Linda Smith was a British comedian who died in 2006.

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That shocks me just a little because I see here that her year of birth was the same as mine.

Her obituary had a few quotes of hers in it, and that’s what brings her to podictionary today in connection with our word drivel.

She evidently once said that she was a dyslectic Satanist, she worshiped the drivel.

The word drivel is succinctly defined in the Oxford Dictionary of English as “nonsense.”

Drivel is a word with a history stretching back to Old English but it only took on this meaning of nonsense about 150 years ago.  The first guy to use it in this way—at least in writing—was a man named John Stuart Blackie.

Blackie evidently was a bit of a free spirit and gained quite a reputation as a university lecturer because instead of standing at the head of the class and reading his lecture in the usual boring way, he would stride around the room and enthusiastically spew forth his thoughts and opinions on the subject at hand.

Students loved it.

His first use of the word drivel is a hint at the color of his personality.

He eventually took over the head of a department and to get the job he is supposed to have said that the guy who had it before him

“should retire from [the department] or the world, or from both together.”

Before Blackie got ahold of it, the word drivel had meant, as the OED puts it “spittle flowing from the mouth; slaver, dribbling.”

The connection between drivel as “nonsense” and drivel as “spittle” goes deeper than some kind of thing that comes out of people’s mouths and is unwanted by others.  In between those two meanings there was a now obsolete meaning to drivel.  For a few hundred years in there a drivel was “an idiot”; the kind of guy you’d expect to have spittle dribbling from his slack jawed, vacant eyed face.

So the word was already associated with nonsense or lack of intelligence to before Blackie wrote it down the way that we understand it.

In closing I’ll give you another one of that prematurely deceased comedian Linda Smith’s lines.

She said that she liked to play country music in reverse because you get your lover back, your dog comes back to life and you cease to be an alcoholic.

Kate asked if a clay pigeon for shooting at was so named because it was being likened to a bird or because it was made of clay.

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The root of her question is in the fact that around the year 1450 there appeared from unknown sources a new meaning of the word pig. In this case a pig was not a four footed barnyard animal but a pot or jar made of earthenware.

Of course a pigeon is a bird alternately cursed by some city dwellers and fed lovingly by others.

It turns out that clay pigeons are named after birds not clay pots.

Taking the root chronologically, way back in ancient Rome and likely before that someone constructed a word that meant “a bird chirping” that actually sounded like a bird chirping.

That appears in Latin as pipire.

This happens all the time, people inventing words based on the real life sound of the thing being named it’s called onomatopoeia.

For example sneeze and crunch likely have onomatopoeic roots.

The word onomatopoeia itself is from Greek and literally means “name maker.”

Anyway, with a Latin root word pipire to start from the Romans started calling any young bird for which they didn’t have a more specific name pipio.

What was once Latin so often ends up in French and by the time William the Conqueror set foot on English shores the word had morphed into pigeon.

At that point it still didn’t refer specifically to those things that poop on window ledges downtown.  It specifically included them but it more generally meant a bird or something bird-like.

Aside from hating city pigeons hunters have long loved shooting pigeons.  So much so that when there were no real pigeons around they still liked to practice and shoot at pretend pigeons.

These were also called pigeons and our first clear citation with this “target practice” meaning is around 1877.

It wasn’t until 1909 that we have a citation for clay pigeon.

Now a clay pigeon is kind of like a decoy and it was this similarity that made the phrase stool pigeon possible. The idea is that someone who actually reports to the authorities works themselves into a group of bad guys and as a decoy, gets accepted by them.

The roots of the word tyranny are at the heart of the name of that famous dinosaur T-Rex.

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Tyrannosaurus rex literally translates as “tyrant lizard king” since rex means “king.”

Obviously thundering around and eating your neighbors qualifies as being a tyrant.

One of the earliest English appearances of the word tyranny was in Chaucer’s poem Anelida and Arcite; Chaucer being far more famous for his Canterbury Tales.

In Anelida and Arcite he refers to the tyranny of a fellow named Creon, who in a power vacuum after a battle in ancient Greece has seized the throne of the city of Thebes and forbids the burying of the dead.

But it isn’t just the injunction against burials that makes him a tyrant, one of the ancient meanings of the word tyrant is a ruler who illegally takes power.

The more recognizable modern meaning of tyrant carries a sense of abuse of power and oppressive rule, so old Creon fits on both counts.

The fact that Chaucer uses a Greek tale is appropriate because English got tyrant and tyranny from French who got it from Latin who in turn got it from ancient Greek.  But way back there in ancient Greek tyrannos didn’t necessarily mean abusive and oppressive rule; at first it only meant “king” or “master.”

It is a measure of how true the truism is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That little gem of wisdom appeared in a letter in 1887 written by the English historian John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton known to his friends and admirers as Baron Acton.

Here’s the exact quote in a little more context:

“I cannot accept … that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. … Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men… There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

But the word tyrant had taken on a negative tone before 1887.

Even by the time it got into Latin it meant that power had been acquired illegally.

We do have an earlier English example relating the corrupting force of power to tyranny; that was in 1770 so hardly as far back as ancient Greek.

What had happened was that a newspaper had published an article critical of King George III. The paper’s founder John Wilkes was turfed out of his seat in Parliament and tossed in jail.  The electorate kept on voting him back into office but King George kept declaring his election null and void.  Eventually William Pitt rose in the House of Lords to defend freedom of speech.  In part he said

“Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, there tyranny begins.”

Lauren Admire—with some self deprecation—asked about the etymology of her last name.

She wondered if it meant “into the mire.”

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Mire is from a Germanic root and means “a swamp.”

Since we look up to things that we admire I hope it improves Lauren’s self-image to learn that admire literally means “to marvel at” or “be astonished.”

According to The Oxford English Dictionary admire comes to us via French from the Latin word admirari meaning “to wonder at.” The American Heritage Dictionary points further back to a root in Indo-European where smei meant to laugh or smile and grew into the Latin mirus meaning wonderful.

Although there are no swamps in this etymology I did get a little bogged down in tying this podictionary word to a first citation.  I’ve been trying to associate episodes with Sir Francis Bacon and I was thrilled to see the first citation for the word admire dating from 1590 as being written by someone named Robert Greene. This because the title of Robert Greene’s work—as shown in the OED—reads “Fr Bacon.”

On further investigation I see that this isn’t Francis Bacon but an abbreviation for Greene’s book The honorable historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay.

No matter, I’m going to talk about Francis Bacon anyway.

One of the reasons I was fooled for a moment was that the timing was about right.  Robert Greene’s book at 1590 only predates the citations I gave in the past two podictionary mentions of Francis Bacon by 15 years.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, that 1605 work tells us two things about Francis Bacon.

It is titled of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane and represents his first foray into the world of philosophy.  In it he is advocating that increasing the store of human knowledge is a good thing; something we take for granted today, but that wasn’t at all highly valued in ages past.  Bacon professed not to wield vast stores of knowledge himself, but to be a messenger broadcasting the notion that people could build greater wisdom out of the collected knowledge of many.

This first work was written in English but he went on to write subsequent works which he produced in Latin instead; the English to Latin transition reflecting his expanding horizon, aiming at thinkers first nationally and later internationally.

Bacon was serious about his pursuit of knowledge and the accounts of his death have a sort of “curiosity killed the cat” tone to them.

One snowy day he was out in a carriage and suddenly wondered if refrigeration might prevent meat from spoiling.  He got a local woman to kill a chicken and he then stuffed it full of snow.  Although his experiment worked he quickly became so ill that he went straight to bed nearby in the unoccupied house of a friend.

He died a few days later.

Here’s what the American Heritage Dictionary says about dexterity:

1. Skill and grace in physical movement, especially in the use of the hands; adroitness.
2. Mental skill or adroitness; cleverness.

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Merriam-Webster says much the same:

1. mental skill or quickness; adroitness
2. readiness and grace in physical activity, especially skill and ease in using the hands; manual dexterity.

Let me focus on that word adroitness for a moment. Because it’s used to define dexterity I feel safe in telling you that to be adroit is to be dexterous.

The word adroit is from the French a droit meaning “to the right.”  Perhaps it is no coincidence that dexterity comes from the Latin word for the right hand.

The importance people gave to right-handedness is clearly seen through these two words. Moreover a value judgment against left-handedness comes into sharper focus when you know that the Latin word for “left” was sinister.

The point here though, in relation to dexterity is that although we now understand dexterous to apply to mental quickness and whole body physical skills, the roots of the word were in the hand.

Most people could do things more skillfully with their right hands than with their left and so in the cases of dexterous and adroit the words for “right” became a metaphor for skill and talent.

Perhaps this is a more realistic way to think of the badness of sinister. It wasn’t so much that people who were left-handed were thought of as evil as the fact that most people’s left hands were just bad at doing the tasks that their right hands could perform with ease. Thus a parallel metaphor would apply where the word for “left” came to be applied to things that weren’t as good.

The reason I chose today’s word was because Sir Francis Bacon in 1605 was the first to mention the word dexterous in his book now remembered as The Advancement of Learning.

I mentioned in an earlier episode that I wanted to talk a little more about Francis Bacon.  Wikipedia lists him as a philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, and author who served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England.

He was such an accomplished guy that there is one school of thought that proposes there was no such person as William Shakespeare and that all those plays and sonnets were written by Francis Bacon under the pen name William Shakespeare.

I like the way that the Oxford Dictionary of English defines tacit.

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They say “understood or implied, without being stated.”  So a tacit agreement is an understanding that is communicated by a look or gesture.

There is a problem with tacit communication though. The observer may think they understand a look or gesture but since no one says anything it’s quite possible they got it wrong.

In some cases tacit communication is actually against the will of one of the parties.  A tacit admission of guilt for instance.

The roots of tacit don’t relate to understanding or implication but to that lack of spoken communication.  In Latin tacere meant to be silent.  That’s why someone who doesn’t say much is called taciturn.

Just as tacit has shifted its meaning from “silent” to “implied,” the related word reticent has also shifted meaning.

I see plenty of references of people reticent to break the law or reticent to sign a document. These seem to take reticent as meaning “hesitant.” Originally only people who refused to talk were reticent, from the same Latin root as tacit.

Back in 1605 when Sir Francis Bacon first used tacit in English it meant “unspoken,” but the first sentence it appears in comes across as a little confusing.

He’s writing to King James in a dedication to a book and he is trying to set the stage before laying out his ideas.

He tells the King that he wants to avoid the interruption of tacit objections.

In most contexts a tacit objection couldn’t be an interruption since a tacit objection is silent.  Yet in Bacon’s book he feels he must first disassemble arguments that others have made that the reader might remember.

Because Francis Bacon is such a towering figure in history I was surprised that I haven’t mentioned him before at podictionary.

He’s remembered for quite an intimidating range of accomplishments and I’ll see if I can talk about some of them in future podictionary episodes, but today I want to extract a little more of his writings to the King to show that even the most accomplished of men seems to have to do a little boot licking from time to time.

Here’s some of how he introduces the book to the King:

I have been touched, yea, and possessed with an extreme wonder at those your virtues and faculties, which the Philosophers call intellectual the largeness of your capacity, the faithfulness of you memory, the swiftness of your apprehension, the penetration of your judgment, and the facility and order of your elocution and I have often thought, that of all persons living that I have known, your Majesty…

Blah, blah, blah, he goes on for pages like this.

… as the Scripture saith of the wisest king That his heart was as the sands of the sea ; which though it be one of the largest bodies, yet it consisteth of smallest and finest portions … your Majesty’s manner of speech[is] indeed prince-like, flowing as from a fountain, and yet streaming and branching itself into nature’s order…

It seems to me that Francis Bacon’s speech flowed like a fountain, which means he was neither tacit, taciturn nor reticent.

Here’s a little poem relating to daughters from a deceased English poet named Justin Richardson

People who have three daughters try once more
And then it’s fifty-fifty they’ll have four.
Those with a son or sons will let things be.
Hence all these surplus women. Q.E.D.

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Now, that little rhyme almost makes sense, doesn’t it.

In actual fact about 105 sons are born for every 100 daughters.

Daughter is one of the old, old, old words that have come down to us from beginnings unknown. A word like it exists or existed in Germanic languages as well as Armenian, Lithuanian, Greek and Sanskrit.

It’s the Germanic source that brought daughter into Old English.

The timeless nature of a parent/daughter relationship means that a word was needed for this girl-child as long as humans have had language. We don’t know how old the roots of daughter are but it’s further back than we can trace and certainly shows up in Indo-European.

Because the word in Sanskrit seems related to the verb “to milk” there is a suspicion that the daughters of a household were the milkmaids.

Back when daughter showed up in English about a thousand years ago English was more like French or German is today in that there were differences in how a word was pronounced depending on the situation in which it was used.

So daughter was dohter or dehter depending on whether it was someone else’s daughter or your own, and dohter or dohtru or dohtra depending on the number of daughters being discussed.

Because Justin Richardson wasn’t a particularly important poet I can’t find much to say about him.  But I do like another one of his little ditties entitled Take Heart, Illiterates

For years a secret shame destroyed my peace—
I’d not read Eliot, Auden or MacNeice.
But then I had a thought that brought me hope—
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.

The word is toque and even though it’s pronounced the same it isn’t the same word as toke.

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Most podictionary listeners and readers are American and I expect that even though you know the object I’m talking about, you may not recognize the name.

If, on the other hand you are Canadian you’ll likely pronounce it tuque and think I’m talking about a knitted wool hat for winter wear.

What I’m really taking about is a chef’s hat.

The correct terminology for one of these tall white hats is toque blanche.

First let me get the homonym toke out of the way.

When people smoke marihuana or hashish they are said to be toking or toking-up when they inhale the smoke.  Although this has something to do with their heads it has nothing to do with hats and the similarity in pronunciation is purely coincidental. 

Toke the smoke inhalation is said to come from a Spanish word that means “touch” or “hit.” I find agreement for this in the American Heritage Dictionary, in Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, at Etymonline and in Merriam-Webster.

It makes sense that such a word might come into American English through Spanish.

Similarly it makes sense that the name for a chef’s had might come to English from French; we give the French so much credit for fine cooking.

Toque blanche is itself still half French isn’t it?

The word certainly came to English from French and appeared as early as 1505.  Although it also appears in Spanish and Italian with a meaning of “hat” the etymological authorities are unable to take it any further back than that.

The type of hat too varies from place to place.

As I said earlier, in Canada a tuque is something I need to keep my ears warm.  In Spanish or Portuguese a toca or touca is specifically a woman’s hat.

The English 1505 reference appears to be to a dangling appendage to a hood of some kind.

In France professional uniforms had a strong tradition and toques of various styles were worn depending on the occupation of the wearer. But the specific chef’s hat only shows up being called a toque or toque blanche in 1965 according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

That’s a mighty short time for something that some websites claim has origins 1300 years ago.

Certainly until the early 1800s French chefs wore a toque that looked more like what I wear skiing than what you might imagine as a chef’s hat.  A guy named Marie-Antoine Carême is thought to have introduced an element of standupishness to these hats.

He died in 1833.

Chef’s hats are given all kinds of meaning.  The number of pleats is said to represent how many ways a chef can cook an egg. More experienced or more highly regarded chefs are said to have higher hats.

But there is a kind of image problem I see with chef’s hats.

Pop the phrase chef hat into Google images and see what comes up.  Almost all of the images are of hats that are shaped something like a muffin; straight sided bottoms with puffy tops.

Yet if you ever go to a restaurant where the chef does actually wear a hat—it would need to be a fancy restaurant or one where the management imposes some kind of dress code on the chef—in that case the toque the chef will be wearing will look more like a white tube without any puffy top at all.

It’s kind of like our image of farmers wearing straw hats when they actually wear baseball caps.

One of the entries at Urbandictionary for the word vamp reads:

“A femme fatale character in movies or books.”

The reason I bring this up is that Urbandictionary contributors obviously know that a vamp is, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it

“A woman who intentionally attracts and exploits men,”

but no cool young person today would refer to a skanky girl as a vamp.

The word is recognized but recognized as passé.

This kind of vamp has therefore had a relatively short life as a word, since it only appeared in English in 1911.

G. K. Chesterton was the first to set it to paper—although in context it is clear that the word needed no explanation, people in his circle must have been using it verbally quite widely as an abbreviation of vampire; also a word applied to such exploitative women.

As an aside, unexpectedly, Chesterton’s use of vamp was in reference to Mary Queen of Scots.  Chesterton didn’t think she had been a vamp, but he was accusing William Thackeray of thinking of her as a vamp.

In addition to this short-lived vamp there is an older vamp brought to my attention by listener John Gilhuly.  The older vamp has been with us as early as 1225 but has certainly changed over time.

John works at a TV studio KPSP in California and tells me that when someone is on air and has to fill time they vamp, meaning they improvise and ad lib while the crew finds the next item that’s supposed to go to air.

John also tells me that before TV personalities vamped to fill time, musicians did so.  A local musician they interviewed once had written a book called Vamp Til Ready, taking his title from the notation on his music-stand when he sat down to do a concert.

In fact this musical use of vamp goes back to a citation from 1789 when it was used as a metaphor.

Before that to vamp was to fix something by patching it.  So it still meant “to improvise” but instead of improvising to fill time, one was improvising to repair something.

About now the light might be going on as to the origin of the word revamp, as in

“I completely revamped my kitchen,”

meaning renovated it.

It was the things that were being revamped, repaired and renovated that gave us the word vamp.

Back there in 1225 vamp was not a repair but a shoe or sock and more specifically that part that got worn out.

In days when shopping malls were less common it was usual to repair footware.  Footware were often more like boots than slippers and why fix the leg-part if it was only the foot-part that was worn out.

The word vamp was originally a French word avantpié.

Avantpié was in turn built on two other word avant and pié which mean “in front” and “foot,” the parts that would need revamping.

A listener named Ross reports that he has observed the use of the word verdant as a sort of formal synonym to “green” or “environmentally responsible.”

I have to say that he must be more observant than I am because I haven’t noticed the trend.

Furthermore when I went looking for it the closest I could come were a bunch environmental companies using the word as part of their name or marketing material.

But I might be wrong.

I remember when—late in the game—the light went on for me that the word green was supposed to mean “environmental.”

To me the word verdant brings images of lush vegetation. I’m not sure if it might be this natural feel of a healthy ecosystem that makes the word appropriate for environmental application or simply that the Latin root of the word literally means “green.”

While the word verdant came to English directly from Latin in the late 1500s, French also got the root from Latin so that the French word for “green” is vert.

This is why the State of Vermont is so named; Vermont literally means “green mountains.”

For its entire existence in English verdant has meant the green of plants.

About the time that verdant appeared in English 500 years ago the word green was acquiring a meaning of “inexperience.”  The idea that fresh foliage as an analogy to lack of sophistication was applied by the early 1800s to the word verdant as well and then in 1853 an author named Edward Bradley, writing under the pen name Cuthbert Bede used both words to name the chief character in his book The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, An Oxford Freshman.

Evidently these and other similar stories by Bradley were very popular in Victorian England and I’ve found one site that calls them minor classics, and another website that abridges the stories down to half hour versions for the internet age.

While some report these tales to be instructive reflections of university life a century and a half ago, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells us that old Edward Bradley never spent more than a couple of days at Oxford and so is thought to have been making it up based on his experiences at University College, Durham.

His pen name Cuthbert Bede is taken from the names of two saints associated with Durham.

The Bede saint is someone we’ve definitely come across before at podictionary.  He is also known as The Venerable Bede and is widely seen as being the first person to try to write down the History of England up to his time—which was about 1300 years ago.

One thing that is appealing about the Verdant Green stories is Edward Bradley’s use of slang.

We learn that people referred to eyeglasses as gig-lamps because a horse drawn gig might be equipped with lamps like a car has headlights. These goggly appendages were likened to glasses.

One slang word that survives is the drink shandy—a mix of beer and ginger ale—identified by Bradley as a shandygaff.