The virtual linguist

Tulip

I'm still writing my article on words of Dutch origin, as I mentioned yesterday, and today I looked up 'tulip'. I thought that the word 'tulip' might have a Dutch origin, since we associate tulips so much with the Netherlands these days; however, I was wrong.

 

The word for 'tulip' is very similar in many European languages, whether Romance, Germanic or Slavic. Ultimately, all these variants come from the Turkish dul(i)band, which, itself, comes from the Persian dulban, meaning turban. Why? Because tulips were first cultivated in the Ottoman Empire, and introduced to western Europe in the 16th century. Moreover, the flowers were thought to resemble turbans. Thus, the words 'tulip' and 'turban' have the same origin. The OED tells us that 'tulipant' and 'turbant' were the most common versions/ spellings of 'turban' in the 17th century. Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 does not have 'tulipant' but it lists turban, turband and turbant as three versions of the same thing (defined as 'the cover worn by Turks on their heads'.

Poppycock

I've been writing a series of articles on English words that have their origin in other languages, and this month I'm doing Dutch. One of the words I came across in my research was poppycock (meaning 'nonsense').

 

According to the OED, poppycock is from the Dutch word poppekak, which literally means ‘doll's excrement’. This seemingly only appears in Dutch in the phrase zo fijn als gemalen poppekak (an idiom meaning 'showing excessive religious zeal', whose literal meaning is ‘as fine as powdered doll's excrement’). Pop is from the Dutch word for doll (and related to 'poppet' and 'puppet') and kak (excrement) is related to the English word cack.

 

So, why doesn't the Dutch poppekak mean 'nonsense', and why are the senses in the two languages different? The OED thinks that the Dutch word may once have had the 'nonsense' sense in a particular region or regions.

100 words to speak English?

Fabio Capello, manager of the England football team,has justified his poor command of English by saying that he only needs a hundred words of English to get his message across to the players (see this article).

 

So, is that true? Can you get your message across in a hundred words?

 

Most people know 50 or 60,000 words in their native language, according to Professor David Crystal. But that doesn't mean you use all those words. I know the words euphonium, off-side and avast, but I never use them in ordinary conversation, as I'm not musical, sporty or nautical. Generally speaking most of us recycle the same (relatively) few words over and over in our conversation. When I say 'relatively few' I'd hazard a guess (and it is only a guess) that most of us use on a regular basis fewer than 10% of the words we know, and this amounts to a tiny proportion, probably less than 1%, of the total number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

 

Some sources claim that about a hundred common words (the, and, for, of etc) make up about 50% of written texts. If you knew a thousand words (or word families, which means that you'd count eat, eats, ate, eating and eaten as just one word) you'd probably understand about 70% of the words in a text, and if you knew 2,000 you'd probably understand about 80% of them. The trouble with that statistic is that understanding words like the, because, in, by, with, from etc is not a great help when it comes to understanding the overall meaning of a piece of English. 

 

Incidentally, in the Sun article linked to above, there are about 750 words in total. Stripping out the names, and then any duplicate words I calculate that there are about 280 different words used in the text. As mentioned above, there are lots of instances of the, of, he, when etc, and, given that this is a text about football, there were several instances of the words player, game, team, squad, good, win etc. There were also several instances of 'really', which, apparently, is one of Capello's favourites.

 

Don't let all this talk of hundreds, or thousands, of words put you off learning a foreign language. You can, indeed, do a huge amount with a hundred words. I expect that when my children were toddlers, I used a very limited vocabulary to communicate with them, yet we had fun and they learnt. Foreign language teachers can convey a lot of information and instructions with a very restricted range of vocabulary. When I used to teach Russian I promised my students that learning just seven words would vastly increase their enjoyment of a holiday in Russia and would really impress the Russians. The seven words were: здравствуйте (hello), до свидания (goodbye; ok I know the Russian is, strictly speaking, two words), пожалуйста (please), спасибо (thank you), да (yes), нет (no) and можно (may I? or Is it possible/allowed? - and this little word, accompanied by a gesture will enable you to ask if you can smoke, sit here, open the window etc).

 

If the hundred words Capello knew were knitting or culinary terms, then they would not be much good to him in talking to his squad. However, if each word is relevant, well-chosen and motivating, then I think that he probably can get his message across. Presumably there are only a limited number of things that one needs to say to footballers about to go into a match and presumably they already know what they need to do.

Boke of Kokery, garbage and custard

I visited the Evolving English exhibition at the British Library at the weekend, where one of the exhibits is the 1440 (or thereabouts) manuscript Boke of Kokery. It contains 182 recipes, and it is interesting to see how words have changed since the 15th century. Many of the words are anglicised spellings of French words eg let for milk (French lait) and fryit for cold (French froid).

 

There were recipes which included 'garbage', which meant offal or giblets at that time. The rubbish/refuse meaning came in a century later. There is also a recipe for 'custarde lumbarde', a type of open pie containing cream, eggs and dates. 'Custarde' in the 15th century was not the thick yellow sauce that we know today but an open pie that could be sweet or savoury. The meat or fruit in the pie was covered with a thick and spicy broth or sauce. The OED says that 'custard' was originally "a perverted form of 'crustade'", or a pie enclosed in a crust. You can see the 'custarde lumbarde' recipe page here.

Census

I've just finished completing my census form. It didn't necessarily have to be filled in today, but the information on it (how many people staying overnight etc) had to relate to today.

 

Census is a word with its origins in the Latin verb censere, to rate, assess or estimate. Before 1801, when the first census took place in Britain, any mention of the word 'census' in texts referred to the registration of citizens and their property in ancient Rome, a procedure that was carried out for purposes of taxation.

 

Although the word censor in English has a very different meaning from census, censor, too, comes from the Latin censere. A censor was originally one of two magistrates who drew up the census of the citizens. In addition to those duties, the magistrates were also responsible for the supervision of public morals. The similar word censer, a vessel in which incense is burnt, has another provenance. It is related to the word 'incense' and is from the past participle of the Latin verb incendere, to set on fire.

 

Census ends in an s, a letter we usually associate with plurals (I posted on singular nouns ending -s here). The plural of census is censuses.

Fracking and fragging

There was a piece on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning (here) about fracking, or hydraulic fracturing. This is a new technological way of extracting shale gas from shale rock. According to the report, the rock is fractured by means of small explosions, and then water and chemicals are forced in.

 

The word isn't in the OED; it's probably too new and/or too technical and specialised. It clearly comes from the word 'fracture', with the 'k' added to keep the hard sound of the c before the i (just as we add k to panicking and shellacking). Fracture comes from the past participle of the Latin verb 'to break' frangere.

 

At the end of the Today report, the presenter Evan Davis warned listeners not to confuse the word 'fracking' with 'fragging', which he said was a military term referring to the act of attacking a superior officer with the intention of killing that officer. Fragging is in the OED; it is described as US military slang, and was first recorded in the 1970s. There is also the verb 'to frag'. It comes from 'fragmentation grenade'. This is a citation from the Dictionary, which appeared in a 1972 edition of the Saturday Review: "Fragging is a macabre ritual of Vietnam in which American-enlisted men attempt to murder their superiors. The word comes from the nickname for hand grenades, a weapon popular with enlisted men because the evidence is destroyed with the consummation of the crime".

Orchid

I was given a beautiful orchid as a gift, and was prompted to look up the word. The root of the word orchid is the ancient Greek ὄρχις, (orchis or orkhis), meaning 'testicle' because of the resemblance of this flower's tubers to testicles. The orchid was a symbol of virility in ancient Greece.

 

Indeed, at the 'bollock' entry in the OED, we find the definition: "any of various plants, esp. several kinds of orchid having tubers which resemble testicles". In particular, there are the old orchid varieties bollockgrass and bollockwort, both in the OED.

 

The UK charity which promotes research and awareness of testicular and other male cancers is called Orchid.

 

Doily

I was transported back to my childhood when I read this story in the Daily Mail about a resurgence in the sale of doilies. I hadn't heard the word 'doily' for years. I don't remember doilies in my own house as a child in the late 1950s/early 60s, but I remember they were always prominent whenever we visited elderly aunts or neighbours.

 

It turns out that the word 'doily' is an eponym, named after a certain Mr Doiley, Doyly or Doyley, who kept a draper's shop in the Strand, according to one of the citations in the OED. Draper is another word not heard very often these days, but a draper is someone who sells cloth. Originally doily meant a type of cloth; as the OED puts it:"The name of a woollen stuff, ‘at once cheap and genteel’, introduced for summer wear in the latter part of the 17th century".

 

What we now call a doily, started off with the name 'doily-napkin'; in the 18th century it was spelt with a capital D. The material was lacy and had holes in it so that the good-quality of the wooden table under the doily was visible to guests. When, in the 20th century (the heyday was the 1950s), doilies began to be mass-produced out of paper, the holey pattern was retained.

 

The Mail article talks of doilies selling like 'hot cakes' due to a boom in home baking. Possibly the very popular retro-chic Cath Kidston product range has something to do with it, too. I found another newspaper article in a 2007 edition of the Independent, which is about doilies falling from grace. So, believe what you will!

Difference between the internet and the web

Today's Today programme on Radio 4 got a barrage of complaints from listeners, apparently, because Sarah Montague, one of the presenters, said, quoting from a newspaper article, that the invention of the internet by Sir Tim Berners-Lee was the top defining moment of the last hundred years. The reason listeners were up in arms was because Sir Tim invented the world wide web and not the internet. The BBC's technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, was invited on to the programme to explain the difference. You can listen to the short extract here (the interview isn't mentioned in the running order, so you will have to click on the button for the whole of the programme for today, 22 March, and scroll through until 2:44:30).

 

Rory Cellan-Jones explained that the internet came first, in around 1970, and it was invented as part of a US defence project. For the next couple of decades the internet was mainly used by academics and scientists, but then Sir Tim Berners-Lee came on the scene. He invented the web, at the heart of which was a browser (like today's Internet Explorer, Safari or Firefox), which meant that people could put documents, and later pictures and videos, on to the internet and thus share them with one another. This was a eureka moment, since it allowed the internet to become user-friendly and to be used by ordinary people. Sir Tim-Berners Lee was instrumental, therefore, in making the internet what it is today.

 

The OED entries illustrate the differences and how non-user-friendly the internet (spelt with a capital I in the OED) originally was:

Internet: "Originally a computer network consisting of or connecting a number of smaller networks, such as two or more local area networks connected by a shared communications protocol; spec. such a network (called ARPAnet) operated by the U.S. Defense Department. In later use (usu. the Internet): the global computer network (which evolved out of ARPAnet) providing a variety of information and communication facilities to its users, and consisting of a loose confederation of interconnected networks which use standardized communication protocols; (also) the information available on this network".

World Wide Web (often shortened to Web): "A widely used multimedia information system on the Internet, whereby documents stored at numerous locations worldwide are cross-referenced using hypertext links, which allow users to search for and access information by moving from one document to another. Also: the network of interlinked information that is accessible via this system".

 

Young guns

England's rugby players were labelled 'young guns' in the media both before the match at the weekend (eg here) and after they were hammered by Ireland (eg here).

 

The word 'gun' has been in the language since at least the early 14th century, and originally it referred to the weapon only. In the 19th century, with the rise in popularity of the shooting party among the landed gentry, the word 'gun' began to be used as a metonym to refer to, as the OED puts it, "one who carries a gun, one of a shooting party". Gunners and artillerymen in the army were referred to as 'guns' a few decades after the shooting party connection.

 

Young gun is not an entry in the OED (which is a large, unwieldy publication, and it can take years for new words to filter through the system), but it is in the single-volume ODE (Oxford Dictionary of English), where the definition given is: "a young man regarded as assertive and aggressively self-confident". I notice from a quick look through the hits on the Google News pages that the term is usually used to refer to sportsmen.

 

For a very thorough treatment of the expression 'young guns', with lots of US examples, see this Visual Thesaurus article, written by Neal Whitman of Literal Minded, which I link to on the left-hand side of this page.