The Etymologicon Quotes

Poetry is much more important than the truth, and, if you don't believe that, try using the two methods to get laid.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was the sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

Oxygen was called flammable air for a while, but it didn't catch on.

The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it’s largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.

If you look back far enough, everything is stolen and every country invaded.

But Shakespeare never drank coffee. Nor did Julius Caesar, or Socrates. Alexander the Great conquered half the world without even a café latte to perk him up. The pyramids were designed and constructed without a whiff of a sniff of caffeine. Coffee was introduced to Europe only in 1615. The achievements of antiquity are quite enough to cow the modern human, but when you realize that they did it all without caffeine it becomes almost unbearable.

If Jupiter was in the ascendant when you were born, you are of a jovial disposition; and if you're not jovial but miserable and saturnine that's a disaster, because a disaster is a dis-astro, or misplaced planet. Disaster is Latin for ill-starred. The fault, as Shakespeare put it, is not in our stars; but the language is.

Love is nothing because those who do something for the love of it do it for nothing.

Freud said that everything was secretly sexual. But etymologists know that sex is secretly food.

The Latin word for sausage was botulus, from which English gets two words. One of them is the lovely botuliform, which means sausage-shaped and is a more useful word than you might think. The other word is botulism. Sausages may taste lovely, but it's usually best not to ask what's actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

The neatest palindrome in English is undoubtedly: “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.

Monty Python is, for reasons best known to nobody, rather popular with computer programmers. There’s even a programming language called Python, based on their sketches.

It was after an incident such as this that my friends and family decided something must be done. They gathered for a confabulation and, having established that secure psychiatric care was beyond their means, they turned in despair to the publishing industry, which has a long history of picking up where social work leaves off.

After all, fiction is only fact minus time.

The glorious insanities of the English language mean that you can do all sorts of odd and demeaning things to a book. You can cook it.

The medievals often mixed up their Gs and Ws, which is why another word for guarantee is warranty.

Sausages may taste lovely, but it’s usually best not to ask what’s actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

A book would therefore have a twofold benefit. First, it would rid me of my demons and perhaps save some innocent conversationalist from my clutches. Second, unlike me, a book could be left snugly on the bedside table or beside the lavatory: opened at will and closed at will.

Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of 'Mary Jane' for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember.

Atom is Greek for unsplittable, but the Americans had discovered that by breaking the laws of etymology they were able to create vast explosions, and vast explosions were the best way of impressing the Soviets and winning the Cold War. However,

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

The chief recommendation of Johnson’s is that he defines a cough as: “A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity.” Dictionaries

Gambling in medieval France was a simple business. All you needed were some friends, a pot, and a chicken. In fact, you didn’t need friends—you could do this with your enemies—but the pot and the chicken were essential.

They gathered for a confabulation and, having established that secure psychiatric care was beyond their means, they turned in despair to the publishing industry, which has a long history of picking up where social work leaves off.

All over America, infuriating white people would address black men with the words “Hey, boy.” And it grated. It really grated. That’s why, in the 1940s, black Americans started taking the fight the other way and greeting each other with the words “Hey, man.” The vocative was not inserted for the purposes of sexual identification; it was a reaction against all those years of being called boy. It worked. White people were so confused by “Hey, man” that the sixties happened and everybody, of whatever race, started calling each other man, until the original significance was lost. This is an example of Progress. Now,

A bar, as any good dictionary will tell you, is a rod of wood or iron that can be used to fasten a gate. From this came the idea of a bar as any let or hindrance that can stop you going where you want to; specifically the bar in a pub or tavern is the bar-rier behind which is stored all the lovely intoxicating liquors that only the bar-man is allowed to lay is hands on without forking out.

Now, that may be the correct translation, but the Hebrew doesn’t say thigh, it says yarek, which means, approximately, soft bits.

To remember that I used to like avocados with a touch of walnut oil only adds to my shame. Even

antanaclasic, which means that it keeps using the same word in different senses.

Despite what astronomers would have you believe, most of the stars were created not by energy cooling into matter, but by Zeus.

Stern people dislike rhetoric, and unfortunately it's usually stern people who are in charge: solemn fools who believe that truth is more important than beauty.

The Latin for standing in front of things is pro-stitutio. It

Atom is Greek for unsplittable, but the Americans had discovered that by breaking the laws of etymology they were able to create vast explosions,

Thomas More observed in 1533 that “of newe booke makers there are now moe then ynough.” Luckily for the book trade, More was beheaded a couple of years later.

Occasionally people make the mistake of asking me where a word comes from. They never make this mistake twice. I am naturally a stern and silent fellow; even forbidding. But there’s something about etymology and where words come from that overcomes my inbuilt taciturnity. A chap once asked me where the word biscuit came from. He was eating one at the time and had been struck by curiosity. I explained to him that a biscuit is cooked twice, or in French bi-cuit, and he thanked me for that. So I added that the bi in biscuit is the same bi that you get in bicycle and bisexual, to which he nodded. And then, just because it occurred to me, I told him that the word bisexual wasn’t invented until the 1890s and that it was coined by a psychiatrist called Richard von Krafft-Ebing and did he know that Ebing also invented the word masochism? He told me firmly that he didn’t. Did he know about Mr. Masoch, after whom masochism was named? He was a novelist and… The fellow told me that he didn’t know about Mr. Masoch, that he didn’t want to know about Mr. Masoch, and that his one ambition in life was to eat his biscuit in peace.

We usually think of beavers as sweet little creatures who build dams, but that’s not how a constipated Renaissance man would view them; a constipated Renaissance man would view them as his relief and his cure. You see, the beaver has two sacs in his groin that contain a noxious and utterly disgusting oil that acts as a very effective laxative. This very valuable liquid was known as castor oil. The

The ladies towards whom these young champions would be scampering were the camp followers, women of more enterprise than virtue, who would follow the soldiers around and rent their affections by the hour. Camp

But to return to the story: in 1776 the Americans were revolting. The British Navy sailed to New York, but so revolting were the Americans that the Brits decided to stay in the channel and blockade the harbour.

Medieval lovers used to fond each other, and if they did this too often, they began to fondle. Fondling is a dangerous business, as sooner or later it leads to snugging, an archaic word that meant to lie down together in order to keep warm. Repeated incidences of snugging will result in snuggling, and pregnancy. Whether

Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) records that: The Welch are said to be so remarkably fond of cheese, that in cases of difficulty their midwives apply a piece of toasted cheese to the janua vita [gates of life] to attract and entice the young Taffy, who on smelling it makes most vigorous efforts to come forth.

Funny chap, Jesus. First, it's a little strange to assert that a piece of bread is your body. If you or I tried that we wouldn't be believed. We certainly wouldn't be allowed to run a bakery. Yet, given that Jesus was the son of God (this point has occasionally been disputed by people who will burn for ever in God's loving torment), we'll just have to take him at his word.

Saint Peter and Saint John were idiots simply because they were laymen. They had no qualifications and were therefore their own men, rather than belonging to some professional class. If they had spoken their own language it would have been an idiom, and if they had been eccentrics with their own way of doing things (which they undoubtedly were) they would have been idiosyncratic. Neither

Baron von Munchausen (1720–97) was a real person who had fought as a soldier in Russia. On his return home he told stories about his exploits that nobody believed. These included riding on a cannonball, taking a brief trip to the moon, and escaping from a marsh by pulling himself out by his own hair. This latter feat is impossible, for the upward force on the Baron’s hair would have been cancelled out by the downward force on his arm. It’s a nice idea, though, and von Munchausen’s preposterous principle was later taken up by Americans, but instead of talking about hair, the Americans started in the late nineteenth century to talk of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. What’s impossible in physics is possible in computing, and a computer that’s able to load its own programs is, metaphorically, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. In 1953 the process was called a bootstrap. By 1975 people had got bored with the strap, and from then on computers simply booted up.

Krafft-Ebing was [...], essentially, the first doctor to start writing case histories of people whose sexual behaviour wasn’t entirely respectable. The book that resulted, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was so scandalous that large chunks of it had to be written in Latin, in order to keep it out of the hands of the prurient public. The idea was that if you were clever enough to understand Latin, you couldn’t possibly be a pervert (something that nobody mentioned to Caligula).

The great thing about creating something is that you get to give it a name.

Carl Jung was Freud’s protégé. Then one day Carl had a dream that wasn’t about sex. He hesitated before telling Freud something quite that embarrassing. Confessing to a psychoanalyst that you’ve had an innocent dream is rather like confessing to your grandmother that you’ve had a dirty one. Freud was outraged. What sort of fruitcake, he demanded, has a dream that isn’t dirty? It was inconceivable. Freud decided that Jung had gone quite mad, that the dream really had been dirty, and that Jung was just being coy. Jung insisted that his dream wasn’t about sex and that, in fact, it was about his grandparents being hidden in a cellar. So he rejected Freud’s pansexualism (not a sin of cookery, but the belief that everything comes down to nooky) and ran off to become a Jungian.

The first recorded fuckers were actually monks. There was a monastery in the English city of Ely, and in an anonymous fifteenth-century poem somebody mentioned that the monks might have acquired some dirty habits. The poem is in a strange combination of Latin and English, but the lines with which we are concerned run thus: Non sunt in celi Qui fuccant wivys in Heli Which seems to mean: They are not in heaven Who fuck wives in Ely The modern spelling of fuck is first recorded in 1535, and this time it’s bishops who are at it. According to a contemporary writer, bishops ‘may fuck their fill and be unmarried’. In between those two there’s a brief reference by the Master of Brasenose College, Oxford to a ‘fuckin Abbot’. So it seems that the rules of celibacy weren’t being taken too seriously in the medieval church.

Farts are quickly delivered and slowly forgotten.

The achievements of antiquity are quite enough to cow the modern human, but when you realise that they did it all without caffeine it becomes almost unbearable.

Under the tutelage of time, nonsense becomes geography.

Just adding (for some only mind number ONE)4 ‘I, I shall go in, when the major has done:’ The Sub, who was, now, a most terrible plight, in; And, not quite aware of priority S---ING, Squeez’d awhile; ‘Well!’ says he, ‘then, the best friends MUST PART;’ Crap! Crap! ’twas a moist one! a right Brewer’s ****! And, finding it vain, to be stopping the lake; ‘Zounds!’ says he, ‘then, here goes man! I’ve brew’d; so, I’ll bake.

According to legend (the beautiful elder sister of truth),

fiction is only fact minus time.

whalers in Nantucket if not the world. In 1823 Valentine Starbuck was chartered by the King and Queen of Hawaii to take them on a trip to England, where the unfortunate royal pair died of measles.

Every culture has a butt for its jokes. Americans have the Polacks, the English have the Irish, and the Irish have people from Cork.

Minor had a lot of time on his hands, and also the advantage of being criminally insane, which is always a plus in lexicography

These days, if you aren’t wiki or cyber or virtual, you are nothing. You might as well give up and make do with real life, which mankind has been trying for thousands of years without success.

Hitler was head of the catchily-named Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). But, like the Cambridge University Netball Team, he hadn’t thought through the name properly. You see, his opponents realised that you could shorten Nationalsozialistische to Nazi. Why would they do this? Because Nazi was already an (utterly unrelated) term of abuse. It had been for years. Every culture has a butt for its jokes. Americans have the Polacks, the English have the Irish, and the Irish have people from Cork. The standard butt of German jokes at the beginning of the twentieth century were stupid Bavarian peasants. And just as Irish jokes always involve a man called Paddy, so Bavarian jokes always involved a peasant called Nazi. That’s because Nazi was a shortening of the very common Bavarian name Ignatius. This meant that Hitler’s opponents had an open goal. He had a party filled with Bavarian hicks and the name of that party could be shortened to the standard joke name for hicks.

But nothing has ever been as new as the French Revolution, which was essentially a mob of new ideas armed with pitchforks and intent on murder.

The Chinese for pay is pei, and the Farsi Iranian word for bad is bad. The Uzbek for chop is chop, and in the extinct Aboriginal language of Mbaram a dog was called a dog. The Mayan for hole is hole and the Korean for many is mani. When, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, an Afghan wants to show you something, he will use the word show; and the ancient Aztecs used the Nahuatl word huel to mean well. Any idiot can deduce from this that all the languages of the world are related. However, anyone of reasonable intelligence will realize that they are just a bunch of coincidences. There are a lot of words and a lot of languages, but there are a limited number of sounds. We're bound to coincide sometimes.

The Oxford English Dictionary itself feebly admits that 'In Middle English it is often doubtful whether blac, blak, blacke, means "black, dark," or "pale, colourless, wan, livid".' ... Utterly illogical though all this may sound, there are two good explanations. Unfortunately, nobody is quite sure which one is true. So I shall give you both. Once upon a time, there was an old Germanic word for burnt, which was black, or as close to black as makes no difference. The confusion arose because the old Germanics couldn't decide between black and white as to which color burning was. Some old Germans said that when things were burning they were bright and shiny, and other old Germans said that when things were burnt they turned black. The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everybody got bored and rode off to sack Rome. ... The other theory (which is rather less likely, but still good fun) is that there was an old German word black which meant bare, void, and empty. What do you have if you don't have any colours? Well, it's hard to say really. If you close your eyes you see nothing, which is black, but a blank piece of paper is, usually, white. Under this theory, blankness is the original sense and the two colors—black and white—are simply different interpretations of what blank means.