London

A few weeks ago over on the HaggardHawks YouTube channel, we looked at the origins of 10 city names, covering everywhere from Chicago (“a place to grow wild onions”) to Funafuri, the capital of Tuvalu (“banana-woman”).

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, Luandan or 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”.

No one knows for sure what the name LONDON actually means. http://t.co/oLcpVgYaIF

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 9 June 2015

Lazy Lawrence

A long-forgotten (but no less useful) expression popped up on the HaggardHawks Twitter feed the other day:

‘To have Lawrence on your back’ is an old 18th century expression meaning ‘to act lazily’ or ‘to not pull your weight’.

— Haggard Hawks (@HaggardHawks) 14 April 2016

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.

Nose-wipe

This tweet nosed its way onto the @HaggardHawks feed yesterday:

To NOSE-WIPE someone is to cheat or deceive them.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) January 26, 2016

And, in response to a quick query tagged onto it…

Be good to get links to more info on your tweets @HaggardHawks :)

— G (@Gordon) January 26, 2016

…here’s a quick history of nose-wiping—or rather, here’s a quick explanation of why nose-wipe means “to cheat someone”.

In this context, nose-wipe dates back to the early seventeenth century, but an all but identical expression, to wipe someone’s nose, had been in use in English since the late 1500s. Likewise, to play with someone’s nose was an Elizabethan expression meaning “to ridicule someone” or, as the OED eloquently puts, “to make a game of someone”.

Both phrases probably have their roots in Latin, which it’s worth knowing had a specific word for the process of wiping your nose: emungere. That’s an etymological relative of mucus, as well being the origin of a handful of unfamiliar and unsavoury English words like emunctory (“having the function of conveying waste”), emunction (“the act of clearing the bodily passages”), and emunct, a seventeenth century adjective meaning “keen” or “acute” (probably derived from blowing your nose to improve your sense of smell).

In Latin, however, the verb emungere could also be used in a figurative sense, to mean “to cheat” or “deceive”, and in particular “to cheat someone of their money”. It’s from there that the English nose-wipe in the tweet above eventually came from—but why or how did “wiping your nose” come to have lying, swindling connotations?

Well, the clue probably lies in the adjective emunct above: wiping or blowing your nose improves your sense of smell, making it keener or more acute (especially if you’re snottering). The comic writers of Ancient Rome are thought to have picked up on this implication and played on it, using nose-wiped to mean “taken advantage of” or “duped” in the sense that “wiping someone’s nose” would make them keener, more alert—and so less likely to be duped a second time. To have wiped someone’s nose ultimately meant that you had somehow taken advantage of them, but that they had learnt from their costly mistake and were now keen not to fall for the same trick twice…

St Lucia

Here’s an intriguing little fact that popped up on @HaggardHawks the other day:

ST. LUCIA is the only country in the world named after a woman. http://t.co/oLcpVgYaIF pic.twitter.com/65njVdQGaZ

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) September 23, 2015

This is actually (shameless plug #1) one of the choicer entries cherry-picked from the Haggard Hawks fact book, Word Drops. And although (shameless plug #2) you can find out more about it (shameless plug #3) in the award-nominated book, maybe all this deserves a bit more explanation here.

On a global scale, the etymologies of country names are a bit of mixed bag. Some are so straightforward that they require no explanation at all (we’re looking at you, United Kingdom). Some are named after their inhabitants (France = “the land of the Franks”), or their colonists or conquerors (Philippines = “islands of Philip II of Spain”). Some are more descriptive (Bahamas = “the shallows”, Bahrain = “two seas”), or more poetic (Luxembourg = “little castle”, Zimbabwe = “land of stones”). And some are just plain weird (Cameroon = “land of shrimp”).

St Lucia takes its name from Lucy of Syracuse, a third-century Italian saint (the patron saint of blindness and throat infections, no less) who was martyred during the Roman Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians in AD 304. Although the reasoning behind the name is unclear, we nevertheless know that it was chosen by the island’s first European explorers and settlers, the French, who arrived there in the early 1600s—although rumour has it that the island was being used as a base by French pirates long before then. 

But according to the US Department of State, as of 2015 there are 195 countries (defined as “a people politically organized into a sovereign state with a definite territory recognized as independent”) in the world. Is it really true that only 0.51% of them are named after women? 

Unfortunately, yes—although there are a couple of very close calls.

One of the most famous almost-but-not-quites is the Republic of Ireland. Both Ireland and its Irish equivalent Éire derive from Eiru, the name of a goddess of the land and sovereignty in Celtic mythology. On a similar theme, one theory claims that Tunisia takes its name from Tanith, a Phoenician goddess of the moon who, with her husband Baal-Hammon, was the principal deity of the ancient city of Carthage.

But as far as eponymous women on our list of 195 countries go, that really is it: if we exclude all the ancient mythological and supernatural beings, St Lucia really is the only country named after a woman. Although, as a handful of astute followers noted, there is one final possibility:

@HaggardHawks @IMcMillan Does St Helena count? pic.twitter.com/mxYACQsmug

— Steve (@SteveTrees) September 23, 2015

@HaggardHawks @IMcMillan St Helena? Island I know but....?

— Alastair McWhirter (@exexcc) September 23, 2015

St Helena is a tiny 50 square-mile volcanic island in the South Atlantic, home to around 4,500 people. It takes its name from St Helena of Constantinople (the patron saint of difficult marriages, should you need one), who was the wife of Constantinus Chlorus, ruler of the Western Roman Empire from AD 293-306. 

Can we add St Helena to our list? Well, the problem here is that St Helena is officially classed as just one-third of a British Overseas Territory known as St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cuhna—the collective name for a clutch of British-controlled islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. And so long as we’re limiting our list to independent countries, St Helena just doesn’t fit the bill. 

So it seems St Lucia it seems really is the only country in the world named after a woman. But, hey—it could be worse: 

Admiral

Last week HaggardHawks tweeted this screenshot, taken from a brilliantly-titled dictionary of Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present, published in 1890:

  

And, well, it probably all needs a bit more explaining.

Admiral is one of those deceptively straightforward words behind which lies the kind of history that keeps etymologists awake at night. They should really cut down on the caffeine after 5pm. It’s all a bit of a bewildering hodgepodge—the OED’s etymology alone comprises a 1300-word essay—but the basic theory is that, at its root, admiral derives from the old Arabic title amir, as in emir and emirates. This ancient title was then borrowed into and reshaped by the vocabularies of various Mediterranean countries and cultures around 1000 years ago, and via the all-conquering Normans eventually began to appear in English texts in the early thirteenth century.

Initially, admiral was used as a fairly general title for a ruler, a leader, or a military commander; things get confusing when we try to find out how it came to be used exclusively of a naval leader.

The first person we know to have held a naval title along the lines of admiral was the not-all-that-impressive-sounding George of Antioch in the early 1100s. George, who had already worked in several similar naval positions in Arabic-speaking North Africa, was put in charge of the fleet of the even-less-impressive-sounding Roger II, a twelfth-century King of Sicily, who gave him the Latin title ammiratus ammiratorum. 

It’s around this time that (etymologically, at least) things become a little hazy: it could be that George’s title ammiratus is a Mediaeval Latin spin on the Arabic title amir, which George would certainly have known of having served in North Africa. Alternatively, it could be a purely Latin title, with no connection to Arabic at all—on its own, ammiratus ammiratorum literally means “the most admired of the admired”.

Wherever the word’s ancient history might lead us from there, however, the fact is that by the time of George’s appointment Sicily too had been conquered by the Norman French—and it was the Normans who were responsible for transplanting the title from the sunny southern Mediterranean to the rainy European northwest. 

So. If that’s the story of admiral, what about the admiral of the narrow seas?

Well, in eighteenth century slang—long after admiral had established itself as a naval title in England—a curious trend emerged for applying fictitious “titles” to various people and characters. So a Captain Queernabs was “a shabby, ill-dressed fellow”, and a Captain Cork was a man who was “slow in passing the bottle”. A boatswain-captain was the naval equivalent of a swot: an overly competent seaman who never seemed to put a foot wrong. An admiral of the red was a wine-drinker. An admiral of the white was a coward. An admiral of the blue was a drunkard, or a publican (who would typically wear a blue tabard). An admiral of the red, white and blue was a ludicrously or ostentatiously dressed person. And an admiral of the narrow seas was the queasy, mulvathered seafarer mentioned above.

A vice admiral of the narrow seas, meanwhile, was an even worse drinking companion: