As you well know by now my book is about the words we use for our bodies; that’s B O D Y. But at least one of my listeners keeps thinking she hears something bawdy in my book promos; that’s B A W D Y. So let me set the record straight. My book isn’t B A W D Y although the cover and title might lead people to think it is. The word bawdy is an old one with an only vaguely visible etymology. Here’s how Urbandictionary defines it:

Raucous behavior, generally, but not always, a result of drunkenness and a desire to [be] loud and overbearing.

I give you the Urbandictionary definition not because it’s quite what a real official-type dictionary might say, but because I find it useful to see how the meaning of the word is perceived by Urbandictionary users.

The official-type definitions range from “humorously course” to “obscene.” Looking at a list of examples where bawdy is used I can see many where the Urbandictionary interpretation would fit in, but mostly you could as easily drop in the word dirty. There are lots of references to bawdy songs, bawdy jokes and bawdy tales. So drunkenness and raucousness aren’t really the focus.

Sex is the focus.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that something that is bawdy is befitting a bawd. The word bawd first shows up in 1362 but because we replaced it with the word pimp at the time of Shakespeare you might not recognize what a bawd is. A bawd was someone who made arrangements for professional engagements between prostitutes and their clients. This is why people who are rounded up by the police during crackdowns on prostitution are often charged with having an association with a “common bawdy house.”

But that professional title must have come from somewhere and that’s where the trail gets murky. There were French words that seem similar but they had a meaning of “bold,” “lively” and “merry.” It could be that sex for money was associated with such happy words, but the OED expects we should have seen some evidence of the crossover in meaning, and we don’t.

Another clue is in the first document that shows us this word bawd. That document is known as William’s Vision of Piers Plowman and I’ve mentioned it before on podictionary.

When we get way back into the early records of written English a couple of things happen. One is that there are fewer and fewer books to be found, and another is that before a certain point, all the books are hand written because the printing press hadn’t been invented yet. Piers Plowman is one of these. Here we have an important ancient document that is hand written but was popular enough that even though there weren’t printers available, it had been copied out numerous times and several examples still exist.

The thing about hand written documents is that they are all different. When some old scribe was copying from another manuscript he might make a mistake or accidently drop in a different word that meant to him the same thing. From the fifty plus copies of Piers Plowman we find that many of them use the word bawd, but one of them uses instead the word bawdstrot. So it’s possible that there was an older word bawdstrot that had been shortened down to bawd by the time Piers Plowman was written down, at least the copies we have, and it was just one old monk who remembered the older word and slipped it in. There is support for this supposition in that there was in fact an Old French word baudetrot that also meant “pimp.” The -strot or -trot part may relate to a Germanic word meaning “to wrangle.” The funny thing is that the baude- prefix might just have been built on a meaning of “raucousness” as Urbandictionary stumbled into.

Every so often we hear of a country where there’s been a coup, or a failed coup. In this sense the word is short for coup d’état and is self-evidently French. Coup d’état means “blow of state” and it must be a blow for all the folks who live in a country to wake up one morning and find their government, however much they hated it, has been taken over by people quite unlikely to make it better.

Coup like so many French words, comes from Latin and like a fair proportion of Latin words, eventually traces back to a Greek word kolaphos that also meant to strike. Like many old words coup seems to have come come into English more than once with subtly different meanings but the first time a coup d’etat was documented in English was back in 1646 by an English historian documenting the tale of King Louis XIII of France. The court of Louis XIII must have been as full of intrigue, backstabbing and subterfuge as any political maneuvering has ever been; and that was just between Louis and his mother.

You’ve likely heard of a coup de grace as well. I saw a restaurant review that talked about the dessert as being the coup de grace. This sense means that it is something that finishes off the meal and a coup de grace would actually finish off anything since the literal meaning is a “blow of grace,” that is, “a mercy killing” to put someone out of their misery. One might imagine a cutting sword in this action and among the many meanings that coup has evolved into in French, “cut” is one.

From “cut” we have things that have been cut away and that’s what a coupon is. Since the word has been circulating so long in French coupon too has come into English more than once. The first time was back in the days of Geoffrey Chaucer but that meaning of a piece of meat became obsolete. The second time the word arose in English was in the 1800s. Money talks so people must have listened and the word coupon referring to a paper cut from a financial stock certificate arrived in English like it had never been here before.

Now we get coupons stuffed into our mailboxes so often I wish I could cut them off at the source.

The podictionary word for today is a favorite one of an author whose work I really enjoy. I caught Jasper Fforde during a book signing in a cavernous and reverberant hall which accounts for the sound of this:

“This is Jasper Fforde and my favorite word is linoleum, linoleum.”

Earlier, during his book reading, he had explained how hard it had been for him to describe his books to agents and publishers when he was getting started. And now that difficulty also falls to me in trying to tell you what he writes about. It’s kind of hard to describe. These are detective stories, except the detectives are able to move in and out of literature. Just like special features in movies might give you insight into the back-story behind the movie and something of the real lives of the actors, Jasper Fforde’s books give you insight into the back-story of the real lives of the fictional characters in books.

He’s very imaginative. I particularly liked how he developed a theme around an operating system for books and how some evil giant corporation was going to take over the book-world with an operating system upgrade. See I told you it was hard to explain.

Anyway, Jasper Fforde really does like the word linoleum. In one of his books the cops work out of a shell corporation that is a retail flooring outlet so the word linoleum fits in quite nicely. In another book two people are killed in a freak linoleum related accident. But don’t judge his books by their flooring.

He also said that one of the reasons he liked the word was the way it slipped off the tongue. I guess anything with an etymology based on the Latin word for “oil” should do that. Linoleum is based on two Latin roots; linum and oleom. Linum means “flax” and that’s why we call linen napkins linen, they have fibers of flax in them. In fact that’s why we call the lining of our coats lining and why we call a line a line; because coat lining and threads that lines are named after were often made with flax fibers.

There are in fact fibers in linoleum but that’s not why it’s called linoleum, those fibers are usually cotton. This is where the oleum part comes in because it’s linseed oil that makes linoleum linoleum.

If it hadn’t been for a guy named Frederick Walton, instead of thinking of old kitchen floors as linoleum, we’d have to twist our tongues around a totally different kitchen flooring called kamptulicon. But I’ll step back a little further if I might.

In London back in the 16- and 1700s it was the posh thing to do to hire a couple of strong guys to come by your house with a sedan chair in which you would sit while they carried you across town for all your important social or business meetings. One very important reason that these human mules were necessary was that the streets were a muddy mix of ruts and horse droppings into which the upper class foot objected to sink up to the ankle. Because sedan chair carriers and others must needs step into the front hall when picking up or delivering their clients, it was important to protect the floor from their mucky feet with something called a floorcloth. These were fabric coverings that were coated in multiple layers of paint in an effort to make them waterproof. In the early 1800s as the use of sedan chairs was falling off Elijah Galloway came up with a better product that embedded cork crumbs in rubber on the fabric backing. He called it kamptulicon from the Greek words for “thick” and “flexible.” It was all the rage and it even graced the floors of the British houses of parliament.

I think we need to doubly thank Frederick Walton since he saved us from having to remember the name kamputicon. Walton filed his linoleum patent in 1860, although the Oxford English Dictionary for some reason dates the first citation for linoleum 18 years later. I can’t figure out how his linoleum was so much more economical than the rubber stuff because it took weeks and weeks to prepare; but it was.

Frederick Walton took out dozens of patents on his inventions but he never bothered to trademark them so as his flooring became wildly popular his patents were running out; and when they did other companies jumped into the market. He tried to sue but the courts found that the word linoleum was so common by then that it had become generic and any company was free to use it. He tried to expand his market by opening shop across the pond in America.

You’ll likely recognize the flooring brand Armstrong. Armstrong got big into linoleum but only as a side effect of prohibition. Armstrong had originally manufactured corks for bottles and as prohibition came on they were wondering first of all what to do with all that cork, and second of all what to do to make a living. Since linoleum recipes called for wood dust or cork dust, they jumped into the business. The reason you recognize their name is because they were the first to figure out that advertising flooring to potential customers might be a good idea. Here’s an image of their very first ad.

Back in England linoleum was seen as such wonderful stuff everyone had to have it. Even the Royal Navy found that it was good to cover the decks of ships with. It was waterproof, it almost never wore out and it gave good traction even when wet. That’s why you hear institutional flooring sometimes referred to as battleship linoleum. You won’t see much linoleum on warships any more though. A few battles revealed that flooring made of linseed oil and wood dust has an incendiary tendency incompatible with a theatre of combat.

I think it was very appropriate for Jasper Fforde to have chosen linoleum as our word for today because before Frederick Walton invented the stuff he had failed in another invention. That might have changed the course of history in book-world; it was a linseed oil based quick drying varnish for book covers.

Who knows what that might have done to the operating system.

I chose nonplussed as today’s word to find out if there was a word plussed and what it might mean.

No luck there, although I might have suspected that someone would have started using plussed as a kind of backformation. Urbandictionary says that nonplussed is:

often misused as meaning unfazed, but actually means bewildered.

So if people thought nonplussed meant “unfazed” or “oblivious”, wouldn’t plussed logically mean “fazed” and “blivious”? Well, I guess not.

The reason that nonplussed means “bewildered” is that it more literally means “stopped in your tracks.” Nonplus means you can’t go forward, just like its components non and plus might suggest.

The first citation for nonplussed was in the work of a guy named William Warner in 1606—so that’s ten years before old Shakespeare was irreversibly nonplussed. Both Warner and Shakespeare lived in a time before there were copyright laws and so people often felt quite free to start printing off someone else’s book and selling it themselves. The book that nonplussed first appeared in was something called Albion’s England and it was a pirated work in its day. But just because there were no copyright laws doesn’t mean authors were without any protection. Luckily William Warner was a lawyer as well as an author and he’d actually given a written license to his printer, so that when another printer started selling his book before its official release date he had the police come down on them like a ton of Harry Potter books.

This Albion’s England was actually a long poem that supposedly described the history of England from the time of Noah’s Ark up to the then present. The fact that it was full of fiction as well as fact seemed to make no-never-mind to the people who bought it. It was clearly a good candidate for pirating since edition after edition kept on being released over a period of 26 years. With each new edition came more and more content until at the end Albion’s England actually took 16 books to contain.

That’s enough to stop anyone in their tracks

I was asked why someone who is thrifty is thought of as spending their money wisely, while a spendthrift is someone who doesn’t spend their money wisely. Of course the reason for this lies in one of the older meanings of thrift. But the reason we can’t recognize it more easily has to do with a phenomenon I talked about in my episode on the word vixen. Fox and vixen are really two forms of the same word because people in southern England liked to pronounce this word with a V while people in the north liked it better with an F.

So if I take our word thrift and exchange the F for a V, I get thrive—or near enough. So that’s what thrift meant when it first appeared in written form back in 1305; thriving, prospering and succeeding.

From there it makes sense that another meaning to the word was “the means by which you were prospering and succeeding”, so that your thrift was your “income” and what you were able to save. So that’s why thrifty means “thrifty”; you can prosper more if you have more money coming in than going out.

Similarly, if thrift means your “income”, now we can understand why being a spendthrift is a bad thing. You can’t grow and prosper if you habitually spend every penny you get.

I mentioned that the favored pronunciation in the north was with an F and it appears that this word, although it isn’t documented until the early fourteenth century, this word didn’t come from the south—from France—but instead from the north and Old Norse. Some 400 years before the appearance of the word thrift the whole northern half of England had been controlled by the Vikings and since books get more and more scarce the further back in time you go, it’s just as-luck-would-have-it that the word only shows up for us in 1305. It must have been in use long before that—and quite likely was written down but lost—and slowly, as the north of England became more English, this word wheedled its way south and became more English too—so much so that it changed its pronunciation and spelling and left a clone in thrive.

Now here’s a quote from someone who never had to be very thrifty; Jennie Jerome Churchill:

We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.

She could afford to say that. You know how when you look up people’s bio it usually says their profession? For example Joe Blow, candle merchant. Beside Jeannie Jerome Churchill’s dad’s name it says “sportsman and speculator.” Beside her name it says “society hostess.”

She had a couple of kids. One of them was named Winston Churchill, you may have heard of him. When she died Winston said

On the whole it was a life of sunshine.

That’s what I call thriving.

The word homage doesn’t mean what it used to mean. These days if you are lucky enough that someone pays homage to you it means they pay you some sort of compliment; they honor you in some way. That’s nice, but wouldn’t it be nicer if instead of paying you a compliment they paid you in good hard cash; or even better in some kind of servitude.

That’s what it used to mean.

Imagine, if someone paid you homage you could get them to clean out the garage or something.

Actually it’s worse than that. These days people are said to be paying homage when actually they are ripping you off. Some design in architecture is said to be in homage to Frank Lloyd Wright or a piece of music is a homage to Jimmy Hendrix—I came across both of these examples by the way. The generous interpretation is that this kind of homage means that the creator liked the style and tried to reproduce it in some way, the cynical is that the creator copied someone else’s work.

I saw another example where the New York Jets paid homage to the time when the team was called the New York Titans by wearing blue and gold uniforms. I suppose they were honoring their history, but if the word homage held the meaning it did for most of its 700 year history in English, their paying homage meant that they were admitting that they were an inferior team to the Titans.

Sometimes, particularly in arty circles, the word is pronounced omage and this reveals its French roots. The word first appeared in a context where medieval lords were granting property use rights to their social inferiors. By doing homage to your lord you were doing work for him in return for the use of the land that he controlled. Paying homage meant payment in cash or in kind. But it was the work or service to the lord that made this word homage applicable. The roots are Latin and ultimately Indo-European and mean “man.” Think Homo-sapiens. So when a guy in medieval England did homage to his lord what he was doing was saying “I am your man.”

Before I go I want to say thank you to Podcast User Magazine who were kind enough to give me a full 4 pages of coverage this past issue.

To do something inadvertently is kind of like doing it by accident. Usually it’s because you aren’t paying attention to whatever it is you were doing when you made the mistake. As in “I inadvertently let the kettle boil dry.”

Here is one of those words that would seem to be built on another word, advertantly, that nobody has ever heard of. But sure enough when I look into the dictionary, there is indeed a word advertant that popped up back in the seventeenth century in what seems to be the latter stages of that period of English history when writers were showing off by pulling words out of Latin. The Oxford English Dictionary only has two citations for advertant and they are only six years apart in the 1670s. So although this inkhorn term seems to quickly have fallen out of use, it’s derivative inadvertent caught on.

I implied that inadvertent meant “not paying attention” so as logic would have it, advertant meant “attentive.” I said this word was pulled from Latin and it comes from advertere. Not only is our word inadvertently put together like building blocks, but so in fact is that Latin root. The vertere part means “to turn” so that advertere means to turn towards something-or-somebody, to pay attention to them. This is the root of our words advertising and advertisements. To turn away from something, you just replace the Latin prefix and you can avert your eyes.

The word advertisement has been in English a few centuries longer—documented from 1523. Its etymology seems more organic and less invented. Instead of having some fancy-pants scholar pull it directly from Latin, advertisement became an English word because it had first become a French word and French had such a longstanding influence on our language. But at first advertisement didn’t mean what we understand it to mean today. Back then advertisement meant turning your mind to something. It’s not easy to tell when advertising and advertisement first came to mean “paid publicity in order to sell something”; there seems to be a smearing of meanings across a few centuries. But one of the citations that caught my eye was by a poet named George Crabb.

George Crabb started out to be a doctor, tried to be an author and ended up being a clergyman. During his first career he was doing pretty well, he’d taken over a medical practice of an older guy and decided to further his education by going to London to study. This inadvertently led to his downfall as a doctor. While he averted his attention from his medical practice, the guy he’d left in charge worked collaboratively with the only other doctor in town, so when George came home, he’d lost all his rich patients. He tried and tried to gain them back—and he was doubly motivated to do it because his fiancé wouldn’t marry him until he had enough income to raise a family—but he just couldn’t do it. Knowing this the following snippet from his poem becomes particularly poignant. His lament is the lament of publicity people everywhere, that there’s no sure fire way to gain the public’s attention.

If the sick gudgeons to the bait attend,
And come in shoals, the angler gains his end:
But should the advertising cash be spent,
Ere yet the town has due attention lent,
Then bursts the bubble…

The podictionary word for today is…well, I’ll let him say it.

“Hello, this is Alexander McCall Smith and my favorite word is fantoosh. That’s spelt F A N T O O S H.”

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series as well as several others including The Sunday Philosophy Club series. I really enjoy his work. I think it’s happy and wise, simple and sophisticated all at the same time. That’s why I was thrilled when he agreed to have me do an episode on his favorite word.

At least I was thrilled until I heard the word.

Fantoosh; I’ve never heard of that. What’s more the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary have never heard of it either. So I popped fantoosh into Google and came up with the Fantoosh Restaurant in Glasgow. Glasgow is in Scotland and Alexander McCall Smith lives in Scotland so I called up the restaurant to see what their name meant:

“I’m not too sure what it means exactly. We’ve actually had a few people from Spain or Italy come in; they actually were laughing at the name of our shop but they wouldn’t tell us what it meant because in their country it means something rude.”

Well, it’s not that rude actually. In Italian and French too the word or a very similar one means “marionette” or “puppet.” But that’s not a puppet as you’d see in a puppet show; it’s a person who is easy to push around, someone with no will of their own.

It evolved in the sixteenth century in Italian out of the word for “manservant.” It’s etymologically related to the Latin infans, an ancestor also of our infant and with a meaning ultimately of “one who can’t speak.” I guess with the Italian and French meaning it’s one who can’t speak for themselves.

But I don’t think if someone was going to name a restaurant Fantoosh they’d want to name it as a place that has no will of its own. And it seems odd that Alexander McCall Smith, who I’d guess is a pretty up-beat kind of person, would pick as his favorite word something that basically means a “yes-man” or a “pushover.”

So aren’t we lucky that the Dictionary of the Scots Language exists, because it has an entry for fantoosh that makes far more sense. They say it means “over-dressed”, “flashy”, “showy” or “ultra-fashionable.” They have citations back to 1947 but they believe the word arose during the First World War, that it is indeed etymologically related to the “puppet” fantouche and an English dialect word fanty-sheeny that I found mysteriously attributed to Devon (which is about as far away from Scotland as you can get and still be in the British Isles).

I also found fantoosh meaning “fancy”, “extravagant”, and “frivolous” in the Double-Tongued Dictionary that’s run by Grant Barrett of A Way With Words.

But wait a minute; there are reader’s comments there too. The first one says:

You can also find the word used in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, where there is a reference to the “fantouche Republic of Bophuthatswana.”

Now that’s an odd coincidence.

I mean, it shouldn’t seem like an odd coincidence that the author who told me that this was his favorite word, actually used it in one of his books. What’s odd is that the Republic of Bophuthatswana was anything but showy or ultra-fashionable. The Republic of Bophuthatswana was a puppet government of the government of South Africa before the end of apartheid.

So here Alexander McCall Smith is using the word with a meaning of a marionette with no will of its own; its Italian or French meaning (with a near French spelling by the way). Two pretty rare words, both with direct links back to the same author. At a glance you might think that the two words are different, but the dictionaries tell me they’re related.

I wonder if Alexander McCall Smith is being fantoosh with his vocabulary, or if he’s playing me for a fantouche

Although I don’t much follow professional sports it seems to me that sports writers have to be pretty creative writers. I mean you have to be pretty creative to keep coming up day after day with different ways of saying that this team beat that team. And now since most sports seasons cross over each other, you have to say it for football, for basketball, for hockey, soccer, cricket, tennis, lawn bowling, oh my god the list is endless.

So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that Googling befuddle for news stories brings up plenty of sports stories of how team A befuddled team B.

Second in line seemed to be politicians befuddling voters.

Befuddle is such a great word. It sounds so funny all by itself. Befuddle, befuddle, befuddle. Who thought that up?

Well, as it turns out the first citation for befuddle was in the Oxford English Dictionary before it was the Oxford English Dictionary. At first it was called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principals and it was published in pieces. This particular entry must have befuddled the editors because that first citation from 1887 indicates the source as the New English Dictionary entry for the prefix be- with meaning number four.

But that’s what the etymology says too.

Oops!

My guess is that the etymology should point back to the word fuddle. There actually is a word fuddle and it showed up way back in 1588. Looking at that I see that to befuddle isn’t just to “confuse”, it’s actually to get drunk, or to confuse as if drunk because originally fuddle meant “drink.”

Although the etymology of befuddle is befuddled the link back to fuddle is right there in the definition since the OED entry for befuddle says:

“To make stupid with tippling; also, to confuse, to stupefy. Hence befuddlement, intoxication; confusion, stupefaction.”

The etymological roots of fuddle are a little less stupefied, although not completely clear-headed either. The OED says that fuddle is of obscure origin but points out that the Dutch word vod means “soft”, “slack”, or “loose”, and that the German word fuddeln means “to swindle.” Etymonline suggests instead that this same German word means to “work in a slovenly manner; as if drunk” and that this might in turn come from fuddle meaning “worthless cloth.”

It’s enough to give you a hangover.

According to the fattest dictionaries I checked out the English word bench evolved from an Old English word before it, and so from a Germanic source.

Although our word banquet didn’t come from Old English and means a generous and usually formal meal, instead of something modest to sit on, there is indeed a connection.

Those pre-literate Germans two or three thousand years ago must have used a similar word to what became the Latin word for a “table” or “bench.” Sometime during their centuries of fighting and trading with the Romans, Germanic speakers must have lent the Romans this word and it later appeared in French as banc meaning “bench.” Thus a banquet would at first have been a small bench. There are suggestions in some of the etymological sources that for a time a modest meal eaten at the household workbench might have taken on the name of the bench and so become a banquet, although at first a very modest banquet. By the time it shows up in English in 1483 banquet has become associated with formal meals eaten with dignitaries and including speeches and other entertainment. So it hasn’t changed much over the past 500 years.

When politicians are campaigning they call the round of dinners that they must attend “the rubber chicken circuit.” The food is all too often chicken that has been cooked long before and reheated, giving it that squeaky feel of rubber when you cut it or bite into it. Big company Christmas parties as well as graduation dinners suffer from the same challenge to the industrial chef. Yet these meals are not infrequently called banquets.

The fussy among language watchers have been known to complain that these lowly group feed-fests are too ordinary to qualify as real banquets. “Real banquets”, they claim, offer only the most succulent foods and to glittering dignitaries, not this bunch of sad-sack riffraff. Such people obviously don’t know the etymology of the word, and since you now do, next time you hear one of these snobs complain, you can tell them to sit back down on their banquet and chew the rubber chicken.