Transcript:

Before we get going I just want to point out that this is the 500th regular podictionary episode. Let’s see if we get to 1000.

Although I see that some slang dictionaries say that the word shampoo can mean “champagne,” I’ve had shampoo in my mouth enough times that if I pop any corks over reaching show number 500 I won’t be calling the bubbly shampoo.

I was reading a book by David Miles called The Tribes of Britain. In there he has an appendix that includes an entry about a guy named Sake Deen Mohamed, who was an Indian who joined the British army as a kid, moved to Ireland, married an Irish lass, moved to London, opened a curry house and finally in 1814 moved to Bristol and opened a place called the Indian Vapour Baths and Shampooing Establishment.

The idea of going to a public bath house to get my hair washed intrigued me, particularly when I imagined old images of people with hair oil slicking back their locks. But on closer inspection I find that clean hair had little to do with Mr. Mohamed’s establishment.

The first citation the Oxford English Dictionary holds for shampoo is dated 1762 and at least the geographic origins look consistent. The citation appears in a book about voyages to the East Indies. But the quote reveals that the author suppressed his fear of being shampooed because he’d already seen it done to someone else.

Fear of having your hair washed?

It turns out that the etymology of shampoo is from Hindi and meant to “press, pound and kneed,” like you do to bread dough. Originally a shampoo wasn’t a hair cleaning exercise, but a massage. So someone who had never experienced it before might certainly be surprised and at first a little intimidated by a gentle beating. And for old Mr. Mohamed vapour baths were a perfect complement to massage. Even Charles Dickens in the Pickwick Papers uses the word shampoo to mean a gentle beating.

It was 1860 before we see shampoo meaning “cleaning with a lather.” I don’t see any evidence of why the meaning shifted but we can take a guess since when we wash our hair there is a degree of massaging of the scalp that goes on. But I also see an earlier citation back around the time of Mr. Mohamed’s establishment, that gives me the impression that in some places the practice was that after someone received their shampoo massage, they were then lathered up with soap as well. So this could also have lead to the change of meaning of the word.

There’s a very special dictionary called Hobson-Jobson that focuses on English words with Indian etymologies. In there I see that before the word shampoo revealed itself in English, the massage it described it had already been observed and documented back in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. The reporter, someone called Terry, writes:

Taking thus their ease, they often call their Barbers, who tenderly gripe and smite their Armes and other parts of their bodies instead of exercise, to stirre the bloud. It is a pleasing wantonnesse, and much valued in these hot climes.

Perhaps stimulated by that word wantonness Hobson-Jobson goes on to say that the Roman Empire had its own form of shampoo or massage called tractator but that while in India shampoos appeared to be good clean fun, in Rome they were associated with sin and vice.

Now it strikes me that if Mr. Mohamed were alive today and opened a massage parlor, we too might assume something there to do with sin and vice

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In defining vixen Urbandictionary differs from the Oxford English Dictionary in that Urbandictionary defines a vixen as a “totally gorgeous and amazing human female” while the OED defines vixen as

the female of the genus Vulpes vulgaris, having an elongated pointed muzzle and long bushy tail

Now it might just be that this entry from the OED is out of date, it is from the second edition, but there is no mention of gorgeous humans anywhere there. To underline its out-of-date-ness there is a reference to foxes as being preserved in England as a beast of the chase, even though fox hunting has been banned in England since 2004.

Oscar Wilde called fox hunting the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.

But, back to vixen. The OED does have an entry under vixen with a definition of “an ill-tempered quarrelsome woman” dating from 1575. I’m sure when the editors at Oxford get around to this word they will include something more in line with that Urbandictionary definition, although it may be just too slangy a use for the mainstream dictionaries who don’t have this definition either, even though their revision cycles are considerably shorter.

But the question I’m sure you have pressing in your mind is why would an English word like fox have as its feminine counterpart such a different looking word? And the answer is that they once were actually the same word, or at least the gender differences of the same word.

Going way way back it seems that some scholars look at the Sanskrit word for “tail” and see a connection to a pre-Teutonic word that evolved into our word fox through Old English. A fox has a pretty prominent tail so although there is scant evidence for this connection, those scholars don’t get laughed out of the building.

Once in the early Germanic languages fox took on the peculiarities of the speakers who used the word and since different people had different dialects all over Germanic Europe and then within Old English, some ended up pronouncing fox with an F while other s ended up pronouncing vox with a V. In England the F people were in the north, the V people were in the south. It just happened that when the English language smoothed itself out a bit, the words that survived were of mixed sources. Fox made it through while vox was hunted into extinction, and similarly vixen managed to survive while fixen died out. Actually it was fyxe in Old English, no N on the end.

While the OED claims that there is a use of the word fox to mean an attractive woman, this dates only from 1963. Curiously though, a foxy woman was called that back in 1913.

It is unclear why Santa Claus would call one of his flying reindeer Vixen since at the time Clement Clarke Moore wrote his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” the word vixen had only two meanings, “the female of the genus Vulpes vulgaris” and “an ill-tempered quarrelsome woman.”

Transcript:

Here’s a word that shows how language can shift around against the current of the river of other words. When I see a word with an Old Teutonic word root I usually assume it came into English in Old English. But the fact is that the ancient Germanic peoples were trading with other Europeans and the Romans before ever either group floated north across the English Channel and took over Britain.

It isn’t clear when the Germanic root of our word group found its way down to Italy, but it was from Italy that it later came to England. And at first the word group had a specific context that related to its—at that time—Italian origins.

Art collectors and art connoisseurs were gushing about the beauty of artworks coming from Italy and so they naturally tended to drop into the jargon of Italian art. In there was the word group that specifically applied to a bringing together of two or more pieces to make up an artistic display with some kind of thematic cohesion.

The first citation for this is was about 300 years ago and it took almost no time at all for the metaphor of a group of objects of art to be extended to other groups of people and things.

The ancestor words of group are variously described as meaning “knot” or “lump” which certainly sound less artistic.

One of the first writers to use the word group to describe a more general collection of things was a little more artistic however. I mentioned Richard Savage the other day as a writer and poet who’d been duped into writing for his lunch. It turns out that Richard Savage, who at that lunch had ordered wine, was something of a scamp himself.

He claimed to be the illegitimate son of an Earl and that both his mom and his dad had cut him loose as a baby. Evidently he had lots of personal charm and could write extremely well but had absolutely no money sense. He was also one of those people who come over to your house and until midnight are delightful and fun to have around, but by 2am have not figured out that the host wants to hit the sack. People liked him and found him a charming companion and so gave him money to help him out of his troubles, but eventually they wanted to get rid of him.

Some friends and admirers took up a collection and paid for him to head out to Wales, ostensibly to avoid his creditors. But somehow he spent all the money he’d gotten for the trip before he was half way there. They sent more and he eventually made it to Bristol where he had planned to take a ship for his last leg to the house they’d arranged for him in Swansea. There was a strike or something and he was stuck in Bristol so quickly blew through what little money he had left.

His charm came to the rescue and he made new friends in Bristol but complained to them about the London friends who’d given him money and in return seemed to expect an unreasonable level of gratitude—unreasonable to him. This had the unfortunate effect of shutting down the flow of London money just as his new Bristol friends were getting tired of evenings that went on until daybreak.

In those days you could go to jail for owing money, and having run up a sizable tab at a local pub, Richard Savage was clapped in irons. Having alienated all of his friends he had no way to pay his way out and so died there.

Somehow this is considered a poetic way to go.

Transcript:

The etymology of the word blind is a little counter-intuitive. I imagine that being profoundly blind is like living in complete darkness, and yet, the ancient root word that gave us our word blind was a word that meant “to shine out brightly.”

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, back somewhere in Indo-European there was a root that—it is felt—gave rise not only to the word blind, but also to blaze and blue, since sometimes things shine in color. According to Etymonline, this root also developed into the word blend and it is the sense of “mixing up” what is being seen that appears to be one of the earlier meanings of the word that became blind through Germanic languages into Old English.

Ever since it’s been in English blind has meant “without sight” but it’s actual first appearance was way back in the year 975 when it was used in a metaphorical sense to describe how drunk someone was. Blind drunk of course meaning that someone is so blasted that they can’t see straight.

I was on a mission to dig up some famous last words when I decided to choose blind as the word of the day. It was because of a fellow named William Harvey. It wasn’t so much his famous last words though; in this case it was his famous last drink that caught my attention.

William Harvey was a doctor back 400 years ago. He is most famous because he is the guy who figured out that your heart pumps blood out into your body, through arteries and into capillaries, then back through the veins to the heart again. Up until Harvey came along no one knew that blood moved in a closed loop system. It makes so much sense to us that it’s hard to imagine what people assumed before this eminently sensible explanation was written down.

Anyway, William Harvey lived in mortal fear of becoming blind. He actually lived a pretty full life, he was 79 when he died. But what transpired on that day of his death is what ties blindness to drinking for the point of this story. His housekeeper bustled into his bedroom one morning to wake him up, she told him the time and threw open the curtains. He sat up in bed and asked if she’d already opened the curtains. She said yes, closed them and re-opened them, just to be sure I guess. His worst fears come true William asked her to bring him a bottle.

I guess something like that would be depressing and might drive you to drink, but unknown to the housekeeper, this particular bottle was one that William had prepared in advance in his paranoid state of fear of blindness.

He slugged back his poison and was dead before noon.

Transcript:

Urbandictionary has one and only one definition for the word affair:

When a man or woman are married and have sex with another man or woman.

I think that comes pretty close to what most people would have spring to their minds for the word affair these days. Although I think that romantic entanglement comes in there too, not just sex. The New Oxford American Dictionary has something along the same lines, but it comes as the second definition. Their first definition is simply “an event that’s been talked about before.” So one might mention the Abu Ghraib affair.

Our parents or grandparents might have talked about a big party being quite an affair. The word affair came into English from French and we have a first citation here in the Oxford English Dictionary circa 1300. It wasn’t until 1702 that a romantic engagement is called an affair. The first instance of affair back 700 years ago was more along the lines that one would use in saying that you had to get your affairs in order when you made up your will. It was the business you had to do. And it’s the having to do it that is at the deeper root of the word.

Before it became an English word affair was two French words a faire that literally translates as “to do.” This compares directly with another English word ado as in Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing. Similarly our grandparents might have called that glitzy party “a big do.” That first citation of affair in a romantic sense—and at first it didn’t have to include infidelity—was in a work by a guy named Sir Richard Steele.

Now Richard appears to have been a very faithful husband and we have hundreds of his loving letters to his wife to prove it. Two related quotes come to the surface. Before I read them I’ll explain that he was a public man who loved ideas and often spent time in the tavern discussing them with other likeminded men. You should also remember that these were the days long before the telephone and the text messaging of the day was hand carried by couriers. It was a regular thing for these guys to shoot several notes a day back and forth between each other. So in one he says to his wife:

A little in drink, but at all times your faithful husband.

And in another:

The finest woman in nature should not detain me an hour from you; but you must sometimes suffer the rivalship of the wisest men.

But for all his faithfulness as a husband he wasn’t always so faithful to his bankers. One day a young writer and poet named Richard Savage got a one of those text messages calling him to go out early in the morning with Richard Steele. He made his way to his front door and there was Steele waiting for him in a carriage. Off they dashed to destinations and rendezvous unknown, and ended up, to young Savage’s surprise in a back room of a seedy tavern.

Steele explained that what he had in mind was to publish a pamphlet and he wanted to dictate it to Savage. For the rest of the morning Savage took dictation. At lunch in came a very Spartan meal with nothing to drink. Savage asked if they could have wine and Steele after some humming and hawing said yes. The crummy food eaten they got back down to work. As the day drew to a close Savage was thinking “okay, time to pay up and get out of here” when Steele revealed that actually, he didn’t have any money.

The reason they were there was so that he wouldn’t be at home when his bankers came looking for him and the reason he’d wanted to write the pamphlet was so that Savage could then go down the street to the publisher to sell it and raise the cash to cover lunch.

Transcript:

Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary says that in American society a lord is a British tourist above the rank of a fruit vendor, and that although some people refer to God as the lord, he (Ambrose Bierce that is) considers this flattery rather than true reverence.

However, when I look at the etymology of the word lord there is a certain accuracy to that line in the Lord’s Prayer that goes “give us this day our daily bread.”

When the word lord came into Old English more than a thousand years ago it held the meaning of someone who manages servants. But back in the Germanic languages that the word grew out of, it had been two words that roughly translate as “loaf warden.” So the lord was the guy who was in control of handing out the bread. In Old English there was even a word for servant that had etymological roots meaning “bread eater.” So I think Ambrose Bierce must have been wrong about God being called lord for the purposes of flattery only.

I heard on the radio the other day that the origin of the phrase “drunk as a lord” came from a time when the aristocracy were the ones with the time and money to get boozy. I see a little evidence to support this claim in the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, but it doesn’t feel too solid to me. Even there they point out that this phrase was already being referred to as a proverb at its first citation some 40 years after William Shakespeare’s death.

Transcript:

The New Oxford American Dictionary says to pander is to “gratify or indulge an immoral or distasteful desire” and as an example it says “newspapers are pandering to people’s baser instincts.”

I’ve always heard pander used as a verb, but evidently before it was a verb it was a noun. A pander was a person who did the pandering.

Getting on 3000 years ago now there was a guy in Greece that we now know as Homer. He is supposed to have written the Odyssey and the Iliad. In the Iliad there is a guy named Troilus and he is slaughtered off part way through the action.

More like 1000 years ago a French author liked the story, but thought it would be even better if Troilus fell in love before he got killed. To add extra drama he decided the girl would be unfaithful and run off with another guy. This must have been an improvement to the story because an Italian guy rewrote it again before our old friend Geoffrey Chaucer rewrote it a third time so that William Shakespeare could make it into a play called Troilus and Cressida.

In order that Troilus can get together with Cressida he has a friend set up the rendezvous. That friend was named Pandarus.

If it wasn’t for all these writers copying each other over the centuries we would have to use another word other than pander since we get it from Pandarus’ name and without Chaucer and Shakespeare’s involvement we likely would never have heard of the guy.

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When you listen to the radio, as one song ends the DJ has another cued up. If you act in a play you have to learn your cues so you know when to say your lines. If you play pool or billiards you poke at the balls with a cue.

Some of these are the same cue, some are not. The cue that you use to poke at the white ball on a pool table is spelled C U E, but is actually derived from another word queue. In North America we “line up” to buy a ticket, but in Britain they use this Q U E U E word. They queue to buy a ticket.

Back in a time before soccer hooliganism in England a guy called George Mikes wrote that “an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.” So a cue is a line, which makes sense for a long thing like a pool cue. But whereas I wondered at first if the DJ was “lining up” the next song to play, it appears that the cue we use for music, and theatre too, has nothing to do with line ups or Q U E U E, but instead is a spelling-out of the letter Q, which in turn was an abbreviation of a Latin word quando that used to be used by actors marking up their scripts as they learned their lines.

The other day I did an episode on the word coward and it turns out that the word cue is actually etymologically related to coward since it comes from the same Latin root. The reason a line is called a queue is that the Latin root for queue was a word meaning “tail.” So that the line of people queuing up to buy a cup of coffee in the morning appears like a tail.

In contradiction to that quote of George Mikes that I gave a minute ago, the first citation for queue meaning a “lineup of people” reads “That talent..of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes..the French People.” That was in 1837. 100 years before that it had meant a pigtail people wore at the back of their heads, and before that a heraldic symbol to do with lions’ tails.

George Mikes was a Hungarian born British writer of the last century and although he seems in this case to have been mocking the British, he actually made his money mocking just about everyone. Here are a few titles of his books. His book on Japan was titled Land of the Rising Yen. His book on Israel was called Milk and Honey, the Prophet Motive, prophet with a PH.

He also included in his book on England a chapter on sex in Britain. The chapter consisted of one sentence: “Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles.”

Transcript:

We all know the difference between bravery and cowardice. As Ambrose Bierce put it, a coward is “one who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.”

There is a scene from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the knights must pass the den of a killer rabbit. After it goes for the throat they turn tail and scream “run away, run away” while putting words to action. This is such a wonderful cowardly scene, and especially so in etymological terms. To get some laughs the movie obviously makes use of the fact that bunnies are not usually very fierce. The fact is that because rabbits are much more prone to be the ones doing the running, back for a few centuries either side of Shakespeare’s time one of the synonyms for rabbit was coward. You would go out hunting for coward. Even better, in the movie, when the knights turn tail and run away, they are doing something etymologically cowardly because the word coward comes from an Old French word meaning “tail.” The dictionaries fuss as to whether this is because something that was running away would have its tail toward you, or because dogs put their tails between their legs when they are afraid. Either way the Old French word is thought to go back to an even older Latin word for tail.

There was a famous actor of last century named Noel Coward. His name comes not from any ancestral tendency to run away, however. His family must have taken care of livestock because in his case Coward is a contraction of “cow herd,” someone who tends cattle.

I found lots of quotes that use the word coward. Many are bold statements intended to make people brave such as Shakespeare’s

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”

But the one I like the best is

“all men would be cowards if they durst.”

This from a guy named John Wilmot, a nobleman of 350 years ago. This guy must be the poster boy for giving the upper class a bad name. He was a wild man but a friend of the King. He caught sight of a rich and beautiful young heiress and had the King try to do a little matchmaking. When this didn’t work he played the role of a highwayman and had her coach and horses stopped on the road, forcibly abducted her into another waiting coach and ran away with her. The King was a little pissed off at this and had young John, lord Rochester, locked up in the Tower of London for a while. At another point he made fun of the King in a cartoon and was banished from society. He set himself up as a fake doctor who claimed to cure infertile women. His treatment was of course to sleep with them. He ended up marrying that gal he’d earlier abducted, but with all his running around he was dead at 33, supposedly from syphilis. As he was dying his mother sent in the priests and John seemed to have the strength of his convictions; he was brave enough to be a coward and to keep from burning in hell recanted all his erotic poetry and debauched lifestyle.

Transcript:

Although you can go into stores and buy what they call “parchment paper,” what you are actually buying, however fine the paper might be, isn’t actually parchment. Parchment is important to us here at podictionary because the qualities of parchment are such that they allow researchers to pour over the original documents of hundreds and even more than a thousand years ago.

You don’t get that kind of staying power with paper. Think of that old newspaper clipping of your grandparents wedding. If it’s holding together at all, it’s likely pretty crispy and yellowed, even brown. True parchment stays white and that’s what the old monks used when they were writing in Latin and Old English back before anybody thought of upgrading to Middle English.

The way they made parchment was that they took the skins of sheep and stretched them out to dry and took a scraper to both sides. They then rubbed them down with pumice to make them nice and smooth and white. Most leather is tanned, that is treated with tannins that drive water out and set up the fibers in a more tough structure. Not so with parchment since this would have made it brown.

The reason parchment is called parchment is that it was invented in a place called Pergamum and so was named after the place. This was a Greek city but it’s now part of Turkey. You’ve heard of the great library of Alexandria? Well evidently this city of Pergamum had an enormous library that was second in line to that at Alexandria. The reason they needed to invent parchment there was that at one point there was an embargo on the shipment of papyrus out of Egypt and since necessity is the mother of invention, voila.

Once it had been invented there was no stopping it because it turned out to be much more useful than papyrus. Those books in the Alexandria library, and I suppose in Pergamum too, weren’t actually books. They were scrolls. Not exactly convenient to check back on something you read the day before yesterday, much easier just to turn pages in a book. What’s more, the parchment that they started to make bound-books out of could be written on on two sides, unlike those papyrus scrolls.