Filo only went as far back as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to name their company after a tribe of semi humans, ugly, stupid and dirty, like them; the Yahoo.

Edward Kasner (1878–1955) was a US mathematician at Columbia University working with big numbers, and who needed a word to describe numbers with 100 zeros; a happy hunting ground for those of his persuasion. Instead of looking back in time, he looked down at his knees, to his 9 year old nephew Milton Sirotta. Milton suggested Googol, later Google, a word that stuck with Stanford students Larry Page and Serguéi Brin, who created in Google 1998.

Those annoying unmanned mini-planes called drones are everywhere now. The name has been used since 1946, although the word is much older, dating back to the 16th century and referring to the male bee and also to the sound it made.

Male bees might be considered as typically male, in the sense that they make no contribution to their society apart from impregnating the queen from time to time.

Alpha Beta

It’s interesting to ponder why the letters of the alphabet look like they do, and why some, like B or D, change their shape quite considerably when they are in lower case (small) as opposed to upper case (capital), while others like C or O don’t.

Thomas Carlyle said: Certainly the art of writing is the most miraculous of all things Man has devised. Or maybe that was just an early form of advertising from someone who, after all, made his living from the scribbled word.

The Sumerians were the first to consider writing necessary, round about the year 3100 BC give or take a rainy season, flooding, invasion and plague.

The oldest known alphabet dates from 1800 BC and consists of some recently discovered hieroglyphics scratched onto rocks. Man has felt the need to scratch on rocks for a long time now, pretty much in the same way as elephants scratch on trees in fact, although the urge has worn off quite a bit in recent years, despite the fact that some of us still occasionally take a chisel to the screen when we lose an hour’s work after pressing the wrong button.

Our own dearly beloved Anglo Saxons used a very basic pre-alphabet consisting of ‘runes’ (straight lines scratched onto wood, bone or stone) called, rather quaintly I think, ‘futhorc.’ The name comes from the first two letters of this very basic alphabet, in the same way that ‘alphabet’ comes from the first two letters of the Greek one.

The basis of our present alphabet was brought to the shores of Northumbria by Aidan and a bunch of Irish missionaries and it was Roman.

Europe has never produced a true alphabet, one with symbols representing sounds. Our own alphabet was a development through the Egyptian, Semitic, Phoenician, Greek and finally Roman ones.

Originally, like Chinese, our letters were pictures depicting something, but as the number of things grew, so did the need for some kind of regulation. The Chinese alphabet has some 50,000 characters, which makes Chinese typewriters among the most interesting in the world. President Kennedy, always keen to show off his urbanity and erudition, used to enthral people by pointing out that the Chinese symbol for ‘trouble’ was two women under a single roof; which is probably why his Secret Service was kept so busy ensuring that this rarely occurred.

As far as the individual letters of our alphabet are concerned, the letter ‘A’ was originally ‘Aleph,’ the Semitic word for ‘ox.’ The pictogram represented its horns, with the horizontal bar representing some kind of ploughman’s straps.

The letter ‘B’ can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet and to the Hebrew word ‘Beth,’ meaning ‘a house’ in Hebrew, although to be honest, to me it has always resembled an aerial view of an ample pair of breasts. The woman would have to be headless to make the picture absolutely accurate, but it might take days before anyone noticed; especially her husband.

I’ve been thinking a lot about breasts recently and have come (in the scientific sense of the word) to the conclusion that they are definitely getting bigger; which is strange because most things that men like to play with are getting smaller. I’m seriously concerned that if they keep on shovelling all these growth hormones into the troughs of the cattle we consume then before long you won’t be able to twirl your partner on the dance floor without being knocked unconscious by a swinging, swirling jungle of uncontrolled mammaries.

The letter C is supposed to have originally been the symbol of the camel, an animal whose importance has dwindled somewhat with the advent of the motor car, but which was once a respectable item of exchange for purchasing wives and other chattels.

The D also goes back to Phoenician and Hebrew and was a symbol for doorways; in Hebrew it is called ‘daleth,’ meaning ‘door.’ Incidentally the D in LSD (I mean the money not the drug) is a reference to the Latin ‘denarius’ (penny), just as the L refers to the Latin ‘Libra’ (pound). Lb, as in weight not as in LBW, comes from the Latin ‘libra pondo,’ meaning ‘a pound in weight.’

E is our most common letter, followed surprisingly by T; surprising until you remember all the this, that, them, there, their, then and therefores that we use, especially on Tuesdays and Thursdays; all of which is a gift from our Scandinavian invaders, worshipers of Thor.

Please come again!

The least common letters are q, x and z, although scientists are furiously inventing new words every day to compensate; quark, quantum and quasar to name but a few.

The F symbolised a peg for the Phoenicians and Jews (I suppose pegs have lost some of their former importance) and was branded onto a felon’s face in medieval times to warn future victims just as the A was sewn onto the dress of an adulteress. Ok so I know these approaches are not in vogue, but along with the occasional hand amputation I think such measures would make more than one would-be villain think again and take up sociology instead!

The G, as you probably guessed, represented the head and neck of a camel for our Phoenician ancestors, who had a proclivity for these animals only equalled by our own stalwart, strident Lancastrians with their abiding affection for our woolly friends.

The letter H originally had two horizontal bars and represented a fence, which may or may not have something to do with why we always drop our aitches, just like horses drop their riders in the Grand National. The Phoenicians (who also fell, but under the irresistible steam-roller of history, not in the Grand National), called it ‘Heth,’ which is a reasonable enough liberty to take seeing as how they invented it.

One of the commonest mistakes of English speakers is to write ‘an hotel,’ supposing that if ‘an hour’ is correct then ‘an hotel’ must be too. This is to forget that the use of the article depends on whether the first letter is pronounced as a vowel or consonant and not whether it is written with one. Consequently we say ‘an’ umbrella but ‘a’ university; the word ‘university’ is pronounced as if it began with a ‘y.’

The letter ‘I’ originates from the human finger, and its delightful little dot first appeared in the 11th century. This became necessary to distinguish a double ‘i’ from a ‘u.’

‘I think therefore I am’ doesn’t have the same kind of zappy catchiness when you realise that ‘I’ was originally ‘ik.’ Anyone, Descartes or otherwise, overheard saying Ik think therefore Ik am is likely to find themselves under arrest and hauled up before Magistrates.

The Phoenician alphabet had no vowels, which may explain the widespread movements of this race of sailors and merchants.

The Romans only used capitals; small letters were not introduced until medieval times to make cursive script faster.

Before the 19th century the letters I and J were exactly the same in written English, which was unfortunate for people with names like Jim, or even Ian, who might have been Jan to his/her friends. J in fact, along with V, was unknown to Shakespeare that famous author of ‘The Merchant of Enice,’ ‘Two Gentlemen of erona,’ ‘Romeo and uliet’ or ‘King ohn.’

The letter K came to English from the Greek ‘kappa,’ which the Romans used instead of the C, which they discarded.

The L used to be drawn as an ‘oxgoad.’ As I don’t in fact know what an oxgoad is and can’t find it in a dictionary, I will just nod my head sagely at this point and mumble something about it being a pity that the youth of today are losing touch with the culture of their ancestors as I tut my way down to the pub for a flagon of mead.

The Phoenician symbol ‘M’ represented waves, which it still could if we stretched it a bit. Their letter ‘M’ was in fact called ‘Mem,’ which meant ‘water’ in Hebrew. The Romans used the letter ‘M’ to represent a thousand, possibly because of the waves of thousands of Roman troops who brought civilisation to the rest of the world at the point of a spear, or maybe because the Latin word ‘mille’ meant a thousand. Our humble mile, which has resisted decimalisation despite our politicians, represented a thousand paces of a Roman Legion’s formal parade step.

The Egyptian ‘N’ was a fish, which was pronounced ‘nun’ in that language; quite appropriate when you think about some of the strange fish who have got themselves to a Nunnery.

The ‘O’ was symbolised by the eye. It is the only letter that has not changed in the last two and a half millennia, although it used to be accompanied by its socket and a dot representing the pupil in the middle. The Anglo Saxon ‘O’ was called ‘oedel,’ which meant ‘home.’ ‘O’ is also a Belgian surname and a Japanese town. Less significantly, it is what most people say when their trousers fall down revealing unconventional underwear.

For the Phoenicians and Hebrews the ‘P’ meant ‘mouth,’ although judging by its shape they must have named it tongue in cheek.

‘Q’ grew out of Latin and is almost always followed by a ‘U’ in English. In fact Us literally queue up to follow Q.

The Romans called ‘R’ the dog letter as it sounded like a dog’s snarl.

‘S’ was ‘shin’ in the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets.

‘T’ was the last letter of the Greek alphabet and still is the last letter in Hebrew, hence the expression everything stops for tea.

The Greek alphabet, to which we all owe so much, had 24 letters. The Greeks changed ‘right to left’ writing to ‘left to right;’ there existed an intermediary stage known as ‘Boustrophedonic,’ which meant ‘turning like an ox,’ a movement known to any farmer.

The classic Roman alphabet does not contain the letters ‘J’, ‘U’ or ‘W.’ The consonant ‘J’ was not differentiated from the vowel ‘I’ for many centuries. The vowel ‘U’ and the consonant ‘V’ were the same for ions and the ‘W’ was really a ligature of V&V. In fact in Spain the ‘double U’ is called a ‘double V’.

U-Boats were so called because they were ‘Unterseeboot’ (Undersea Boats).

The ‘X’ was the 14th letter of the Greek alphabet and represents an unknown quantity for unknown reasons, (which means that I don’t know).

Illiterate people have signed their names with an ‘X’ for many centuries to bear witness before Saint Andrew’s cross that they act in good faith. They would then kiss the cross as a kind of promise and reverence, which is why the cross represents a kiss in the letters we used to send to our girlfriends before they became our wives.

The Greeks invented the letter ‘Y;’ in fact in Spanish it is called ‘I griega’ (Greek I). That most triangular of Greeks, Pythagorus used the ‘Y’ as a personal symbol. For him it represented the path of virtue which is one, but, if once deviated from, the farther the lines are extended the wider becomes the breach. Those Greeks took their virtue really seriously considering what they used to do with the serving boys!"

Apocalypse Now, Armageddon Later

This humble mumble about English etymology has absolutely nothing to do with the end of the world; but when you’re competing for attention with war, disaster and sport on the book racks, you have to do something to attract the casual browser!

Not many people realise that Canada was actually a mistake. When I say ‘mistake,’ I don’t refer to the impressively rugged mountain scenery nor to the nobly sweaty lumberjacks; but to the name itself. The name ‘Canada’ comes from the Huron Indian language.

Anyway, when the explorer Jacques Cartier asked a Huron Chief what this place is called (in French presumably) the Huron is purported to have waved his arms around and said Kanata, which in his no doubt very expressive language meant (and still may do if there are any Hurons still around) ‘a collection of lodges.’ Not to be fobbed off with anything so obvious, Jacques decided that that would do very nicely to describe what is in fact, a very impressively large collection of lodges and other things, stretching between two oceans.

The origin of the word ‘freelance’ is in fact a mercenary. It was first used by Sir Walter Scott in his novel ‘Ivanhoe’ to describe knights whose lances were literally free (as in available, not as in without cost) to be hired.

Mercenaries are unsavoury characters, as are freelancers generally, being mostly people who couldn’t hold down a real job, and we etymologists are a pretty shifty lot too, always looking for connections however spurious. I have personally stretched plausibility as far as it will go in a desperate attempt to relate mint, as in a place to print money and mint, as in a herbal sauce to pour over your roast lamb, although without any notable success so far.

The herb’s name derives from the Greek nymph Minthe, who was transformed into a herb by Proserpine the wife of Pluto (the God of the underworld not the dog of the Disney). It is considered an aphrodisiac (the herb not the dog; although to see the way some dog owners carry on, you could be forgiven the confusion) and has been chewed on by wishful thinkers for eons; in fact Aristotle, who was, like most philosophers, not the most enthralling person to invite to an orgy, forbade its use among Alexander the Great’s soldiers, claiming that it distracted them from conquest and slaughter.

In fact the financial version of the word ‘mint’ comes from the Latin word ‘moneta,’ which meant, and is the root of our own word, ‘money’. ‘Moneta’ was an epithet for ‘Juno’, the Goddess of the Moon and the origin of our month of June; the month in which she was worshipped more than others. The original Roman mint was established in her temple. This probably explains why the words ‘moon’ and ‘money’ look so similar; as does ‘month,’ which was after all simply a measurement of the phases of the moon, which is what a month originally was before we changed to a solar calendar.

‘Moneta’ became ‘mynet’ in Old English and then ‘mynt’ in Middle English. Isaac Newton was once in charge of the English mint, which was situated in the Tower of London, although rumour has it that he was much more interested in seeking out alchemists’ gold than in stamping royal faces on lumps of debased metal.

Pertaining to this, the reason that the hallmarks we put on our bullion are called hallmarks, is because the marks were originally stamped at the Goldsmith’s Hall in London.

The Mimosa is a tree with some pretty interesting leaves; while not as stimulating as the leaves of the coca or tobacco plants, they do have an interesting tendency to react to their surroundings. They react to violent stimuli such as cloudy weather by folding in upon themselves. The Greeks believed that they were mimicking the actions of some animals such as the tortoise, hence the name.

The Greek word for ‘face’ was ‘mimo’ and our words ‘mime’ and ‘mimic’ come from these words.

Fields of mustard swaying in the breeze might easily be confused with fields of rape. In fact they both come from the ‘brassica’ genus of plants, although I would much rather have mustard with my roast beef than rape.

Mustard takes its name from ‘must,’ the ‘new wine’ which was first used in the creation of the mustard paste.

Frederick the Great was very taken with mustard, believing that it did wonders for his masculinity. He invented a drink made of powdered mustard, coffee and champagne to be drunk before launching himself upon the serving wenches; so perhaps the link with rape is more than just a botanical one.

Rapeseed derives from the Latin word for ‘turnip,’ ‘rapum.’

In fact ‘rape,’ ‘rapture’ and ‘ravish’ all have the same origin, the Latin word ‘raptus,’ the act of ‘carrying someone off.’

Having clarified those points (I hope to everyone’s satisfaction) my next pending task is to establish a semantic relationship between the words ‘unencumbered’ and ‘cucumber,’ and to explore the exciting possibility that our ancestors in fact used ‘cucumber’ as a verb.

Saint Wilgefortes was, to all intents and purposes, a woman, and one who fulfilled her religious duty by praying to God to give her a beard, which, so the story goes, He did. The purpose of this was, quite naturally, so prevent men from ravishing her, although one of her former lovers decided, in a pique of rage, to have her crucified. According to Thomas More, her followers later changed her name to Saint Uncumber, in the hope that she would help them to unencumber themselves of their husbands.

Perhaps it was her cold attitude towards men that is the connection; we do after all have the expression ‘as cool as a cucumber,’ although this would seem to reflect the scientific fact that the interior of a cucumber can measure up to (or perhaps down to) 20 degrees less than the surrounding air temperature.

Interestingly enough, the expression dates from 1732, but the scientific proof from 1970, which only goes to show; (the perfect expression to use when you’re not really sure what it goes to show at all).

Still, better late than sorry.

What have the Romans ever done for us?

It has become popular these days, when we’re all more or less honorary Americans, to turn our backs on the Romans and mock their somewhat inferior weaponry. And yet we owe them a debt of gratitude which can be overlooked, but should not be under-rated.

To begin with the whole idea of toasting began with the Romans, and I don’t refer to them putting Celtic villages to the torch, for which few of us still bear significant grudges, but to toasting each other with a glass of wine, or champagne, or water if you’re driving.

Basically, the Romans used to put bits of burnt toast in the wine to reduce the acidity and improve the flavour, which is no doubt, judging from the smell, what my wife is up to in the kitchen at this very moment.

Nobody would ever think of calling a Roman insincere, at least not to his face; and yet it was Roman insincerity that gave us the word in the first place. Roman tradesmen were apparently not averse to a trick or two, and marble quarry workers would happily fill in the cracks of a piece of marble with some wax. The Roman Senate however decided to put a stop to this and ruled that all marble must be sold ‘sine cera’ (without wax), hence the word.

They also knew a thing or two about politics. The word ‘sinister’ originates from the Latin word for ‘left.’ Left-handed people, being a minority, have always been looked upon with suspicion.

The Romans were solid soldiers, and being soldiers they knew that a woman’s place was after the battle, when the lads could spend their salary (which comes from the ‘salt,’ with which they were paid) on the pleasures of Venus, the Goddess of love, and unfortunate origin of ‘venereal disease’ (etymologically speaking of course).

The Romans subjugated a large part of the known world and condemned many thousands to slavery and a life-time of hard manual labour and wine pouring. Recently captured prisoners were placed in a yoke. When they were under the yoke they were ‘sub iugum,’ the origin of the word ‘subjugate.’

Even something as vital as the question mark was granted to us by the Romans; and where would we be without question marks I ask myself? They took a long time coming. At first they let you know it was a question by adding ‘questio’ to a sentence. This was then shortened to QO. Then to avoid confusion, as Empire builders must, they changed that by putting the Q above the O (not an easy thing to do on a computer), which finally deteriorated into the loveable ‘?’ that we use today.

Although our sturdy mile is not as Anglo Saxon as we might like to think, coming as we know from the Latin ‘milia passum’ (a thousand paces), ‘pacing’ being something that the Legions took very seriously, we should not worry; if we want to dig in and conserve our racial purity we can always go back to measuring in furlongs. This word comes from the medieval English ‘furh’ (a word I frequently whisper to my beloved in bed) and ‘lang’ meaning long (need I say more?) ‘Furh’ actually means furrow, and was the average length of a field that a peasant could raise the energy to plough at one time.

At the height of their empire the Romans were abundant; waves of them descended upon our humble Celtic villages with their sharp swords and iron discipline. It is appropriate therefore that the word ‘abundant’ should derive from the Latin word ‘unda’ meaning ‘wave,’ under which our ancestors bravely perished in their thousands.

Resistance to a Roman army was ‘absurd,’ another word they probably shouted over pathetic wooden defences. This word comes from ‘surdus’ meaning ‘deaf;’ and he who resisted absurdly met a quick and not quite painless death.

Once they’d finished the necessary killing, the Romans brought ‘affluence’ wherever they went; and well-needed baths. ‘Affluo’ means ‘to flow towards,’ and in the same way that our streams flow towards a major river, so our cattle, our crops and our young men flowed towards the Roman coffers. Still, no hard feelings, eh?

The Romans were Pagans, although they wouldn’t have thanked you for pointing that out. In fact the word ‘paganus’ meant ‘countryman’ to them. After the Christians started taking over the Roman Empire, their ideology was adapted more readily in the cities. The country folk preferred their naturalistic multiple Gods and were consequently labelled ‘pagans.’

It may be that the words ‘river’ and ‘rival’ sound similar for a good reason. A ‘rival’ (‘rivalis’) was literally one who lived on the other side of a stream (‘rivulus’).

To us the Romans may seem a peculiar people. The word ‘pecu’ meant cattle and ‘peculiaris’ signified ‘pertaining to private property’ (as one’s cattle do). As cattle were a form of wealth, it isn’t surprising to discover that ‘pecunia’ also meant ‘money.’

The Romans, like the Greeks, were notoriously bi-sexual, which may be why the Christian church over-compensated by becoming asexual. On the other side of the river, the Pagans were all in favour of sex, although it was the Greeks who offered us the word ‘orgy’ (no thanks, just a half of bitter if you don’t mind). Nevertheless, when a Roman ‘leapt upon you’, it wasn’t necessarily because of your undeniable attractions; the Latin ‘insultare’ literally meant ‘to leap upon someone.’

Characters in Shakespeare were not averse to exclaiming By Jove! which was a reference to the God Jupiter, the Roman God who was supposed to augur favourable events, thus making his worshippers ‘jovial’ people.

When your children are making ‘pests’ of themselves, you would do well to remember that the origin of this word is the Latin ‘pestis,’ meaning ‘plague,’ which most people would agree is marginally worse than the average children’s birthday party.

Speaking of kids, ‘precocious’ is also a word of Latin origin, meaning ‘pre-cooked,’ or ‘ripened before its time’ if you prefer. And speaking of kids, the word ‘brat’ is not a Roman invention, and neither is Matt Groenig a Roman; he is however the creator of ‘The Simpsons.’ Homer and Marge are his real parents’ names. Louisa and Maggie were his real sisters, and Bart is merely an acronym for ‘brat.’

Passing The Acid Test

The words for ‘bank’ and ‘bench’ in Italian are the same: ‘banca.’ This is not a coincidence. In medieval Italy, bankers plied their trade from a bench and were required by law to break it if their business failed; which is where our word ‘bankrupt’ comes from; it literally means ‘broken bench’ ‘banca rupta’ in Italian.

I’m not sure why our rivers have banks; perhaps it’s got something to do with the cash-flow problems of our Water Authorities since they were privatised; or those of their customers more likely.

My etymology dictionary tells me that it comes from the Old Norse word ‘banki,’ which is detestably uninteresting. It also says that bank holiday dates back to the 19th century; but the problem with etymology, there are always at least two explanations for everything. My rule of thumb (an old carpentry expression) is to choose the most interesting one and damn the torpedoes.

Bank holidays, although seeming to be a very British tradition, were invented by Franklin D Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Two days after his inauguration he declared a four day bank holiday in order to stop a run on the banks and rush through emergency legislation.

To tell a friend that they can bank on you sounds a bit like telling them that you’ll take their home and all their worldly goods if they ever stop giving you money, but undoubtedly this is just a superficial reading of the situation.

The famous comment about laughing all the way to the bank was made by that superb pianist Liberace, a man who put to shame drab pop stars like Elton John.

Airplanes also bank, causing many a passenger to lose his dinner.

Somebody once kindly referred to my work as being largely balderdash. Such perception certainly deserves a reply and so I will point out that ‘balderdash’ is a 16th century term which at first meant a frothy drink and later strange drinks made by mixing unlikely ingredients such as beer and milk; although the Danish word ‘balder’ means ‘noise’ and may be another source.

Incidentally, the word ‘prostitute,’ curiously enough, comes from the Latin verb ‘prostituere,’ which merely means ‘exposed to sight for the purpose of sale;’ not so far away from the banker’s bench when you think about it.

Many of us will have often said that we would give a ‘pretty penny’ for something we see ‘exposed to sight for the purpose of sale,’ and the pretty penny in question was a coin minted during the reign of King Henry III in 1257. It was a gold piece worth twenty shillings, was unpopular at the time and quickly disappeared, which meant that it later became rare and valuable. How it came to be called a penny is probably due to inflation or some other highly technical economic concept.

The acid test was the means by which the gold content of a coin or artefact was measured using nitric acid. There were many dishonest traders in those times, unlike today, and many people who would ‘welch on a bet.’ This expression, which is over a hundred and fifty years old, refers to Welshmen who, presumably, at that time, unlike now, were considered untrustworthy.

Obviously such expressions should be banned in today’s climate of political correctness as they might inspire somebody to abuse innocent Welsh people, who sing delightfully, have an admirable language and used to be good at rugby.

As for the Scots; William Wallace was the only one who had any guts, and look what happened to his!

Me Paranoid? Who Said That?

Sometimes I lock myself away in a room, go down on my knees and cry out: God, God, there must be more to life than this! After a respectable pause I will then usually get up, open the door and ask what’s for supper. If it’s lentils I might return to the room and ask a few supplementary questions.

We live in an age where people are obsessed with themselves as never before. Everywhere you look you are offered courses, books and DVDs designed to help you get to know yourself better, to get in touch with your own feelings, to realise your potential and develop your interpersonal skills. In other words to stare longingly at your navel until you are blue in the id.

I suppose Sigmund Freud is largely responsible. He, after all, took Shakespeare at his word and started looking for method in our madness. This is only a short step away from shaving your head, wearing orange robes and dancing and chanting through Hyde Park with a tambourine for companionship and never having to worry about smalltalk anymore.

Perhaps I’m a bit old fashioned, but it seems to me that the meaning of life is to find sustenance, build shelter, reproduce, and when you are no longer of use to the tribe, to wander off across the ice like Oates saying that you might be gone for a while.

I can’t help thinking that something is seriously wrong if, while half the world suffers from hunger and dysentery, the other half is prepared to pay a hefty fee to experiment with the therapeutic advantages of colonic irrigation.

Perhaps I’m a killjoy, I don’t know, I like my pleasures like any other man, but as Shopenhauer said, life is full of pleasure and pain in more or less equal parts; and he used the striking image of two animals, one of which is eating the other, in order to demonstrate this concept.

Pleasure is a funny thing. Some people apparently need to hang themselves with plastic bags around their necks wearing women’s panties to overcome their boredom, others go into politics.

On the television during programmes with live audiences you’ll sometimes see a group of faces light up in ecstasy when they realise they are on screen, as if it constituted some kind of achievement. People coming across a camera crew in the street will jump up and down with their fists punching at the sky shouting I’m on TV! I’m on TV! They will then rush around asking all their friends if they were watching. The answer will be: yes I saw you, then I sprinted down to the Public Library and took out Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, and you were in there too.

A television is a complicated machine. Few of us could explain how it works at a technical level, and the fact is that it is infinitely more complicated than the garbage it transmits to us. The only way we can be sure that the illusion described in the film ‘Matrix’ hasn’t come to pass is that they would have surely created more convincing TV programmes and not tarnished such clever technology with the kind of stuff that is served up today. The word ‘television’ comes from the Greek; ‘tele’ meaning ‘far away’, and ‘vision’ meaning ‘vision.’ The same concept applies to telescope, telephone and telepizza.

One of the most impressively lucrative new businesses today is psychiatry. These new witchdoctors seduce us by saying that being barmy is just like a cut on your leg; all you need is the right treatment with a qualified professional who has read books, but still can’t figure out his teenage daughter, or why his wife is having an affair with an acupuncturist from Shanghai.

The language of psychiatry is replete with classical references, anything to lend it an undeserved air of respectability. The Greek word ‘psykhe’ means the mind, although it also describes the soul, spirit or breath; obviously they didn’t have the technology we have today. ‘Pathos’ means suffering, therefore a psychopath is one whose mind (soul, spirit or breath) is suffering.

Unfortunately the world seems to be full of psychopaths who like to share their suffering with others. Not a day passes without some psychopathic husband murdering his wife and then (in the best of worst cases) turning the shotgun on himself. It’s only a pity that, despite having enough mental clarity to operate a weapon, they don’t have enough to realise that by reversing the order of their actions, they might alleviate their own suffering and the world’s at nobody’s expense.

In 1688 a Mulhausen physician named Johannes Hofer dipped into his Greek dictionary to name a medical condition he had been studying. He took the words ‘nostos’ meaning return and ‘algos’ meaning suffering and put them together as ‘nostalgia.’ Greek literature’s most famous book is all about this, as Ulysses strives to return home to his faithful wife in ‘The Odyssey;’ although it isn’t clear if the nostalgia so prevalent in the book is