Game: Missing Letters

Well, it’s been quite the year and a bit. 92 blogposts, 2 books, 10 quizzes, 13 YouTube videos, 8 stories about poop, something about a herring on top of a magistrate’s horse-drawn carriage, and a planet called George. The HaggardHawks blog might only be a little over 12 months old, but incredibly it flew past the 100,000 hits mark earlier last week. So a massive thank you, everyone, for reading, sharing, commenting and just generally being brilliant. You’ve earned yourselves the toughest quiz we’ve put together in a while…

Click PLAY in the box below and you’ll be given all 26 letters of the alphabet, and a word with some of its letters removed. All the missing letters will be the same, so all you have to do is pick the correct letter of the alphabet to complete the word. So if the clue was _ _ RDV _ RK, you’d click A. If it was _U_ _LEGUM, you’d click B. _HI_KEN, you’d click C. Sound easy? Yes. Yes it does. A little too easy in fact—so let’s just say the words are going to be a little tougher than aardvark, bubblegum and chicken. Oh, and you’ve only got 90 seconds to complete the entire alphabet. That’s more like it…

Feel free to share the quiz or your scores over on Twitter or in the comments section below—and good luck!

Feague

If you’ve been keeping up with our new YouTube series, you might remember possibly the strangest word we’ve ever come across from our Words You Won’t Believe Exist video: the eighteenth century verb feague.

Feague, for those of you who don’t already know (or practise it), means “to put a piece of ginger up a horse’s anus,” with the somewhat predictable outcome of making him appear more lively. If you think that sounds impossibly cruel, then fear not—according to the 1811 edition of Francis Grose’s aptly titled Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, it was just as common to replace the ginger with a live eel. A much more sensible idea, I’m sure you’ll agree.

So why on earth—seriously, why? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY?—would anyone want to spend even one microfortnight of their day forcing a piece of ginger up a horse’s arse? 

“You’re going to do WHAT?”

Well, as explained (though, alas, not demonstrated) in our video, if you were selling the horse, then it’s only natural that you would want it to look as frisky and as energetic as possible, to ensure that you got the best price for it. And if there’s one thing guaranteed to make a horse frisky, it’s shoving the spicy root of a herbaceous perennial up its ass. That makes feaguing essentially the 250-year-old equivalent of those tricks estate agents use when prospective buyers stop by. You know how it goes—a bouquet of freshly picked flowers on the table. A fresh pot of coffee brewing in the kitchen. A horse desperately trying to evacuate a live eel from its poop chute in the garden. 

Another fairly cruel means of improving the asking price of your horse incidentally was bishoping, which involved filing down its teeth. Because horse’s teeth continue to grow throughout their lives, shaving them down meant that even a worn out old carthorse could pass as a young colt, and in that sense bishoping was essentially the eighteenth-century equine equivalent of botox. Or six pints of Guinness.

As a verb, BISHOP can be used to mean ‘to tamper with the teeth of a horse to make it look younger than it is’.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 2 October 2015

But while bishoping was straightforwardly enough named after a crooked horse salesman named Mr Bishop, feaguing is more of an etymological mystery. 

One theory is that it comes from fake, which besides its more familiar meaning was used in nineteenth century slang to mean “to tamper with something in order to deceive.” That sounds exactly like our horse-enlivening ginger insertion, but the dates don’t match up—in fact, the OED suggests faking in this sense might derive from feaguing, not the other way around.

Another theory is that feague comes from an even earlier sixteenth century word, feak or fyke, meaning “to twitch” or “to be restless.” Twitching and restlessness certainly sounds along the lines of feaguing, but this theory stumbles because by the time feague first began to appear in the language, feak had morphed into a more figurative word, meaning “to be officiously busy,” or “to appear busy, yet accomplish little.” Hey, we’ve all been there.

But then there’s this:

’Slife, this She Devil will ruin me! Alas, madam, she’s merry, she drolls; but come, let’s dance and put these things out of our heads. Come in, Minnim and Crotchet, and fegue your violins away, fa, la, la, la!

That’s a line from The Humorist, a play written in 1671 by the English playwright Thomas Shadwell. Here, “Minnim and Crotchet” are the names of musicians, and when they’re called upon to “fegue their violins,” they’re not being told to put a piece of ginger inside them (nor, for that matter, to put their violins somewhere it’s anatomically unadvisable) but to start playing them, quickly and energetically. 

To feague away was a seventeenth century phrase basically meaning “to set in quick motion,” “to agitate,” or “to work flat out.” It’s thought that it derives from an even earlier sixteenth century word, feg or feagle, meaning “to beat” or “thrash,” which in turn probably comes from an even older German word, fegen, meaning “to clean” or “sweep”, or to busy yourself with housework. 

Feaguing away then seems to be the missing link: it’s easy to see how a word meaning “to busy yourself with housework” could give birth to a phrase meaning “to work quickly,” or “to agitate,” and ultimately “to enliven” or “to make energetic.” The ginger-inserting part, it seems, was just a bit of added spice.

10 Words You Didn’t Know Had Opposites

If you’ve been keeping up with our 500 Words series over on the HaggardHawks YouTube channel, you’ll know that recently we’ve been expanding your vocabulary with lists of words for fools and nincompoops, words you won’t believe exist, and words from Victorian slang. And this week, we’re adding even more words to your wordhoard with a list of 10 Words You Didn’t Know Had Opposites.

Words like these crop up every now and then over on HaggardHawks, with recent examples including tautegory, the opposite of an allegory, and dysangelical, the opposite of evangelical. But what about the opposite of the placebo effect? Or the opposite of postponing something? And what exactly are jamais-vu, dysphoria and eustress? The answers are all here...

One term that didn’t make the final cut in the video, however, is one of our personal favourite opposites-you’ve-never-heard-of:

The opposite of Stockholm Syndrome is LIMA SYNDROME—in which hostage-takers become sympathetic to their hostages.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 12 August 2015

Stockholm syndrome is of course a curious psychological phenomenon in which a hostage, or group of hostages, gains sympathy for their captors. It takes its name from a bank robbery that took place in Stockholm in 1973, which led to a five-day siege between police and back robber Janne Olsson. Happily, the siege ended without any of the hostages being seriously injured.

The opposite of Stockholm syndrome is Lima syndrome, which, as the tweet above explains, refers to a situation in which the captors develop sympathy for their hostages. And just like Stockholm syndrome, it too comes from an actual hostage-taking: in 1996, fourteen members of a Peruvian militia group called Túpac Amaru stormed the Japanese embassy in Lima, and held more than 600 of the Japanese ambassador’s guests captive. Within a matter of hours, however, more than half of the hostages had been released, and over the days that followed another 300 more were steadily set free as the captors began to empathize with their hostages. The siege was eventually brought to an end 126 days after it had started. 

Cacafuego

There’s really no nice way of putting this, but the fact is that poop crops up more often than it duly should on this blog. And thanks to a tweet from the HH feed the other day, we’re going back down that way again now:

CACAFUEGO is a 16th century word for a blustering, over-confident braggart. It literally means ‘fire-shitter’.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 29 March 2016

There’s no denying that cacafuego is a brilliant (and unavoidably useful) word, but is it really genuine? Or, to put it another way:

Does anyone ever read @HaggardHawks tweets and wonder, ever so briefly, if they've just been taking the piss out of us for years?

— Kateri (@katerimorton) 29 March 2016

Wow, imagine if that were true. A plot twist to put M Night Shyamalan to shame. But let’s not get bogged down in piss halfway through a blog about shit, so to speak.

No prizes for guessing that cacafuego was borrowed into English from Spanish, and combines the verb cacar (modern Spanish cagar, “to void excrement”) with fuego, “fire”. It first appeared in English as another word for a blustering braggart in the early 1600s, but we can be fairly sure that it was in use before then thanks to the somewhat unlikely-sounding involvement of Sir Francis Drake.

Sir Francis Drake: looking a little ruff

In 1578, part-way through his circumnavigation of the Earth, Drake rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific Ocean, hot on the heels of a 120-tonne Spanish galleon called the Nuestra Señora that he had heard was laden with a rich cargo of silver and jewels from the Spanish colonies. And he wanted it.

Sailing up the Pacific coast of South America, Drake’s Golden Hind caught up with the Nuestra Señora off the coast of Ecuador. Knowing that an attack made under the cover of darkness was his best bet, he slowed his progress by tying some of his ship’s store of wine to the stern and throwing it overboard, so that by the time the Hind reached the Nuestra Señora it was the middle of the night. The Spanish crew were taken by surprise, and after a brief skirmish they surrendered, allowing Drake and his men to take control of the ship.

Drake sailed both the Nuestra Señora and the Golden Hind back to the South American coast to unload her treasure. Knowing just how substantial a prize he had secured for England he treated the Spanish crew well, inviting the officers to join him for a grand banquet and giving every crewmember a parting gift and a letter of safe conduct, ensuring as safe a journey home to Europe as possible. Drake himself continued on his journey, and having completed his circumnavigation arrived back in Plymouth on 26 November 1580.

So where does all the flaming poop come into this? Well, Drake’s captured galleon might have been officially known as the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, or “Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception”, but to her crew she was the Cacafuego, or “fire-shitter”. That might seem like an odd (and fairly uncomplimentary) nickname for—well, anything really, but just like the Spitfire centuries after her, it was probably intended to be a reference to her impressive weaponry and blazing cannon fire, or else to her speed through the water and her “fiery” temperament. 

And just as spitfire was once a nickname for an irascible, hot-tempered person, in the seventeenth century cacafuego became a byword for a blustering, swaggering braggart—a meaning perhaps influenced by the fact that, despite her impressive armoury, the Cacafuego had proved no match for Drake. 

10 Words For Fools And Nincompoops

No jokes, April 1 is April Fools’ Day. So in honour of that, this week on the HaggardHawks YouTube channel we’re looking at 10 Words For Fools And Nincompoops. 

As explained in the video, the word nincompoop is something of an etymological mystery. Samuel Johnson suggested that it came from the Latin phrase non compos mentis, used to describe someone of less than sound mind, but a lack of early spellings following this template casts doubt on his theory. 

Alternatively, on its own the word poop (which crops up more often than it really should on this blog…) can be used as a verb meaning “to cheat” or “deceive”, but the nincom– part is a lot more challenging. Some accounts claim that it’s a twist on noddy or noddypoll, both even earlier words for fools or dunderheads, while others claim it comes from Nicodemite—a French-origin word for a follower of Nicodemus, but which became a byword for anyone who hides their faith to avoid persecution or ridicule. 

Whatever the truth might be, the word nincompoop continues to fool etymologist. But this and nine more words to boost your April Fools’ Day vocabulary are listed here—from a word derived from a gullibly catchable freshwater fish to a general word for a fool that began life as a psychiatric category based on a person’s IQ…

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