10 Misnomers - 500 Words Ep. 28

Looking back through the HH archives the other day, we happened across this little gem of information:

The name of Paris' PONT NEUF means 'new bridge'. Completed in 1607, it is actually the oldest bridge in the city. pic.twitter.com/Xk7CduXZYH

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 4 April 2014

The Pont Neuf, then, is a misnomer—its name really doesn’t (or, at least, no longer) fits it. 

And from strawberries to the Big Bang Theory, this week on the Haggard Hawks YouTube channel we’re looking at 10 misnomers precisely like this one:

In fact the dictionary is so full of examples like these that cutting our list down to just 10 here was a brutal business. Koala bears, for instance, aren’t bears. Irish moss is a marine algae. Chinese chequers aren’t Chinese. Fireflies aren’t flies. Peanuts aren’t nuts. Thousand Island dressing takes its name from an archipelago of 1,864 islands. And let’s not get started on the Hundred Years War…

But as misnomers go, this one will forever be one of the best:

FRENCH PINK is the name of a shade of yellow.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 18 May 2016

So how the dickens did that happen?

The colour pink as we know it today takes its name from the Dianthus flowers known as “pinks”. They in turn are thought to take their name either from the use of pink as a verb, meaning “to perforate” or “to give an ornate trim”, or else from the even older use of pink as an adjective, meaning “half-closed” or “winking” (which was, at the risk of making this discussion even more complicated, the original meaning of pink-eye). If that’s the case, then pink probably has its roots in Dutch, and might even be a distant relative of blink.

The “pink” in French pink is something of a mystery, but one very plausible theory claims that it derives from an old German word, pinkeln, literally meaning “to pee” (hence its yellowy colour). This murky-yellow shade of pink is actually the oldest recorded use of the word pink in English—and remains in use in artistic contexts—but nowadays the pale red version has all but taken its place.

Why? Well, no one is entirely sure, but one popular theory is that the use of pink to refer to pale red derives from the popularity of Dianthus flowers in Elizabethan England. According to the story, pinks were one of Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite flowers and so were grown and sold all across England in the sixteenth century. That helped to establish their name, pink, with their pale fuchsia colour, and it’s that colour that the word has remained attached to ever since. 

10 Words For The People You Know - 500 Words Ep. 27

You might have spotted this tweet over on the HH Twitter feed the other day:

FRAME-PERSON is an old English dialect word for an overnight visitor whose stay demands a great deal of planning beforehand.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 11 July 2016

Which, as our friends at UWG English pointed out, is probably not the most appropriate word for that kind of person…:

I call this person a "NEVER-AGAIN." https://t.co/u6FsU53yFs

— UWG English (@uwgenglish) 11 July 2016

But what about all the other characters that we know and love and love to hate? What other words are hiding out in the dictionary to describe them?

Well, from unknowledgeable critics to penniless friends, this week’s HH YouTube instalment is looking at 10 words for precisely those kinds of people:

One word that didn’t make the final cut here, however, was zoilist:

A ZOILIST is an unfair or unnecessarily harsh critic, or someone who particularly enjoys finding fault in things.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 13 May 2015

Just as (spoiler alert if you haven’t watched the video yet...) the ultracrepidarians of this world take their name from a story from Ancient Greece, the carping zoilists have their roots in a fourth-century BC Greek grammarian and literary critic named Zoilus of Amphipolis. 

Born in what is now Macedonia c.400 BC, Zoilus was one of the most scathing critics of the Greek poet Homer. Despite being the author of both the Iliad and Odyssey and one of the most well respected writers of Ancient Greece, writing two cornerstones of Western literature was not enough, it seems, to impress Zoilus. 

In a long-lost essay called Homeric Questions, Zoilus challenged Homer’s portrayal of the gods, and called out a number of plot holes and inconsistencies in his works: in the Iliad, for instance, Menelaus dies in battle only to be seemingly revived to witness the death of his son several pages later. Other writers might have fallen victim to Zoilus’ criticizing glare of the years, but it was for these criticisms of Homer’s writing that Zoilus was best known—and for which he deservedly the nickname Homeromastix, the “Scourge of Homer”, among his contemporaries. 

Zoilus’s writings have not survived, and as a result it’s unclear just how harsh his criticism really was. But the enduring popularity of Homer’s works has nevertheless led to history being somewhat less kind to his harshest critic. 

Various historical accounts record that Zoilus died having been thrown from a cliff by an angry mob, stoned to death on the island of Chios, or else tossed alive on top of a funeral pyre in Smyrna. Whether any of these gruesome demises ever truly occurred is debateable, but instead it’s likely that they are all just myths and smears rooted in little more than the unpopularity of Zoilus’s opinions—but it’s precisely those opinions that led to Zoilus the zoilist earning a permanent place in the language. 

10 Fossil Words

A while ago on the HH blog, we looked at the history of time immemorial—an expression now used to mean “time beyond memory” or “time out of mind”, but which began life as a legal term in mediaeval England referring to anything that happened before the coronation of Richard I, on 6 July 1189.

The legal term TIME IMMEMORIAL originally strictly referred to any event occurring before 6 July 1189.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 6 June 2015

And that’s just one of 10 so-called “fossil” words that we’re looking at in this week’s YouTube video.

Fossils, or “fossilized” words, are words—like the immemorial of time immemorial, the shrift of short shrift, and the lurch of left in the lurch—that survive in the language only in one stock phrase or expression.

It’s fair to say that words like these are often hiding in plain sight: the phrases they appear in are so familiar that the obscurity of the word or words they contain slips by unnoticed. So you might not know what a caboodle is (it’s actually an alteration of boedel, an Old Dutch word for a person’s belongings), but you’ll know precisely what someone means when they talk about the whole kit and caboodle. You might not know that a pale is a wooden picket fence, but if someone or something is beyond the pale you’ll know it’s outside the accepted standards. And if we agree to let bygones be bygones, we let go of earlier contentious issues or disagreements. But what exactly is a bygone?

Well, back in the fifteenth century, bygone was an adjective rather than a noun, essentially meaning “former”, “elapsed”, or “that has gone by”—Shakespeare spoke of “the by-gone-day” in A Winter’s Tale in 1611. From there, the word came to describe anything dead or departed, and later obsolete or anachronistic—Dickens spoke of “the byegone old Assembly Rooms” in a letter dated 1869. But for bygones to be plural, it has to be a noun. So when did that happen?

Well, based on the original meaning of the word, back in the mid-sixteenth bygone came to be used not merely to describe something that has gone by or expired, but essentially as a placeholder name for it itself. Soon everything from overdue payments and financial arrears to a criminals’ previous convictions were being labelled bygones, before what we might call the modern meaning of the word—that is, “any past incident or event”—began to emerge in the mid-1600s. According to the OED, the earliest record of the phrase bygones be bygones itself dates from 1648. 

10 Colour Names

A few weeks ago, this intriguing factoid popped up on the HH Twitter feed:

English had no word for the colour ORANGE until oranges began to be imported from the continent in the Middle Ages https://t.co/pVK6Y1JNvr

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 19 May 2016

It’s an interesting story, which we touched on again in this week’s YouTube video, all to do with the names and etymologies of 10 colours—including the perfect word to describe the perfect colour of a perfectly ripe banana (spoiler alert: it’s not yellow), to the reason why magenta is called magenta, and what connects a Tudor folk dance to a bowl of porridge and to a pile of goose droppings. Truly, it’s an embarrassment of riches.

But back to oranges. Yes, that fact above is completely true: the earliest record of an orange in the English language comes from the early 1400s; the earliest record of something being described as orange in colour, dates from as relatively recently as 1557. But things have been orange coloured since—well, forever. 

Take foxes, for instance. They and their orangey-brown fur have been around ever so slightly longer than the English language (a few hundred thousand years, give or take), which meant that writers in pre-orange-importing times had to get creative when it came to describing what colour they were. As in this line, from Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale:

His colour was bitwixe yelow and reed,

And tipped was his tayl and both his eeris 

With blak, unlyk the remenant of hise heeris;
His snowte smal, with glowynge eyen tweye. 

  

[His colour was between yellow and red,

And tipped was his tail and both his ears

With black, unlike the remainder of his hair;

His snout small, with two glowing eyes.]

With no word for the colour orange, Chaucer—writing in the 1390s—had to resort to describing the fox in terms of yellow and red. And things stayed like that for another century-and-a-half, until a connection between the colour orange and it’s corresponding fruit was made, and the English language finally gained a separate name for the second colour of the rainbow. (Shameless plug #4,229: there’s more on this in the HH factbook, Word Drops.)

So that’s that. But, just when you think English and it’s colours are all sorted, you find out this:

FRENCH PINK is the name of a shade of yellow.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 18 May 2016

10 Portmanteau Words

If you follow the HaggardHawks Twitter feed, you might have spotted the word insinuendo the other day, meaning “an insinuated remark”. According to the late Oxford English Dictionary editor Robert Burchfield, insinuendo is a “tasteless word.” Well, there’s no accounting for taste, of course, but as well as being “tasteless”, insinuendo is also a portmanteau—a blended word that brings together two existing words to form a new one. 

And it’s 10 of those we’re looking at in this week’s YouTube video.

As mentioned in the video, the term portmanteau was first used to describe “blended” words like these by Lewis Carroll, who took the name of a type of suitcase with two separate compartments, and applied it to terms in which “there are two meanings packed up into one word”.

Although Carroll was writing in 1871, it’s tempting to think of portmanteau words as a much more modern phenomenon. It’s certainly true that “blending” words together to form (albeit often fairly clumsy) new ones is still a very fruitful word-forming process today—you can take your pick from any number of recent examples, like fandom, bromance, mocktail, cosplay, metrosexual, guyliner, Brangelina, Twitterati, edutainment, frappuccino, snowmaggedon, favicon, chillax, rockumentary and mockumentary.

But despite their modern appearances, a lot of portmanteau are much older than they first appear—even insinuendo dates back to 1885.

Take a word like newscast, for example. Despite it’s relatively modern feel, its earliest appearance in the language dates from 1928, when it cropped up in an edition of Time magazine. The first motorcade drove through Rockford, Illinois, back in 1910. People have been eating with sporks since 1909, and enjoying brunch for even longer—it’s earliest record comes from an 1896 edition of the satirical magazine Punch that called it “an excellent portmanteau word … indicating a combined breakfast and lunch”. Unfortunately, another word the magazine tried to champion didn’t catch on:

At Oxford, however, two years ago, an important distinction was drawn. The combination-meal, when nearer the usual breakfast hour, is ‘brunch’, and when nearer luncheon, is ‘blunch’.

Another early portmanteau—which sadly didn’t make the final cut in our video—is gerrymander. (Shameless plug #495: there’s more on this in the HH factbook, Word Drops—which is now out in the USA!)

Gerrymander derives from the name of American politician and diplomat Elbridge Gerry. Gerry was serving as a Governor of Massachusetts when in 1812 he signed a bill that redrew the boundaries of Massachusetts’ state senate electoral districts so that they would most benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. This practice was certainly nothing new (the Anti-Federalist leader Patrick Henry had tried the same trick in Virginia back in 1788), but it nevertheless soon became known as gerrymandering—a combination Gerry’s surname and the word salamander.

Why a salamander? Well, an article in the Boston Globe on 26 March 1812 happened to liken the shape of one of Gerry’s redrawn districts to that of a salamander, a lizard-like amphibian:

Frankly, that’s the most un-salamandery salamander I’ve ever seen, but nevertheless the name stuck.

But did Gerry’s gerrymandering work? It certainly did. At the 1812 election, the senate remained in his party’s hands. Gerry himself, however, lost his seat—but went on to serve as Vice President under James Madison the following year.