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. 

Zed

So zed is British and zee is American, yes? Well, that might be the case today, but once upon a time things were quite different...

Historically, both zed and zee were used pretty much interchangeably in both British and American English, alongside a whole host of other more outlandish names for the last (or rather, second last) letter of the alphabet, like izzard, uzzard, zad, shard and, our personal favourite, ezod. Of the two we’re talking about here, however, zed it by far the oldest, and takes its name via French and Latin from that of its Greek equivalent, zeta. Zed first appeared in print in the early 1400s, in a Middle English document that fairly straightforwardly described it as “þe laste lettre of þe a b c”—which is considerably nicer than what William Shakespeare had to say about it.

Zee, on the other hand, first appeared in print in a British language textbook—Thomas Lye’s New Spelling-book—in 1677. The name zee itself is thought to have originated as nothing more than a dialect variation of zed, probably influenced by the regular bee, cee, dee, ee pattern of much of the rest of the alphabet. But precisely how or why it became the predominant form in American English is unclear.

Thanks to his new calling card, everyone knew where Zubin Mehta had been

One widely-held theory is that because zed, as the older of the two, was the most widespread variation amongst British English speakers, during the Revolutionary War American English speakers looking to distance themselves from anything even vaguely British simply adopted the zee version as their own to make a stand—no matter how small it might seem—against British control. Alternatively, there mightn’t have been any political reasoning behind it at all, and the name might simply have come to the forefront as American English was forced to adapt and simplify as more and more colonists—coming from ever more distant countries, and speaking an ever more varied array of languages—began arriving in the New World.

Whatever the motivation might have been, by the mid-nineteenth century zee had become the standard form of the letter Z in the United States, and has remained so ever since. 

Though the campaign to resurrect ezod begins here...