Toad-eater

A few days ago, HaggardHawks tweeted this:

A TOAD-EATER is someone who backs up a liar, or helps someone to propagate a lie.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) August 5, 2015

And, well, it’s all just a little too bizarre to leave unexplained... 

There’s an old language myth that claims toad-eater comes from the Spanish mi todita (literally “my little everything”), which is itself a diminutive of toda, the Spanish word for “all”. Todita, so the story goes, was once a jocular title used by well-to-do Spaniards for their closest and most servile assistants or aides, who were only too ready to help their masters out in whatever way necessary, hence the definition above. 

It’s a neat theory—but unfortunately it’s completely untrue. In fact, the true history of the toad-eater is much more interesting, much more literal, and considerably more revolting, than all that.

According to the OED, the earliest record we have of a toad-eater comes from a seventeenth-century diarist named John Rous. Rous kept a diary from 1625-43, during which time he was the Anglican vicar of the village of Santon Downham in Suffolk, England. He recorded a predictably eclectic mix of events from both home and abroad, ranging from the coronation of Charles I in 1625 (described as “very joyous to the well-affected, but to the Papists not very welcome”) to reports of a rebellion in Portugal, Spanish ships returning from the West Indies being attacked by Dutch pirates, and, inevitably, growing unrest across England in the lead-up to what would eventually become the Civil War.

Alongside all the headlines, however, Rous’s diary contains several accounts of local goings-on in and around his own parish—including, in 1629, this account of a conversation with a shopkeeper in the nearby village of Laxfield:

I inquired of him if William Utting the toade-eater … did not once keepe [i.e. stay] at Laxfield; he tould me yes, and said he had seen him eate a toade, nay two.

Rous goes on to explain how “the toade-eater” apparently went about his business:

The man in whose house he kept went to him and … tould him that a friend of his would give a groate [4 pence] to see him eate a toade (thus was the way to see it): he accepted the offer, and went and fetche in, from under blocks, ij toads … He swallowed them downe, but presently he cast them up into his hands, and after some pawse, “Nay,” sayeth he, “I will not loose my groate.” So taking that which came up last (saith he), “thou wentst in first before and shalte doe againe.” When both then were downe, his stomach held them, and he had his groate.

Seemingly, Utting somehow managed to swallow two toads whole (after having already vomited them up once), and thereby won himself the princely some of one groat—or just under £2 (or just over $3) in 2015. But how do we get from this fairly disgusting story to the considerably less disgusting meaning in the tweet above?

Well, back in Rous’s day, toads were widely believed to be incredibly poisonous. Not only that, but their warty skin, their fondness of dark, dank places, and their ability to survive both on land and in water led to an association with black magic and witchcraft; even the Devil’s coat of arms is traditionally said to be decorated with “three unclean spirits like frogs”. To even touch a toad was, frankly, to dice with death—and so to be able to eat one was quite some feat.

Can’t you two get a room?

Rous’s toad-eater, and the many more like him who worked the country fairs and fêtes of Georgian England, knew precisely that. They also presumably knew that toads—or, by any rate, the two species of toad native to Great Britain—aren’t really as poisonous as most people believed: they can secrete a foul-tasting “milk” from glands on their skin when disturbed that contains an impressive battery of unpleasant chemicals, but unless you’re an overly-inquisitive dog or cat, or unless you fully digest the toad and its toxic skin (which toad-eaters seldom did, opting instead to either rely or sleight of hand, or else regurgitate them later), the chances are you’ll escape unharmed. 

Nevertheless, if these toad-eaters could convince people that they were somehow immune to the toad’s toxicity—or, better yet, that they had invented some kind of all-curing antidote or medical procedure—then they could not only put on an impressive show, but make an equally impressive profit.

Based on this presumption, by the late 1600s, quack physicians and itinerant charlatans all across England had begun working with toad-eaters to come up with a brand new sting: in front of an enthralled (and presumably somewhat nauseated) crowd, they would have their assistant eat, or pretend to eat, a live toad, just as William Utting had. Although unharmed, the assistant would then promptly collapse to the floor in feigned agony, whereupon the quack could either make a great show of his miraculous healing powers, or else administer some kind of homemade concoction to his assistant, who would consequently stage an immediate and impressive recovery—leaving his quack associate to sell vials of their bogus cure-all to the assembled crowd.

The original seventeenth century “toad-eater”, ultimately, was nothing more than a con artist’s assistant, and it’s from there that the sense of “someone who corroborates a lie” came about. Over time, however, toad-eater came to be used more loosely for any assistant or subordinate, and in particular one who acts obsequiously or servilely and is only too happy to perform any duty required of him—no matter how unpleasant it might be. 

Dandelion

For some reason, toilet talk keeps popping up on here (we’re looking at you, vespasienne), and unfortunately we’re heading back down that way now. That’s because last week we found out that when Italian slang gets weird, it gets brilliantly weird:

Because it grows around lampposts and by the sides of roads, PISACAN—literally ‘dog-pisses’—is an Italian nickname for the dandelion.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) July 11, 2015

Pisacàn is an old Venetian word, which has long since dropped into local use in northern Italian slang. Predictably enough, the pis– means “urine”, while –càn comes from the same Latin root as canine (and Canary Islands). No surprises there then. But what is intriguing is that this is apparently another example of an etymological connection between dandelions and—well, what Samuel Johnson would euphemistically call “animal water”:

@HaggardHawks doesn't it have related names in many dialects because of its diuretic properties?

— Moose Allain (@MooseAllain) July 11, 2015

Quite right too. English is chock-full of slightly pee-tinged nicknames for dandelions, but more on those in a moment. First things first, though—why exactly is it called a dandelion?

English borrowed the word dandelion from French in the early Middle Ages. The original French name—itself derived from mediaeval Latin—was dent de lion, literally meaning “lion’s tooth”, which is a brilliantly imaginative reference to the dandelion’s jagged, sharply-toothed leaves:

Although a handful of even earlier examples of the word have been unearthed in Middle English herbals and medical textbooks—some dating back to the late 1300s—in those dandelion was still essentially a foreign word, and it wasn’t until the late Middle Ages that it started to become naturalized into English. Ultimately, the first truly English record we have comes from this translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, written in 1513.

Before then—and before we plundered dent de lion from the French—dandelions were known by all kinds of other names in English: in the fifteenth century, they were the priest’s crown (a reference to their bright golden colour) and the monk’s-head (a reference to their bald heads, after all the fluffy seeds have been blown away). Earlier still, the Old English name was ægwyrt, or “egg-wort”, an allusion to the dandelion’s egg yolk-coloured petals. But in the late Middle English period, another entirely different nickname began to emerge: pissabed. 

Pissabed derives from the old belief that the dandelions do indeed have a diuretic effect, increasing the amount of urine that the body produces. So have a nice fresh supper of dandelion salad and, well, you might end up having that dream where you’re asleep on the beach and the tide’s coming, or that you’re Ophelia in John Everett Millais’ painting. (If you know what I mean...)

Medicinally, diuretics are used to treat all kinds of different conditions from high blood pressure to liver disease, and in traditional and complementary medicine dandelions have been used to do precisely that for centuries. Whether they work or not (and the jury is certainly still out about that), this ancient association has become so ingrained in folklore that a whole host of pee-related nicknames for the dandelion have since emerged. 

The English Dialect Dictionary, for instance, lists pissabed alongside pissybed, pissymoor, pissimire, and pissimer-flower. Other dialect glossaries add pittly-bed, piddle-your-bed, pee-the-bed, pish-the-bed and pissy-mother to the list. And elsewhere there’s jack-piss-the-bed, tiddle-bed, wet-the-bed, and even pisshead. This association isn’t unique to English either: the original Middle English pissabed was probably a translation of the earlier French name piss-en-lit, and alongside that there are German nicknames like Pissblume and Bettnässer (literally “bed-wetter”), the Spanish slang meacama (“piss-the-bed”), and the Italian piscialetto.

A pappus. At 0000 hours, apparently.

It’s not just number ones that dandelions are blamed for either: the EDD also lists the fairly unsubtle shit-a-bed as another alternative name, while one nineteenth century Scots dialect dictionary likewise calls it the bumpipe. The dandelion’s supposed medical benefits are  alluded to in nicknames like heart-fever grass and live-long. There’s also dog-posy and dog-stinker, both of which tie in with the Italian “dog-pisses”. An entirely untrue bit of folklore that claims dandelions are poisonous is responsible for nicknames like devil’s-milk plant, canker flower, and witch gowan. And the ancient tradition that the number of breaths it takes to clear the dandelion’s fluffy seed head (known as the pappus, if you want to get technical) is the origin of a clutch of old nicknames like bessy-clock, one-o’clock, and fortune-teller plant. 

So just one question remains—why on earth are there so many different names? 

Well, it’s worth pointing out that dandelion is by no means alone here. Remember the dishwasher bird? Jack-jump-up-and-kiss-me? The lady-with-the-twelve-flounces? And take a look at this fantastic Storified list of local nicknames for woodlice, put together by Mr @MooseAllain. The fact is that many of our most familiar, most noticeable, and most frequently-encountered plants and animals end up with page after page of alternative names, simply because they’re so familiar, so noticeable, and so frequently encountered. And the fact that dandelions are edible, as well as medicinally useful, only serves to make them even more noteworthy. Just don’t eat too many of them before bed...

Amethyst

Once upon a time, Bacchus, the louche Greek god of wine and debauchery, was pursuing a fair young maiden named Amethyste, who had caught his beer-goggled eye. Amethyste, however, was sober as a judge and had no intention of giving in to Bacchus’s bleary advances, so she fell to her knees and prayed to the gods themselves to keep her chaste. 

The gods, in their infinite wisdom, responded by keeping Amethyste safe in the only sensible way they knew how—namely by transforming her into a large slab of white quartz. (This is fiction, remember.) 

But Bacchus had had such a skinful back at the grape harvest that even a bare slab of white quartz still looked pretty alluring, so in one final attempt to woo Amethyste—and in a perfect demonstration of the kind of thinking that seems utterly logical when you’re drunk—he poured his wine all over the quartz. 

Unfortunately that had no effect at all other than to stain the quartz a deep, rich purple colour, and he was forced to retire, frustrated and unsatisfied. Amethyste’s chastity, meanwhile, remained in tact. (Well, it would do wouldn’t it, because she was now made entirely of quartz.) But, anyway—THE END.

The story of Bacchus and Amethyste, of which this is a fairly accurate précis, was written in the sixteenth century by the French Renaissance poet Rémy Belleau. Although Bellaeu’s tale is not an original Greek myth, it’s nevertheless inspired by an Ancient Greek belief that amethyst stones could prevent drunkenness; drinking from a cup made from or decorated with amethyst, you would simply never get drunk. 

I could have done with one of these at New Year

This peculiar belief was even reflected in the word amethyst itself:

AMETHYST literally means ‘not drunk’.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) May 30, 2015

Etymologically, amethyst comes from the Greek word amethystos, which is in turn based around the Greek word for “wine”, methys. The initial a– of amethyst is a negative- or opposite-forming suffix (like un- or non- in English today), and so altogether amethyst effectively means “not drunk” or “not intoxicated”.

But where did this superstition come from? Well, admittedly, no one is entirely sure, but it’s probably the amethyst’s rich, wine-like purple colour that first led to its association with booze, and from there it’s just a quick hop, stagger and jump to the idea that such a dazzling precious stone could have corresponding magic powers. 

Versions of this superstition are found dotted throughout Greek literature, with even Plato seeming to get in on the act in one of his Epigrams:

The stone is an amethyst: but I, the tippler Dionysus, say, “Let it either persuade me to be sober, or let it learn to get drunk.”

But even by the days of the great Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, this idea was already ancient history: in his Natural History, Pliny dismissively states that “the falsehoods of the magicians would persuade us that these stones are preventative of inebriety.” After all, it’s an easy enough hypothesis to test out. And here at HaggardHawks HQ, we’d be more than happy to volunteer. 

Magpie

Considering our mascot is a hawk*, for some reason we seem to tweet an awful lot about magpies:

In Tudor England, magpies were called HAGGISTERS and MAGGOTY-PIES.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) June 11, 2014

Word of the Day: MAGPIETY – talkativeness, chattiness

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) November 25, 2014

And sometimes it even happens inadvertently:

In 18th century English, a PLEANY-PIE was a grumpy, gossiping person.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) May 1, 2015

We stumbled across pleany-pie a few weeks ago in a handful of old local English dictionaries. Among them was the hallowed English Dialect Dictionary, which defines a pleany-pie as “a tell-tale, a gossip; literally, a complaining magpie.” The EDD even records an old Yorkshire nursery rhyme that was presumably used to admonish schoolyard snitches back in eighteenth century England:

A pleeanie-pie tit,

Thy tongue shal be slit,

An’ iv’ry dog i’ th’ town

Shal hev a bit.

Dismembered tongues aside, it’s the “complaining magpie” part of the EDD’s definition that concerns us here: pleany– is an old dialect derivative of plain, meaning “to whinge” or “bemoan” (as in complain or plaintive), while –pie comes straight from magpie, a proverbially raucous and chattery bird. Hence a pleany-pie is an annoyingly vocal, complaining person.

Our pleany-pie tweet, however, sparked an interesting back-and-forth in the comments (we’re looking at you @BertSwattermain and @MooseAllain) about the connection between pie and magpie, and magpie and pied, meaning “black and white”, or “blotchy”. And, as always happens in cases like this, one quick bit of research opened a whole new etymological can of worms.

So, first things first. Originally, magpies were known only as pies in English—the earliest record we have of them comes from an Anglo-Saxon document that lists pyge as the Old English translation of pica, the Latin name for the magpie. It’s from this Latin name that the English pie eventually evolved, but if the word pica itself looks familiar, then that’s probably because we still use it today as the medical name for a pregnant woman’s cravings for bizarre, non-nutritious substances people shouldn’t really consume—like ice, clay, charcoal, and bread-and-butter pudding. (Bread does not belong in a dessert, people, no matter how much custard you pour over it.)

But we digress. It was the Greeks who first described these strange prenatal cravings, and it was they who chose to name them after the magpie (kíssa in Ancient Greek), because magpies, they noticed, seem to eat just about anything. They’d probably even eat bread-and-butter pudding given half a chance. 

A Eurasian magpie. Bread-and-butter pudding just out of shot.

Over time, the Greek kíssa gave way to the Latin pica, which in turn simplified to pie in English. And it’s thanks to this, and the magpie’s familiar black-and-white plumage (in Europe and North America at least—take a look at this fantastically fruity magpie from Sri Lanka), that we now have names for other black-and-white birds like the pied wagtail and the pied flycatcher, as well as for piebald horses. And it’s also why the Pied Piper was such a snazzy dresser.

So if that’s the story behind the –pie, what about the ­mag–? Well, there’s no lengthy, civilization-spanning history to talk about here. The mag– of magpie is actually just a pet form of the girl’s name Margaret, or Margery. That might sound odd, but there’s actually a long tradition in English dialect of using forenames as nicknames for birds, as in tom-tit, jenny-wren and robin redbreast (which was originally the Robert Redbreast, incidentally). 

So the goldfinch was once nicknamed the King Harry. The barn owl was once the Jenny owl. The song thrush is still known in some locations as Mavis. House sparrows were once Philips, while hedge sparrows were variously known as Mollies, Isaacs, or even Molly Isaacs. And, best of all, the green woodpecker—when it isn’t busy piloting short-haul flights for weasels—was once the laughing Betsy. Records show that magpies first earned the nickname Mag or Maggie as far back as the mid-1500s (although it was likely in use locally earlier than that), and it soon established itself as the norm—albeit, with a variety of brilliant local variations.

But that still leaves one last question—why give a person’s forename to a bird at all? Well, in the case of magpie some etymologists have pointed to a connection between chattering birds and gossiping, incessantly talking women or “chattermags” (no comment here), but it’s just as likely that it’s the familiarity of magpies, and all the other birds listed above, that earned them an equally common forename as their nickname. Which, incidentally, is the same reason why we have tomcats and billy-goats—and it’s probably why baby kangaroos are called joeys.

___________
*Actually, our mascot appears to be a kestrel—which is a falcon, not a hawk. Uh oh…

Hypochondria

You know how it is. The slightest ache or pain, and that’s it—you’re a goner. Raise your concerns, and the answer’s always the same: “Oh, stop worrying about nothing. You’re such a hypochondriac!” 

It’s a sign of intelligence, apparently, just like bad handwriting, introversion, doodling, not being a morning person, and all the other much-maligned quirks and traits that smart people like to tell you all smart people have in common. But what exactly is hypochondria?  

Hypochondria: The only disease you haven’t got

You’ll probably recognise the hypo– prefix from dozens of other words like hypodermic and hypothermia. Derived from Greek, it literally means “under”, or “below”. So a hypodermic needle passes under the skin. Hypothermia is dangerously decreased temperature. The hypotenuse is the line that literally “stretches below” the other two in a right-angled triangle. And a hypothesis is the idea forming the basis of an argument, literally beneath everything else.

The –chondria part, though, is more complex, or at least more unusual. It derives from the Greek word for bodily cartilage, khondros, which is a distant etymological cousin of words like grind and grounds. But how did a word meaning something like “below the cartilage” come to mean “anxious about one’s health”? 

To answer that we have to go back to the early days of medicine, when physicians blamed just about every condition you can think of on the Four Humours—no, not the Marx Brothers, but four bodily secretions (namely blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm), the correct balance of which was necessary for a healthy life. Each of the four was said to be produced in a different organ or region of the body, and an excess of any one of them was enough to cause you problems.

Of the four, black bile was said to be produced in the spleen, the blood-filtering organ found just below the protective cartilage of the ribcage—the hypochondrium. If the spleen or any of the other visceral organs in this area acted up, then an excess of black bile would be produced that could, it was believed, cause feelings of depression and anxiety. 

We still use the Greek name for “black bile”, melancholia, to describe these kinds of feelings today, and, ultimately, we still call a feeling of anxiety about one’s health hypochondria. 

Vespasienne

We tweeted about toilets a lot today. Purely by coincidence, of course. But you know how it is—once you’ve done one, it’s hard not to do another. Though one of the things we’ve tweeted probably needs a little bit more explaining:

Public urinals in France are nicknamed VESPASIENNES in honour of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who introduced a urine tax in the 1st century.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) April 10, 2015

Urine tax. It’s all a bit too bizarre to leave open ended like that.

So, first things first: Titus Flavius Vespasian became Roman Emperor in AD69 after a brief period of turbulence—known as The Year of the Four Emperors—that was sparked by the Emperor Nero’s suicide the previous summer. Unfortunately, Nero’s successor, Galba, was assassinated after just seven months on the throne. (There we go talking about toilets again.) Then Galba’s successor, Otho, committed suicide after just ninety days in power, and in turn his successor, Vitellius, was overthrown and executed just eight months after that. Happily, Vespasian’s rule restored some much-needed stability to the Empire after a year of unrest, and he remained in power for the next decade—until he died trying to stand up during a fatal bout of diarrhoea in AD79. But we digress. That’s more than enough potty talk for now.

One of the high points of Vespasian’s rule was the construction of The Colosseum, which he commissioned in AD70, and which was completed one year after his death by his son and successor, Titus. One of the low points of his rule, however, was his introduction of the vectigal urinae, or “urine tax”. And we thought paying 30p to use the toilets at King’s Cross Station was bad. 

In Vespasian’s defence, the urine tax was actually the brainchild of Nero, who first introduced it sometime around AD60. But long after it had been repealed, it was Vespasian’s decision to reintroduce it. So why was he so keen to tax pee?

Well, chemically speaking, because the urea it contains can be used to produce ammonia, urine is actually quite a useful commodity—and the Romans knew it. They used urine to bleach fabric (including their gleaming white togas), to soak animal hides (making it easier to remove the hairs before tanning), and they even mixed it with powdered pumice to make toothpaste to whiten their teeth. 

So with all this potentially lucrative activity going on unchecked, Vespasian sought to levy his vectigal urinae onto anyone whose business involved collecting urine from the sewers and communal cesspools dotted around Rome—not exactly the most pleasant of job descriptions, but the fact that it was even worth taxing in the first place shows just how profitable a living it could be.

Roman togas: didn’t smell as clean as they looked

If you’re still a bit put off by the prospect of siphoning off other people’s urine and boiling your clothes in it, don’t worry—you’re in good company. When Titus, Vespasian’s son, first heard about the urine tax he was so disgusted by it that he complained in person to his father. In response, Vespasian simply held a gold coin up in front of his face, and asked him if he was just as revolted by it. Confused, Titus answered “non olet”, or “it does not smell”, to which Vespasian knowingly replied, “and yet, it comes from urine!” Recorded by the Roman historian Suetonius, this particular anecdote gave rise to an old Latin saying, pecunia non olet—or “cash doesn’t stink”—which is sometimes still used in English today to imply that money remains unaffected by how it’s earned.

But back to toilets—it was Vespasian’s advocacy of the urine tax that ultimately led to his name being attached to public toilets across the Roman Empire, and it’s through that that French public urinals eventually came to be known as vespasiennes. 

It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “pay toilet”.

Noon

So a few days ago, we tweeted this:

NOON was originally 3pm.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) April 7, 2015

It sounds odd, but it’s completely true. Noon is a corruption of the Latin word for “ninth”, novem, as in November. And just as November was originally the ninth month of the Roman year, noon was originally the ninth hour of the Roman day. And because the Romans are reckoned to have started their day at 6am, this made noon 3pm—or the ninth hour of daylight.

This mid-afternoon meaning was retained when the word noon first began to appear in English in the early Old English period. The OED has traced the word’s earliest written record to a medical textbook dating from the ninth century, which, under a remedy used as protection “against witches and elvish tricks”, describes a concoction of milk blended with powdered blackberry, lupins and pennyroyal that should be drunk “on þreo tida, on undern, on middæg, on non”—that is, “three times a day, at undern [9am], midday [12pm], and noon [3pm]”.

In fact noon didn’t come to refer to 12pm until the early 1200s. So what prompted the change from one time of day to the other?

Well, admittedly no one is quite sure, but the most likely explanation is an ecclesiastical one: around the same time, traditional church prayers shifted from mid-afternoon to midday, and it’s possible that the word noon simply shifted with them. Alternatively, there could have been a cultural shift responsible, that saw working hours change after the Norman Conquest and the main meal of the working day brought forward from mid-afternoon to closer to midday.

Whatever the reason, the change seems to have firmly established itself in the language by the late 1400s, by which time the original literal meaning of noon had all but vanished to be replaced entirely by the meaning we know and use today. 

Pencil

Earlier on today, we tweeted this: 

A PENCIL was originally a paintbrush.
— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) March 12, 2015

And we thought you might like to know a bit more about it.

It’s easy to presume that pen and pencil are related words, but in fact they’re completely unconnected. Pen comes from the Latin word penna, meaning “feather”, making it an etymological cousin of words like pennant, empennage and even penne pasta. The earliest pens were quills—long birds’ feathers dipped in liquid ink—and it’s from there that the modern pen eventually evolved.

Pencil, on the other hand, comes from penicillus, which was originally the Latin word for artist’s paintbrush. Brushes were used as writing implements long before modern pencils of lead, chalk and eventually graphite were developed in the Middle Ages, and it’s from there that the modern pencil emerged in the late 1500s. 

In turn, the Latin word penicillus is a diminutive of penis—no, honestly—which, besides the obvious, could also be used to mean “tail” in Latin. But how did a word meaning “little tail” also come to mean “paintbrush”? Well, picture a lion’s tail, with a soft tuft of hair at the end of it, and you can probably see the resemblance. Just make sure you’re picturing its tail.

The world’s most dangerous paintbrush