According to The Oxford Dictionary of English—notable for confusingly being not the Oxford English Dictionary—a fantasy is:

a fanciful mental image

The OED has one meaning that is a little more to my purpose, they say a fantasy is:

a supposition resting on no solid grounds

When the word fantasy first appeared in English it was in a translation 600 years ago of an important medical textbook originally written 700 years ago in Latin by a guy known to us as Lanfranc.

The art of medicine back in those days was full of fantasy since doctors didn’t have much scientifically based information to go on.  However this first instance of the word fantasy didn’t mean misinformed or impossible ideas such as making someone feel better by cutting them open and letting them bleed.

Instead fantasy referred to the mind’s ability to form mental images—what we might call visualization.

This was only one of several meanings that had evolved for the word as it has burbled up from Greek through Latin and French before arriving in English.

Way back in ancient Greek the word meant “to make visible” and was built on the root phaos meaning “light” which also gives us photon and photograph.  One of the other meanings of the word fantasy that English inherited from earlier users of the word was that of “a phantom.”  You can hear the similarity in fantasy and phantom and sure enough they come from the same etymology.

But a phantom usually comes in a human or humanlike form and this is a bit of a divergence from the ancient Greek interpretation since the same word roots gave the Greeks their god Phantasus, who brought dreams; but not dreams of people. It was his brother Morpheus who brought dreams of people.  Phantasus only brought dreams of inanimate objects.

That first English citation for fantasy comes from a document known as Chirurgia magna which in English means “The Big Book of Surgery.”

The author Lanfranc was important because he was forced to flee from Italy to France because of the ongoing battles between the ruling families back home, and in so doing he set the stage for a shift in the western world center of medical knowledge.  Back home he’d studied under the most famed doctors but he himself hadn’t yet made his mark.  After building up his reputation in Paris he was encouraged to write down his knowledge for the combined reasons of helping his students and colleagues be better doctors, but just as importantly to bring fame and honor to Paris.

This is one of those examples of the pen being mightier than the scalpel because it was indeed his book that not only made him famous but moved the centre of gravity for medical knowledge out of Italy and into France.

Here was a doctor uncommon for his time.  He based his advice on results and observation not superstition.  So though he gave us the word fantasy, he seemed not to live within it

The opium poppy’s scientific Latin name is Papaver somniferum meaning “sleep inducing poppy.”

Somnus was the Roman god of sleep and one of his offspring was Morpheus, the god of dreams.  Actually there were several brothers who were bringers of dreams, one brought dreams of animals, one dreams of things.  It was Morpheus who brought dreams of people.

In 1804 the opium poppy also had offspring, aided by a German chemist.  In this case the offspring was known as morphine, also a bringer of dreams.

Pharmacologists were not seeking new recreational drugs back 200 years ago, but looking for a better painkiller. Morphine looked like a great one until they realized how addictive it was.

In fact it is a great painkiller and is widely used in medical settings but the list of casualties who came away from hospital with an addiction is enough to give one pause.  Morphine’s use is perpetuated not only because it works—albeit with side effects—but also because it’s cheap.  In the 1950s it was successfully synthesized, bypassing any need for father poppy.  Morphine is seen as a particularly useful drug in treating terminal illnesses.

Guess why; not too much to worry about on the addiction front.

One famous user of morphine to carry him into dreams and beyond was Sigmund Freud.  Here we are almost 70 years after his death and pretty well everyone knows the name Sigmund Freud.  Looking at the ideas he brought forward it’s kind of hard to understand why he was so influential.  His objective was to link his theories to hard scientific data but that’s kind of difficult to do when you assign a sexual motive to a baby wanting to suckle at its mother’s breast.

Freud wasn’t a morphine addict but he was a cigar addict and this lead eventually to cancer in his mouth and jaw.  He suffered through multiple surgeries until finally, when he knew the writing was on the wall, he called in his personal physician and asked to be put out of his misery.  Three doses of morphine later Sigmund parted company with Morpheus and was introduced to Morpheus’s uncle Thanatos; the Greek god of death.

Curiously Freud had invoked the concept of Thanatos as a supposed human drive we are all supposed to have, wishing death upon ourselves even as we strive for life—and of course for sex.

See, I told you it was hard to make sense of some of his theories.

Maybe it was all a dream.

More than one of the entries at Urbandictionary has a theme along the lines of the following for the word thesaurus:

A scholarly dinosaur known worldwide for his knowledge of words of all kinds.

I can get into that.  For two reasons:

• One is, doesn’t thesaurus sound like it should be a dinosaur?
• Another is our increasing use of digital media that renders big fat books useful as a secondary line of inquiry.

In fact I just bought a book called Print is Dead, the author Jeff Gomez makes a point right off the top that no one has to tell him about the irony that his book on the death of hardcopy is actually a physical book.

Anyway, as relates to thesaurus, I don’t think many people thumb through their Roget’s anymore.  It’s much easier to right-click. So doesn’t that make the traditional thesaurus a bit of a dinosaur?

But we’re into dictionaries here at podictionary so we should give strength and comfort to the kindly old thesaurus.  After all the word thesaurus is older than dictionary, although not necessarily in English.

To go back to what a thesaurus is for a moment, a modern definition might be that a thesaurus is a book of synonyms.

While the word dictionary appeared in English back in 1526 and thesaurus didn’t appear as an English word until 1823 it had been used as the Latin name for a kind of Latin-English dictionary back about the time when dictionary first surfaced.  More than that thesaurus goes back through Latin to Greek where its meaning isn’t of a book of synonyms; instead, the word in Greek meant “treasure house” and according to Etymonline arose from a root word meaning “to put.”  Where else would you put your stuff than in a treasure house.  So that’s why a thesaurus is called a thesaurus, it is a treasure house of words.

The most famous kind of thesaurus is, as you know, Roget’s Thesaurus.  This is named after Peter Mark Roget, an Englishman who tinkered with the idea of a book of synonyms for most of his life, but didn’t get around to producing it until he was retired.  Before coming up with his thesaurus Peter Roget was a physician and scientist with astoundingly broad interests.

He was one of the guys who recommended that the City of London filter its drinking water before piping it around town.  Long before refrigeration as we know it became possible he had been involved in the invention of a sort of refrigerator to keep food fresh.  As a young man he had been poking around looking for a career and had spent some time in the company of Charles Darwin’s grandfather, perhaps not quite coincidentally one of Peter Roget’s most famous scientific papers was one that pointed out the seemingly common origin of the various species—although he attributed it to the hand of God.

Apart from his thesaurus the one discovery he made that most influenced human life on earth was as follows.  One day he was watching carriages go by on the street through a window with a venetian blind on it.  He noticed that even though the venetian blind blocked the view of the spokes of the carriage wheels for an instant when they aligned with the slats of the blind, he still retained the impression of continuous motion in his mind’s eye.

He realized that if you snap from one image to another quickly enough, the brain interprets the change as smooth continuous motion.  I

t is this trick of our minds—likely the same trick that enables us not to notice our own blinking five or ten thousand times a day—that makes movies, TV and computer monitors possible.  They all throw a quick series of stills at us and we think we’re watching motion.

What a treasure.

As Christmas eve approaches I’m sure that there will be many young insomniacs lying completely unable to get the visions of sugarplums started dancing in their heads. It’s hard to wait for morning to come when you are so excited about what might be in your stocking.

It’s just as hard to wait for sunrise when it isn’t excitement that keeps you awake, but that amorphous awareness that you wish would just go away so you could follow your wandering mind into dreams.

The word insomnia is marked in the Oxford English Dictionary as “not naturalized, alien.” This isn’t a nod to the feeling you have after a few nights without sleep, but instead the view of the dictionary makers that this word is actually still a Latin word. The OED marks such words with parallel lines that Oxford insiders called tramlines.

It seems strange that a word that first appeared in the very first English dictionary to actually call itself a dictionary back in 1623 should still be considered an alien word.

It is strange but the reason is that this tramline designation actually is a vestige of the compilers of the original dictionary more than 100 years ago. We are talking about the close of Victorian England here. Back then you could actually have a discussion about “pure” forms of English and be taken seriously.

Now we know that although there definitely are rules to a language such as English, these rules aren’t exactly set out by some governing body; the rules more or less make themselves according to how people actually use the language. So a word is foreign until people start using it in English, then it’s English.

The third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary now evolving before our very browsers has sent tramlines off for scrap metal recycling since depending where you start counting from, almost all English words are alien.

Of course insomnia—our word of the day—means “not somnus” in Latin; somnus meaning sleep, but also being the Roman god of sleep.

There is a whole family surrounding this state of being. Like many Roman gods Somnus was a continuation of an earlier Greek god Hypnos and had sons including Morpheus and Phantasus who were the bringers of dreams. All of these godly personal names are echoed in English words like hypnotic, morphine and fantasy.

Though they may be otherworldly, they aren’t alien.

I was once at a big rally that was later claimed in the press to have been 100,000 strong.  Evidently there are experts who can calculate these things but when you’re there in the crowd it just seems like a whole lot of people.

A thousand, ten thousand; who can tell? This is the idea behind the word myriad. These days we hear about debts amounting to billions, maybe trillions; these are scales of numbers that we just can’t conceive of.

I looked at how the word myriad is used and there are examples of myriads of flies, a myriad of readers and myriad problems.  Myriad doesn’t just mean “many” it means “very many”, “uncountably many.”

The word comes from a time when there weren’t the tools we have today to work with numbers that high.  Myriad comes from ancient Greek and literally means “ten thousand.”  In English the word was first used in translations to figuratively mean a number too big to try to count.  But the Ancient Greeks lived in an even smaller world because according to the Oxford English Dictionary it was pretty rare for them to express an overwhelmingly large number by this word myriad.  Instead of using the word for “ten thousand”, they used their word for “one thousand” to mean “overwhelmingly many.”

The first time myriad appears in English is from the pen of Richard Eden who’s life just preceded Shakespeare’s—so 450 years ago.  Richard Eden was one of the guys there at the beginning of what became the British Empire; one of the instigators, or at least their mouthpiece.

When King Henry VIII died there was some jostling for position in who exactly was in charge of ruling England.  One of the guys heavily working the back-room was the Duke of Northumberland.  He was of the opinion that there were opportunities to be had out there in the wider world and that so far the people who were getting in on all the action were those who set off in ships.

Richard Eden was thus encouraged to begin translating tales of discovery from Spanish into English.  The idea was that Englishmen were more likely take to the seas if they could read about how other countries were doing it.

Eden was one of the first to let his countrymen know about Christopher Columbus’s visits.  After telling them about that he put together a kind of how-to manual on shipping and maritime navigation.

Although most of his work was translating the work of others into English, he had a bit of the investigative reporter in him and actually visited the bedside of explorer Sebastian Cabot before he died.  So I guess it’s safe to say that Richard Eden helped set in motion a myriad of changes in the world.

Here are a few quick announcements.

Podictionary will take a few days off next week and the week after.  I’m going to post only two episodes in the week of Christmas, on Thursday and Friday.  Then during the week of New Years I’ll post three episodes Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

If you’re taking holidays I hope you keep safe and enjoy yourself.

Here’s what Santa brought me a little early.  I’ve just signed a deal for an audio book that will be coming out in the spring.  It’s called Global Wording and it’s a short history of the English language.  You can see what the cover will look like if you go over to my book blog at navelgazersdictionary.com.

This is the six hundred and sixty sixth show for podictionary.

Some time ago I got an email from a listener named John who said that he had dreamed that my six hundred and sixty sixth show would fall on Christmas day.  This wouldn’t have struck me as significant but I see from the Oxford English Dictionary that way back in 1382 John Wycliffe’s bible made reference to this number as being the number of the beast.

Clearly then today’s word must be beast.

I see from Urbandictionary that beast is used today to express admiration.  For example someone who is a beast at basketball is really into it and likely very skillful.

Obviously this isn’t the meaning that John Wycliffe had in mind.

The word beast appeared first in English right after the Norman invasion.  It was a French word and as usual with these kind of words, a Latin word before that.  So at the time that John Wycliffe wrote it down it had only just been adopted as an English word.

For some reason this new English word was a popular one and largely replaced an existing Old English word.

We still use that old word that seems to have been attacked by beast; it evolved into our word deer.

That’s deer as in Bambi.

Our sense of the word deer doesn’t hold much of a sense of savageness, while our sense of beast does.  Yet back when Wycliffe was writing these two words had a closer equivalence.  Perhaps the word animal as we use it today gives the best sense of the breadth of meanings that both deer’s precursor word and beast had.  They referred to a range of animals from wild to domestic and in the case of the word beast, explicitly including humans as well.

Then just as the word beast was getting good and comfortable as an English word, along came another Latin word; animal.

Although animal had been drifting around in obscure uses in England before that, some years after Shakespeare took his last breath people suddenly started using animal where they would have used beast before, and where their Old English ancestors would have used deor.

And “breath”—as in “Shakespeare’s final”—comes into it too.

All three of these words are thought to have evolved from etymologies that included breathing.  The idea that a living being was one that drew breath seems to have been pervasive enough that it exists at the root of all three of these words: deor, beast and animal.

But what’s so beastly about the number six hundred and sixty six?

I am reminded of the times I’ve taken children on wilderness canoe trips.  Sometimes they worry about animals in the woods.  I ask them what animal do they think is the most dangerous species in the whole world.  Sometimes they say a lion, sometimes a bear.

I answer

you are; humans are the most dangerous species in the whole world

Sure enough, there it is in the bible:

…the number of the beast…it is the number of a man.

It’s like that old comic strip Pogo said:

We have met the enemy and he is us.

With all that in mind my advice is that if you have a choice, be a deer

Now I’ve repeated the word ho three times there because I want you to listen to this with the spirit of Christmas in your hearts.

Not everybody does you know.

I’ve been alerted to the fact that one of Santa’s helpers down in Australia has been fired for saying “ho-ho-ho.”  Evidently some Grinch of an employer had given strict instructions that all of Santa’s helpers were to say “ha-ha-ha.”  They wanted the real jolly old elf to mark them down on his list as being nice not naughty.  Their concern was that the word ho has in certain circles come to be an alternative way of saying “whore.”

And that’s definitely naughty!

I have personal knowledge that Santa Claus is a big fan of dictionaries and so to find out what his reaction might be to this firing I decided to consult my dictionaries.

It could be that the guys who fired Santa’s helper were being nice by keeping this word from being uttered, but then again, it could be that Santa would scribble them down on the naughty side of the ledger.  Firing someone just before Christmas can’t be too nice I don’t think.

Looking in the Oxford English Dictionary I do see some support for the firing.  In 1964 and ‘65 I see the first citations for ho meaning “sexually promiscuous woman” or “prostitute.”

Urbandictionary definitely backs that up with thousands of votes.  Most Urbandictionary entries have tens or maybe hundreds of votes.

Things are looking pretty bad for that Australian Santa because the OED tells me that in 1890 an Englishman recorded the fact that one African tribe referred to another tribe as ho, which was effectively calling them “a heap of dried peas.”

Even more damning the OED says that for more than 500 years ho-ho-ho has been an expression of derision or derisive laughter.  There’s even a 900 year old Latin quote.

Do you suppose that mean Santa’s helper was actually making fun of the little kids who came to see him?

Even worse is this quote from 1575:

Did not the devil cry ho ho ho?

Maybe that fake Santa shouldn’t have just been fired, maybe he should have been ridden out of town on a rail!

But wait a minute.  Let’s try to regain the spirit of the season.

I see as the last line in many of the news articles that although the department store Santa guy said he was fired for saying”ho-ho-ho”, the store themselves deny it.  They say ho-ho-ho is okay.

What’s going on here?  Doesn’t that store sell dictionaries?

Let me have another look.  Here in the American Heritage Dictionary ho is defined as “used to express surprise or joy.”

That warms my heart a little more.  Here too in Urbandictionary there are a few sweet entries among the naughty:

• Santa Claus’s most famous line that he uses as a greeting and exclamation.
• Can be used to describe how some people laugh i.e. very jolly and old-fashioned sounding.

Looking again at the OED I see the etymology of ho reads

A natural expression…

Enjoy the season!

If you saw the movie Pirates of the Caribbean you’ll recognize the name Tortuga.  It was the island where the pirates all went to blow off steam.  It was a real place where real pirates did go to have a good time and the guy I’m going to tell you about today spent a few good times there himself.  His name was William Dampier and he’s an example not of the old saw that history is written by the victors, but instead, my twist on it, history is written by the literate.

William was born the son of a tenant farmer.  He was lucky enough to have been sent to school until he was 18 and so was a fair hand at keeping a journal.  That journal and the fact that he was a pretty good navigator made him famous enough to be mentioned as the fictitious cousin to Captain Gulliver of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

William Dampier spent lots of time as a pirate but also worked as a legitimate English navigator and captain—although the line between pirate and legitimate English captain was sometimes pretty thin.

In the course of his travels he managed to circumnavigate the world three times including such feats as 130 miles of open ocean in an outrigger canoe.

All the while Dampier took notes.  Notes on the soil, notes on the bugs and beasts, notes on the people and places, notes on the plants and of course notes on the food.  It was when he was in the far east he made this particular note:

At their ordinary eating they use two small round sticks about the length and bigness of a Tobacco-pipe. They hold them both in the right hand, one between the fore-finger and thumb; the other between the middle-finger and fore-finger..they are called by the English seamen Chopsticks.

And thus in 1699 is the first documented evidence of the name of those little wooden things provided in Chinese restaurants.

As to why chopsticks are called chopsticks, it isn’t because the cheap ones you get with takeout Chinese food are chopped up pieces of wood.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary the Chinese name for this style of cutlery is k’wâi-tsze.

That sounds reminiscent of “quick stick” in English.  But “quick” isn’t a word that was used between people struggling to communicate between English and Chinese; instead they used the word chop.  You’ve probably heard chop-chop used to mean do it quickly.  Also that Chinese word literally meant “nimble ones”, so the meaning fit too.

So “quick sticks” become “chopsticks.”

There is a simple piano tune known as chopsticks.  It was written in 1880 and showed up in English 13 years later.  Since you play chopsticks with two fingers the thinking is that the two fingers inspired the analogy of two chopsticks

The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce has the following entry for siren:

One of several musical prodigies famous for a vain attempt to dissuade Odysseus from a life on the ocean wave. Figuratively, any lady of splendid promise, dissembled purpose and disappointing performance.

That, with one exception about sums up the list of meanings held by siren about the time of Ambrose’s life.

His language is a little obscure so I’ll give a little recap.  In the mythology of antiquity there was a concept of a half bird half woman with such a beautiful singing voice that she lures sailors to their deaths.  The first and most dramatic mention of these evil-if-attractive beasties is in Homer’s Odyssey; but they make appearances in other ancient stories as well.  According to Homer, Odysseus as captain of his ship got advance intelligence on the operational tactics of the Sirens.  Now Odysseus was like any man and if he heard that there were these female creatures with charms so attractive that they could lure men to their death, he just had to find out more about them.

But Odysseus wasn’t stupid.  He didn’t exactly want to die either.

He had what would now be called “a high risk tolerance.”
What he did was he told his ship’s crew three things.

• First of all sail near these islands;
• second of all, before we go there pour wax into your ears so you can’t hear those evil Siren ladies singing;  and finally
• tie me to the mast of the ship so I can hear them myself without being able to either leap into the sea if the temptation to swim to them arises, nor tell you my sailors, to change course.

So that’s what a Siren has meant for a couple of thousand years.

Ambrose also mentions “any lady of splendid promise” and in doing so he is following the example first known to have been documented by our friend William Shakespeare.  The tantalizing image of a female creature that attractive was applied as a metaphor to any number of female objects of desire.

But when you and I hear a siren it usually means we should pull over to the side of the road; not to be killed hopefully, but to let an ambulance or fire truck pass.  Ambrose didn’t mention that.

The reason he didn’t was likely because that kind of siren had only just been invented.

When those gals on the rocks were singing I’m sure Odysseus could in his ecstasy recognize both the high notes and the low notes in their song.  But what he likely didn’t know was that the higher the note, the higher the frequency of the sound wave that he was listening to.  Actually, until the invention of the siren there was no way of knowing exactly what the frequencies of sound were.

Sirens as used by police and ambulances were not actually invented as warning devices, instead these kind of sirens were invented as measurement devices to figure out what the frequency of sounds were.

In the early 1800s a guy named John Robison in Scotland took a metal disk and poked holes all around its perimeter.  He then started the disk a spinning and shot a jet of air at the place where the holes were spinning by.  This produced a singing sound that could be adjusted up or down based on the speed of the disk.  He figured that the number of holes passing by per second produced the frequency of sound—and of course he was right.

The thing made a singing sound and so naturally it was called a siren.

It took another 60 years or so before people figured out this might be not just a measurement tool, but a useful device for signalling trouble.  By Ambrose Bierce’s time sirens were being used on ships and he’s sure to have heard them, but land based emergency vehicles still used bells.

As far as the ultimate etymology of siren it’s fairly sketchy but some sources say it may be related to a Greek word for “rope”; hence it ensnares.

It’s getting to be the season for gingerbread houses.

We usually think of ginger as a kind of spice but the word is pretty old and seems to have spread pretty far and wide.

There is an association between ginger and fair skinned people and this is mostly due to the similarity in color, although some people feel that having red hair is a sign of a fiery temper and somehow blend the spiciness of the rhizome and its color with the completion and temperament of people with sandy or red hair.

Evidently the history of the word itself is so complex that one linguist named Ross produced 74 pages of analysis on ginger’s etymology.  I won’t go that far.

It seems that the stuff was well known in the ancient world about as far back as we can trace and that it was about as popular in European and English cooking as was pepper.  The word is old enough that it appears as one of the originals in Old English, and popular enough that it was re-imported and readopted into English from French in Middle English after the Norman Conquest.  The Latin word certainly wasn’t the first but given the zingy taste that ginger has it’s appropriate that its Latin name was zingiber.  (I see no evidence that the word zing is at all etymologically related though.)

Before Latin we see the ancestor of the word in Greek and it is so wide spread that it’s hard to tell who got it from where before that.  There is one theory that it comes from a combination of Sanskrit words meaning “horn body” due to its hornlike shape.

The very first English citation for the word ginger comes from a medical document. So often things we see as food items were seen as medicinal items by those of ages past.  Especially so with things that were fragrant, exotic and tasty.  According to Oxford University Press’s A to Z of Medicinal Drugs tincture of ginger is often added to preparations that are supposed to treat flatulence.

The word ginger has also been used as a verb.  In an age before British Prime Minister Tony Blair was accused of having “sexed up” information about Iraq, an equally spicy but more culinary phrase was used by Prime Minster Benjamin Disraeli in 1849 when he questioned whether some information had been “gingered up.”  But even before that I find evidence of a rather unsavory practice involving ginger.

If you’ve ever been to a horse show you know the high value placed on the posture of the horses being judged.  For some time, back before people were quite so strong on prevention of cruelty to animals, one of the techniques for getting a horse to carry its tail in the approved high position was to “ginger the horse.”

Here then from a 1785 dictionary called A classical of the vulgar tongue the entry for a synonym of “to ginger”:

To feague a horse, to put ginger up a horse’s fundament, to make him lively and carry his tail well.

Hmm.  Well, I suppose at least the horse wouldn’t suffer from flatulence.