If you’ve been keeping up with the HH “500 Words” YouTube series, you’ll so far have found out about 280 of the 500 words we’re going to look at this year. But this week, we’re turning things around.
So from hypernyms and hyponyms to holonyms and holophrases, this week’s video is looking at 10 Words for Other Words.
(And for more words like those, then be sure to check out the HHarticle that inspired it over on Mental Floss.)
One word that didn’t make the final cut here, however, is backronym. We’ve discussed some backronyms on YouTube before—mainly in our 10 Word Origins Stories That Are Completely Untrue video—and it’s a myth-busting topic that’s always worth revisiting.
Backronyms are words or phrases that are widely and mistakenly believed purported to be acronyms. Posh, for instance, is often claimed to stand for “port out, starboard home”, a reference to moneyed cruise ship passengers paying for the best views on both the outward and homeward bound parts of their voyage. Golf too is said to stand for “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden” (or ladies do something else that begins with F). And the distress signal SOS is famously claimed to stand for “save our souls”, or “save our ship”.
“It says, ‘you may have been missold PPI.’”
None of these is true, of course. Posh is simply thought to come from an old slang word for cash or loose change. Golf is probably descended from an old Dutch word for a club, colf or kulf (albeit with perhaps some influence of a Scots word for a stout blow to the head). And the letter combination “SOS” was chosen as a distress signal for no other reason than that its rhythmic and symmetrical combination of dots and dashes [· · · – – – · · ·] is so immediately noticeable. Incidentally, precisely the same combination of dots and dashes could also be used to spell the letters “VTB” in Morse code, but the designation SOS was used because of its own symmetry and memorability.
In Morse code, the distress signal SOS [· · · – – – · · ·] could just as accurately be interpreted as the letters VTB.
— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 22 July 2016
Before SOS was adopted in the early 1900s, however, the standard telegraph distress signal was “CQD” [– · – · – – · – – · ·]. It’s fair to say that that’s hardly the most recognisable or memorable arrangement of dits and dahs on offer, so why pick that?
Well, on their own the letters “CQ” had long been used as a telegraphic distress signal as they sound identical to the French word “sécu”, an abbreviation of sécurité. The Marconi Telegraph Company simply added a letter D to this to make their first recommended distress signal, CQD. But just like SOS, CQD also fell foul of backronymy and before long myths had emerged claimed that it stood for “come quickly—danger!”, or “come quickly—drowning!”
Problems with interpreting the confusing set of letters “CQD” over a poor signal, however, eventually led to calls for a more immediately recognizable distress signal to be adopted, and so SOS was officially introduced in 1906.
Ah, how the time flies. It seems like only yesterday HaggardHawks embarked on a series of fifty Top 10 YouTube videos, back when David Cameron was Prime Minister and the UK wasn’t being laughed at by everyone, but here we are! How. The time. Flies.
Unbelievably, we’re already at the halfway point in our series, as this week’s video—looking, appropriately enough, at the meanings and origins of 10 Words To Do With Halves—is the 25th of the 50 in the series. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re officially embarking on the home stretch...
Out of all the halves in the video, however, one word that nearly-but-didn’t make the final cut was Laodicean, a synonym (as Thomas Hardy fans will doubtless know) for half-heartedness or apathy, or else a byword for someone who is indifferent or uninterested in important matters.
The word derives from Laodicea, a city and region of Ancient Greece now located in modern-day Turkey, whose inhabitants were notorious for their religious indifference. In the Book of Revelation, the Laodiceans were one of seven ancient peoples or Christian churches—alongside those of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyateira, Sardis and Philadelphia (no, not that Philadelphia)—to whom messages were to be sent to stir them from their apathy. And in his letter to the Laodiceans, the author of the Book of Revelation John of Patmos accused them of being “neither cold not hot.”
“I would thou wert cold or hot,” he exclaimed, “so, then because thou are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth”. Good old John of Patmos, such a way with words.
It’s this image of someone or something being “neither cold not hot” in their opinions that led to the adjective Loadicean appearing in English in the early 1600s, as another word for a lukewarm disinterest, or apathy regarding important issues like politics and religion. Likewise, Laodiceanism is another word for unconcern or indifference—one thing John of Patmos certainly couldn’t be accused of.
So a lot of very big things have happened this week. For one, the UK voted to leave the European Union for some reason. Secondly, the shelves on the HH bookcase were starting to sag a bit in the middle, so they were rotated. And thirdly, the four new chemical elements discovered at the start of the year were given their names.
NONREPRESENTATIONALISMS is thought to be the longest English word that can be spelled out using chemical symbols. pic.twitter.com/l5T1Fk1H35
One of those stories is of much higher import than the others, of course, but don’t worry—those shelves will be fine. As for those chemical elements, well, the names chosen were nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganasson. Each has a story attached to it: the first three honour their places of discovery, Japan, Moscow and Tennessee respectively, while the last honours Russian-Armenian physicist Professor Yuri Oganessian.
Elsewhere on the periodic table, however, there are another 114 elementary etymologies to tell—although we only had enough time (and bandwidth) to talk about 10 in this week’s video…
Of course Yuri Oganessian and (SPOILER ALERT in case you haven’t watched the video) Vasili Samarsky-Bykhovets aren’t the only eponymous honourees on the periodic table. Elements like einsteinium, curium, bohrium and seaborgium honour some of the most famous names in science. Nor are nihonium, moscovium and their neighbours the only geographical namesakes: besides tennessine, America can offer berkelium and californium, as well as americium, while the UK has strontium, which takes its name via the mineral strontianite from the village of Strontian in the Scottish Highlands. And then there’s gallium, element number 31, which uniquely manages to honour both its place of discovery and—if the rumours are trumours—its discoverer.
The father of the periodic table, Dmitri Mendeleev (who has the element mendelevium named after him), predicted the existence of gallium in 1871, but it wasn’t until four years later the snappily-named French chemist Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran obtained a sample of it from the mineral sphalerite. The metal de Boisbaudran discovered was bright silver and brittle, and melted just above room temperature. He called it gallium, from Gallia, the Latin name for the Roman territory of Gaul, corresponding to modern-day France. But it’s possible he had other ideas in mind.
One of de Boisbaudran’s many, many names, Lecoq, means “the rooster” in French, while the Latin word for “rooster” is gallus. Had de Boisbaudran wryly named gallium after himself? Some fellow scientists at the time accused him of such, but he insisted that the connection was purely coincidental. Even if it was, it’s certainly a very convenient one and makes de Boisbaudran an interesting footnote to the dozens of famous names honoured on the periodic table.
But one city that didn’t make the final cut was the largest city in the UK and the second largest city in Europe. The home of Britain’s smallest police station. The world’s oldest underground network. Two of the world’s best universities. And a woman with a pig’s face. Yep, we’re talking about London. So why—to resurrect our occasional series of Questions About The Language You Never Even Thought About—is London called “London?”
In terms of etymology (or rather toponymy, to give the study of place names its proper name), London is something of a mystery. Actually, that’s putting it mildly—over the past few hundred years, a number of linguists, scholars and geographers have put their heads together and come up with little more than a mutual discrediting of each other’s theories and one gigantic Buckingham Palace-sized question mark. Why is London called “London”? The short answer at least is that no one really knows.
That’s partly to do with a lack of written evidence. It’s also partly to do with the fact that we’re dealing with exceptionally old words and word elements, the barest bare bones of the language. And partly it’s because London is such a unique name—it really just doesn’t look like any other ancient word or word element that we know about, which makes working out what it might mean an especially tricky business. But just because we don’t have a definitive answer, doesn’t mean that we don’t have any answer at all.
By far the oldest explanation on record is that of the twelfth century Welsh scholar and historian Geoffrey of Monmouth. In his History of the Kings of Britain (c.1135), Monmouth claimed that London was founded by and named in honour of a pre-Roman king of Britain named Lud, who built the city on the site of an even more ancient city called “New Troy” that had been founded by Brutus, grandson of Aeneas, in 1100BC. It’s a nice story alright. It’s just a shame it’s complete rubbish.
Geoffrey of Monmouth probably based his mythical tale of King Lud on that of a legendary figure from Welsh folklore called Lludd Llaw Eraint, or “Lud Silver-Hand”, who is said to have saved Wales from a plague of dragons and a magical giant who had the power to send people to sleep by playing music; to escape the giant’s soporific tunes, Lud dipped his head in a bucket of water. Oddly enough, it’s likely that none of that ever actually happened, which makes the idea that London is named after a dragon-slaying monarch with his head in a bucket somewhat implausible. Oh, and linguistically it’s highly unlikely that a word like Lud would morph into something like “Lond”. But still—dragons and giants. That’s probably all the proof you need there.
“...and over there is the bucket I put my head in.”
As unlikely as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s theory might be, he nevertheless might’ve been onto something by suggesting that London was named after or in honour of someone—but precisely who that “someone” was is another question.
For a while, one popular theory was that London was founded by or named in honour of someone called Londino or Londinos, a hypothetical name supposed to derive from an old Celtic word meaning “wild” or “fierce”. But there’s no historical precedent for that name whatsoever, and (without getting into too much detail) phonologists tend to agree that a Celtic word beginning lond– would give you a modern English word pronounced something like “loaned”, not like the “lund” of London. So despite being more than century old, this theory is now widely discredited.
Alternatively it might not be the Lond– part of London that’s taken from someone’s name, but rather the –don. It’s been suggested that London might once have been called Lunadin,Luandanor Lan Dain, an ancient name meaning something like “moon temple of the goddess Diana”. Sir Christopher Wren certainly believed that he had unearthed a Roman temple dedicated to Diana when he rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral, but again the linguistic and historical evidence just isn’t there to back this theory up.
So if it’s not an honorific name, how about a geographical one?
Another theory is that London was originally llyn din,or llyn dain, both Welsh-inspired names literally meaning “lake-fort” or “pool of the river” respectively (the “lake” and “pool” in question possibly being the widening, deepening part of the river Thames). They’re both plausible theories, but linguistically a word like llyn would be expected to produce a modern name like Lindon-with-an-I, not London-with-an-O. And London has almost always been London-with-an-O: the earliest records we have of it are all from ancient Roman Latin documents and inscriptions that refer to it as Londinium or Londinion. The people of London themselves were the Londiniensi—a word taken from a stone tablet dating from around AD 150 that was unearthed at an archaeological dig in Southwark in 2002, and which provides us with the earliest known evidence of the name “London” that we have. And for the Romans to have spelled their “London” with an O (or a U, as they sometimes did) casts doubt on those Welsh-origin theories. Instead, we might have to look even further back in time.
Bring on the wall!
In 1998, Professor Richard Coates—then President of the English Place-Name Society—put forward perhaps the most convincing argument for the origin of the word London yet: Plowonida. If you think Plowonida sounds more like something you’d use to treat athlete’s foot rather than the origin of one of the most famous cities in the world, you’ve got a point. But the reason this looks so unfamiliar—and so unlike the modern name “London”—is because we’re dealing with impossibly old pre-Celtic language.
In Coates’ theory, Plowonida would have started life as a hydronym (a river name) referring to the part of the Thames on which London was founded. It combines (brace yourselves, we’re going even further back in time here) two Proto-Indo-European word roots meaning “to flow”, plew– and nejd–, whose descendants are found in river names all across Europe. In combination, it’s theorized that these two elements might have referred to the first noticeably deep, fast-flowing part of the Thames, where it was impossible to ford or cross on horseback.
Knowing what we know about pre-Celtic language, calling the river itself Plowonida would have given the town or village that stood on the banks of the river the name Plowonidonjon, which over centuries of simplification and alteration would have become a Celtic name along the lines of Lūndonjon, then the Latin name Londinium, and ultimately the modern English name “London”. If Coates’ theory is correct, that would mean the name “London” could be interpreted as something like “the town at the unfordable part of the river”—which is a considerably better theory that “the town of the king who put his head in a bucket”.
As with a lot of particularly ancient place names like this, that’s just one of a few competing theories of course, nevertheless it’s still the most likely of the bunch suggested so far. But as we said back then, it’s easy to forget that when it comes to etymology—or rather, toponymy, which is the branch of linguistics dedicated to place name origins—the names of countries and continents, rivers and seas, towns and cities (and all the other proper nouns in the language for that matter) behave just like “ordinary” words. Put another way, there’s a reason why everywhere is called what it’s called. And it’s 10 of those stories and meanings that we’re looking at in this week’s 500 Words video.
And this isn’t the only proverbially lazy Lawrence to find his way into the dictionary. Long before lazy people had “Lawrence on their backs” there was an earlier expression, Lawrence bids wages, that the OED explains was used to imply that “the attractions of idleness are tempting”—or, in other words, doing nothing looks like a lot of fun. Even Lazy Lawrence itself has been used as a nickname for an idling lazybones for centuries, as well as being the name of a mischievous fairy or sprite supposed to induce lethargy or idleness.
So apologies to anyone named Lawrence, but you’re immortalized in the language as a metaphor for laziness. Still, it’s better than being known for a one-year prison sentence or destroying gates, I suppose. But why Lawrence? And why laziness?
Well, one theory is that the connection is purely coincidence, and that Lawrence just has a nice alliterative ring to it—so this could just as easily be “Lazy Linda”, or “Leon bids wages”, or “to have Loretta Lynn on your back”. It’s certainly plausible (well, apart from the Loretta Lynn bit) but needless to say there are a couple of more imaginative explanations on offer. And one of them even involves a barbecued saint, what more could you want?
One theory is that phrases like these refer to St Lawrence’s Day, 10 August. That date puts it bang in the middle of the “dog days” at the height of the summer, when you can expect to endure the hottest, sultriest, most stifling weather of the year—the kind of weather that makes you want to lounge around and do nothing except lounging around doing nothing. The dog days are traditionally said to last anywhere from mid July to early September, and take their name from the tradition—probably started in Ancient Greece, if not Ancient Egypt—that the appearance during the summer months of Sirius, the Dog Star, just above the horizon before sunrise somehow amplified or added to the heat of the Sun. In fact, the so-called “heliacal rising” of Sirius always occurs sometime around August 10–11.
You cannot be Sirius
So is our proverbially lazy Lawrence inspired by the highest hottest heat of high summer? Possibly. But we can’t ignore the fact that there’d be no St Lawrence’s Day without St Lawrence himself.
Lawrence of Rome was the highest-ranking of seven deacons that served under Pope Sixtus II in the 3rd century AD, whose job it was to oversee the church’s treasury and distribute alms to the poor. Everything was going splendidly for Lawrence until August AD258, when a letter arrived at the Senate from the Roman Emperor Valerian—who was imprisoned in Antioch, having left Rome to fight a war with the Persians—calling for all Christian senators to be stripped of their titles and assets, and for all priests, bishops and deacons to be arrested. If they renounced their faith and agreed to perform a sacrifice to the Roman gods, they would be freed. If they refused, they would be put to death. Valerian, it seems, wasn’t going to let a little thing like being held in prison 2,000 miles away stop him from running his Empire.
In accordance with Valerian’s orders, the Senate rounded up Pope Sixtus and his seven deacons. All eight refused to comply with the edict, and so, on 6 August 258, they were beheaded—all, that is, except Lawrence. As the archdeacon in charge of the treasury, Lawrence was given a three-day stay of execution to collect together all the church’s wealth and hand it over to the Roman state; instead, he reportedly spent the next three days giving as much of the money away as he could. On August 9, he returned to the Senate with a group of Rome’s poorest, sickest, neediest citizens, and boldly claimed that these were the true treasures of the church. The Prefect of Rome, frankly, was far from pleased.
Whereas Pope Sixtus and his other deacons had been beheaded, Lawrence’s singular act of defiance earned him an especially cruel death: the sentence was passed that he should be roasted to death, suspended on a gridiron above roaring fire.
Baby catching was all the rage in Ancient Rome
There’s some disagreement over whether or not Lawrence was actually burned to death in this way, because some sources claim that the Latin record of his death (assus est, “he was roasted”) should actually have read passus est, “he suffered”. But whether true or not, the question still remains—what does an early Christian martyr’s gruesome execution have to do with laziness?
Well, Lawrence’s death was so notably brutal that it soon became the subject of a macabre bit of folklore that claimed midway through his roasting Lawrence had quipped, “Turn me over, I’m done on this side!” It might sound more Groucho Marx than it does Archdeacon of Rome (and you can make your own mind up as to whether he actually said it or not), but this legend nevertheless apparently inspired a joke that Lawrence was “too lazy” to turn himself over. So is this the true origin of our lazy Lawrences? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it’s a good story all the same. And one well worth telling round the barbecue this summer.
