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Showing posts with label birds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label birds. Show all posts

12 May 2016

10 Old Animal Nicknames

If there’s one subject that crops up fairly regularly on the HaggardHawks Twitter feed, it’s animal nicknames. You might have spotted this tweet about penguins—and the explanation behind it—over on Twitter the other day:


But it’s not just the penguins that have it bad: 





So this week over on the HH YouTube channel, we’re looking at the origins and meanings behind 10 Old Animal Nicknames.
One name that didn’t make the final cut here was mouldwarp, an old English word for a mole. The “mould” of mouldwarp has nothing to do with being mouldy (which is actually an entirely unrelated word), but is instead an ancient English word for loose earth or turned-over soil. Its etymological cousins are words like mull, meaning “ashes” or “crumbling dust”, and mool, the soil used to fill graves.

The “warp” of mouldwarp is a verb, meaning “to toss through the air”, or “to sprinkle”. You can also (should you ever need to) warp a door, which means to throw it open quickly; warp your clothes, which means to remove them equally quickly; and warp someone, which means to suddenly drop them in some kind of situation or scenario—so you could warp them into prison, into bankruptcy, or into peril. Presumably after you’ve closed the door and put your clothes on again, of course.

Put together, that means that mouldwarp literally means “earth-thrower”. Which seems like a perfectly reasonable name for a mole—and a much nicer one than this:



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28 April 2016

Penguin


You might have seen this frankly brilliant fact pop up on the @HaggardHawks Twitter feed this week:




Poor old penguins. It can’t be much fun humpling around in sub-zero temperatures avoiding being eaten by seals all day. But then along comes Oliver Goldsmith—whose seven-volume History of the Earth and Animated Nature is the source of that quote—to tell us that eighteenth century sailors called them arse-feet. It’s just not fair really, is it?

Not that it was only the penguins, though. The nickname arse-feet dates back to the sixteenth century, when it was originally another name for the little grebe, and over the centuries it’s been used in reference to a whole host of other species, all of which had one thing in common—the position of their feet noticeably close to their derrieres. Frankly, it gives a whole new meaning to having a boot up the arse. (Shameless plug: there’s more on all this in the HH factbook, Word Drops.)

But if that’s the history of arse-feet, what about penguin?

Well, the word penguin also dates back to the sixteenth century, with the earliest record we know about coming from the logbook of Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind. According to Drake’s admiral, Francis Fletcher, as he sailed through the Magellan Strait in 1577: 

[20 August 1577] In these Islands we found great reliefe and plenty of good victualls, for infinite were the number of fowle, which the Welsh men named Pengwin … [The birds] breed and lodge at land, and in the day tyme goe downe to the sea to feed, being soe fatt that they can but goe, and their skins cannot be taken from their bodyes without tearing off the flesh, because of their exceeding fatnes.
Yep, not only did the penguins have to contend with waddling around in sub-zero temperatures and being called arse-feet, but Drake and his crew decided to announce their presence in the Southern Ocean by eating every penguin they could lay their hands on.

But then there’s this:
New found land is in a temperate Climate… There are Sea Guls, Murres, Duckes, wild Geese, and many other kinds of birdes store, too long to write, especially at one Island named Penguin, where wee may driue them on a planke into our ship as many as shall lade her. These birdes are also called Penguins, and cannot flie.
If you know anything about natural history, that quote might strike you as a little odd—penguins are only found in the Southern Hemisphere, so what the dickens were they doing in Newfoundland?

Well, that second quote isn’t from Drake’s logbook, but from a letter, written on 13 November 1778, by a Bristol merchant sailor named Anthony Parkhurst to the famed English geographer Richard Hakluyt. And the penguins Parkhurst is talking about aren’t the same penguins we know today—in fact, the penguins he’s talking about haven’t been seen by anybody for 150 years.

Parkhurst’s Newfoundland penguins were in actual fact great auks—tall, flightless, black-and-white seabirds (whose arses were just as close to their feet) that were once native to much of the North Atlantic. Although the great auk is now extinct (and the story of its slow demise makes for a sobering read, alas) in Drake and Fletcher’s day they were still widely abundant—so abundant, in fact, that as Parkhurst points out they could be driven in huge numbers from “Penguin Island”, along a plank, and onto a ship to provide food for the crew.


Well, this is aukward...

Fletcher’s quote might predate Parkhurst’s by over a year, but it’s thought that the birds Parkhurst wrote about were the original “penguins”—after all, for there to be a place called “Penguin Island” in 1578, we can presume the word penguin was in use in reference to the great auk long before then. Drake’s crew, meanwhile, would have presumably been familiar with the sea birds they knew from back home, and so when they saw remarkably similar flightless black-and-white birds in the equally freezing cold waters of the Southern Ocean in 1577, they either mistook them for the great auks they knew from home, or simply referred to them by the same name, penguin, because they were so similar.

That’s all well and good, of course, but what does the word penguin actually mean? Well, Fletcher’s reference to the birds’ “exceeding fatness” points to one possible theory: that penguin might derive from a Latin word, pinguis, meaning “plump”, “dense”, “fatty”—or pinguid. But a more likely explanation lies with Fletcher’s “Welsh men”. Penguin is thought to derive from pen gwyn, the Welsh for “white head”, and sure enough the great auk had a noticeably bright white patch of plumage between its bill and its eyes. 

 So all that means that the original “penguins” weren’t actually penguins, and weren’t from the Antarctic. But their feet were close to their arses...
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24 February 2016

10 Word Origin Stories That Are Completely Untrue

Often when the origin of a word isn’t known—and, just as often, even when it is—an entirely fictitious story emerges that purports to explain where the word in question came from. Typically, these stories provide neater, funnier, cleverer or more straightforward accounts than any real-life word etymology ever could, and so remain enduring popular—despite, however, being completely untrue… 

 This week on the HaggardHawks YouTube channel, out #500Words project is turning its attention to debunking 10 of these word origin myths, from backronyms like posh, cabal and golf to a bird supposedly named for his nesting sites (that in fact takes its name from the colour of its behind) and a bird that Napoleon thought was only good for horse food (that in fact takes its name from a flatulent goblin). You have been warned—here are 10 Word Origins Stories That Are Completely Untrue…






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8 December 2015

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!

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6 June 2015

Grandmother

When it came to being amazed, those Victorians really knew how to respond:
If ever an old fashioned phrase needed bringing back into circulation, it was this one. But where does a saying as bizarre as this one come from?

The earliest record we have of this beats my grandmother! dates back to 1833, when it first appeared in a comic poem included in an American elocutionary reader, The United States Speaker. The poem, “Logic”, outlines a light-hearted back-and-forth conversation between a young schoolboy—“an Eton stripling”—who has just returned from boarding school, and his uncle, Sir Peter, whom he is visiting:


 “Well, Tom, the road; what saw you worth discerning?
How’s all at college Tom: what is’t you’re learning?”
“Learning?—Oh, logic, logic; not the shallow rules
Of Lockes and Bacons, antiquated fools!
But wits’ and wranglers’ logic; for d’ye see
I’ll prove as clear as A, B, C,
That an eel-pie’s a pigeon; to deny it
Is to say that black’s not black;”—“Come, let’s try it?”
“Well, sir; an eel-pie is a pie of fish:” “Agreed.”
“Fish-pie may be a jack-pie:”—“Well, well, proceed.”
“A jack-pie is a John-pie—and ’tis done!
For every John-pie must be a pie-John!”
“Bravo! bravo!” Sir Peter cries,—“Logic for ever! 
This beats my grandmother, and she was clever!”

Tom’s grandmother-beating argument is that the eels in an eel-pie are fish, as are the jacks (an old nickname for a young pike) in a “jack-pie”. Jack is a pet form of John, and “John-pie” when reversed gives “pie-John”— hence, “pigeon”. Ipso facto. Quod erat demonstrandum. Logic forever, indeed.

The poem is unfortunately anonymous, which makes it hard to pin down the precise origin of this beats my grandmother. Its appearance here in an American textbook makes it tempting to presume it’s an American invention, but the reference to Eton College confuses things, as does the fact that the entire “pigeon”/“pie-John” argument is apparently considerably older than this poem might suggest: a reference to it here, for instance, from a book published in London in 1821, suggests that it was already fairly well known even by then.

But regardless of its American or British ancestry, one question remains—why on earth does it beat my grandmother? 

Well, oddly enough, this beats my grandmother! was just one in a long line of bizarre eighteenth-nineteenth century slang expressions that emphatically alluded to the speaker’s grandmother. So all my eye and my grandmother! meant “don’t talk rubbish”. So is your grandmother! was the Victorian equivalent of that schoolyard favourite, “I know you are, but what am I?” And to shoot your grandmother meant to find out a juicy bit of gossip, only to discover that everybody else already knows it. (Shameless plug: there’s more on this here.) 

Some of these expressions even made the leap from everyday colloquial English into hard-copy literature. Dickens, for instance, used the emphasizing expression not even to your grandmother in Our Mutual Friend (1865). Anthony Trollope dismissively used your grandmother! in his novel Phineas Redux (1873), as did Mark Twain in his short story How I Edited An Agricultural Paper Once (1870). And chances are you’ll have heard someone warn not to teach your grandmother to suck eggs—which Henry Fielding used in Tom Jones as far back as 1749.

As well as being the only one of these phrases to still be in use today, this egg-sucking grandma is also the oldest—and as such provides the best clue to the origin of this entire clutch of expressions. It’s earliest record dates all the way back to 1707, but before then, seventeenth-century speakers were telling each other not to teach their grandmothers “to sup sour milk”, “to make milk-kail” (a type of cabbage soup), and even “to grope a goose” (meaning to poke a goose’s rear end to see if it’s ready to lay an egg—which is likely the origin of the egg-sucking grandma).

Some geese: boy, has grandmother got a surprise for you...

 The implication of all of these sayings was the same—don’t try to tell an informed, experienced person how to do something they already know how to do. Tellingly, a similar meaning is implied by another expression, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, which has been found in a list of proverbs dating back to 1636 but is probably much, much older: a book on animal husbandry written in 1534, for instance, advises that “it is harde to make an olde dogge to stoupe [i.e. be compliant]”. The same book also explains the best technique for greasing sheep. Truly, it’s an indispensable read.

The implications in the old dog new tricks and grandma to suck eggs might be different, but there’s only a slight semantic sidestep from “old dog” to “old person”, and hence to “grandmother”—so it’s likely that the one inspired the other, and, eventually, its plethora of later variations. 

And if that doesn’t beat your grandmother, I don’t know what will.


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9 May 2015

Magpie

Considering our mascot is a hawk*, for some reason we seem to tweet an awful lot about magpies:
And sometimes it even happens inadvertently:
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…

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12 March 2015

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.



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