Mistletoe

Christmas is almost upon us again, which means bouning your home, preparing your Yule-hole, and misportioning yourself silly. And brandy sauce. Lots of brandy sauce. Brandy sauce with everything. Otherwise YOU’RE JUST NOT DOING CHRISTMAS RIGHT.

But Christmas is also the season for kissing under the mistletoe—which means it’s also the season for any etymologists you might have invited round for a turkey sandwich to have a quick smoosk to themselves, and then regale you with one of the best etymological stories on offer. (And like all the best etymological stories, it involves poop.)

So. First things first. The modern English word mistletoe comes from the Old English name misteltan. Tan just means “twig” or “branch” (and lives on in teanel, a dialect word for a wicker basket), while mistel was both a shorter Old English name for mistletoe, as well as another name for birdlime, an adhesive paste made by mashing up mistletoe berries that was then smeared onto branches to catch birds.

In turn, mistel is thought to derive from one of two even earlier words: one theory claims that it’s related to masc, the Old English word for the mixture or “mash” of water and malt used to start brewing a batch of ale. But another more likely theory suggests that it’s related to the Old English word mix—it’s just that mix hasn’t always meant what it means today.

Mix or meox in Old English meant—well, excrement. Crap. Poop. Dung. Bescumberment. That’s why dunghills are sometimes called mixhills, why heaps of compost or fertiliser are called mixens, and why the water that drains from piles of muck or farm waste is called mig. The word mistel ultimately might have started life as a diminutive form of mix, in which case it probably originally meant something like “little splatter of poop”. So that mistletoe you’ll be kissing under this Christmas? Yep, that’s literally a “poop-twig”. But how on Earth did that happen?

Well, if you’re horticulturally minded, you might know that the mistletoe plant is essentially a parasite: it doesn’t have true roots of its own, but rather attaches itself to a tree or a plant that’s already growing, forces itself through the bark or the stem, and thereby leeches all the nutrients it needs directly from it. And because it doesn’t rely on a system of roots pushed deep underground, mistletoe can often be found growing high up in the tops of trees, nowhere near the soil—and there’s really only one way that it can get up there.

Ironically, as well as being used to make birdlime, mistletoe berries are something of a delicacy for thrushes and other similar-sized birds. The seeds the berries contain, however, aren’t quite as digestible as the fleshy pulp around them, so when the birds poop them out—often while perched in the very tops of the trees—they’re not only deposited perfectly unscathed, but coated in their own personalized layer of guano. Or, to put it in the considerably more eloquent terms of the Tudor English herbalist William Turner:

[The thrush] shiteth out the miscel berries well prepared in her bodye and layeth them upon the tre[e.] the berries grow into a bushe and the bushe bringeth furth berries, and of the berries the fouler maketh byrde lyme

And on that note, Happy Christmas to all!

Aphercotropism

Well, well, well. Every so often something just seems to click over on @HaggardHawks, and one unsuspecting tweet suddenly goes a bit berserk. The goldfinch did. Tantling did. The racehorse with the best name in history did. And that fantastically wind-sculpted tree undoubtedly did too.

But earlier this week, an obscure nineteenth century ecological term (paired with a tremendous photograph, for which we can take no credit whatsoever) broke all the HaggardHawks records:

The term APHERCOTROPISM refers to the response an organism makes as it grows to overcome an obstacle in its way. pic.twitter.com/DD7jN4a3kP

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) July 5, 2015

Understandably, the obscurity of a word that seems seldom (if ever) to be used outside of old scientific literature—and so isn’t found in the pages of any major dictionaries—raised a few eyebrows:

Googled APHERCOTROPISM. 669 results, mostly Chinese & Google asking "Did you mean: PHOTOTROPISM". Something's fishy. https://t.co/qanik9oWdq

— Patrick Achtelik (@PatrickAchtelik) July 7, 2015

@HaggardHawks That word doesn't sound right. What's an apherco? Or is it apher co? What has covering to do with overcoming an obstacle?

— Jos van Egmond (@Joozey) July 7, 2015

@HaggardHawks "citation needed", what's the source?

— Steve Roe (@steveroe) July 5, 2015

So, 800 retweets and nearly 1000 favourites later, we thought you might like to know a bit more about aphercotropism, and thereby address a few of these queries (and the dozens more like them). Scalpels at the ready, then—let’s dissect this thing.

First of all, the prefix ap– or aph– derives from a Greek word, apo, meaning “off” or “away from”. It’s the same root we see in words like apocalypse (which literally means “uncovered” or “disclosed”), apocryphal (literally “hidden away”), and even apology, which originally referred to a formal defence or justification, or to a personal account of a story (and so literally means “from speech”).

Secondly, the –erco– part comes from another Greek word, herkos, referring to a fence, a barrier, or a some kind surrounding wall. It only has a handful of offspring in modern English, the majority of which are fairly obscure, long-forgotten terms (the kind that HaggardHawks devours) that have found their way into the dustier corners of the OED: hercotectonic (“pertaining to the construction of walls”), poliorcetic (“relating to the besieging of cities”), and hercogamous, a botanical term describing plants that grow “barriers” between their male and female parts in order to prevent self-fertilization. Apparently.

So that only leaves the suffix –tropism, which you’ll likely recognise from words like heliotropism (“turning towards the sun”) and phototropism (“growth towards a light source”). Scientists and ecologists have invented dozens of words for different kinds of “tropism” besides these, of course, including geotropism (“growth dictated by gravity”), thigmotropism (“movement in response to touch”), homolotropism (“fixed horizontal growth”), and and thixotropism, which refers to the property of certain fluids that makes them act like a solid when subjected to a force—which is why you can run across a pool of custard.

Wait a second—let me just stop to add those last six words to my bucket list… Right, let’s carry on.

Tropism derives from another Greek root, tropos, which literally means “a turning”. So when we put everything back together, aphercotropism ultimately refers to an organism quite literally “turning away from an obstruction”. That’s all well and good, of course, but it still doesn’t explain where the word itself comes from. Did we just make it up?

@haggardhawks Invented? Can't find it in any dictionaries :-)

— Oliver White (@TheOTown) July 6, 2015

No. Seriously, no. Believe me, finding out about genuinely interesting genuine words is much more fun than making them up. Instead, this particular term seems to date back to the late nineteenth century, with the earliest record we’ve so far uncovered coming from an 1899 volume of Nature Notes, a natural history journal published by The Selborne Society, an early conservationist organization:

Aphercotropism … is a peculiarity discovered by Darwin. His experiment was as follows: after allowing a radicle to be well developed in peas, beans, &c. the seed is suspended in the air. A tiny piece of card is attached to one side of the tip by a little gum; the tip will now move away from the vertical position, on the opposite side to the card. The tip may make one or more complete circles in a vertical plane; and it has been known to pass through the first loop so as to tie itself into a knot. This explains how a radish was once dug up and found to be thus tied up.

Charles Darwin outlined this experiment—in which the root of a single pea plant grows in an obscure shape in order to avoid the card glued above it—in his 1880 work, The Power of Movement in Plants. But in his account, he makes no reference to the word aphercotropism. So until any other evidence comes to light, we can presume that the word was coined sometime between the publication of Darwin’s book in 1880, and the publication of the Nature Notes journal in 1899, the author of which likewise makes no reference to having coined the word himself. Precisely who did coin the word, ultimately, remains a mystery.

Right. Now, back to that custard thing…

____________________
With grateful thanks to avid HH-er John (no surname supplied, unfortunately!) who emailed to say, quite rightly, that the second Greek root of aphercotropism discussed above should read herkos, not erkos as it did previously. For those of you not up to speed with your Ancient Greek (a minority, surely...) this is to do with “rough breathing”, an Ancient Greek diacritic marker that indicated the vowel in question was preceded by a “h” sound, which should be transliterated into English as an H, and which we had omitted the post has now been updated accordingly. Apologies for the oversight—a more up to date Dictionary of Ancient Greek has been purchased here at HaggardHawks HQ. The other has been unceremoniously banished to the back of the cupboard.

Pedigree

Archery. Tapestry weaving. Playing the lute. Invading England. There were all kinds of things you could do to pass the time in medieval France. 

Another popular pastime was genealogy, the study of heritage and descent. Seemingly, the nobility of the day liked nothing more than drawing elaborate tree diagrams to boast both in print and in picture of their family’s proud French heritage.

Some of these diagrams comprised little more than lists of names connected by a series of hand-drawn strokes and lines. Others, like the one above, were more involved and more detailed. And some were even drawn as actual trees. But no matter how they were put together, there was something about the lines on these genealogical diagrams—long, flat and broad, with shorter vertical strokes linking one generation to the next—that reminded the writers and artists who produced them of birds’ feet. And, in particular, of cranes’ feet.

Today, in modern French, “crane’s feet” is pieds de grues. But back in the eleventh century, it would have been something more like pée de grue. And if that particular snippet of obscure medieval French sounds even slightly familiar, then it’s because pée de grue eventually morphed into our word pedigree—namely, the traceable ancestry or descent of something.