Day
Fifty Two
Fascinated, enchanted bewitched and by words…
I grew
up in England, learning to cook using scales like this.
One of the heavy iron weights was marked ‘2
lb’ but why lb?
Fifty
years later, I learned it’s from the Latin libra pondo.
My Dad also paid two pounds for a new hat;
this time the sign for pound was £ but that too is really an L, stylised and also means libra
pondo - or 2 pounds in weight, with a line through
to indicate an abbreviation.
The lb or pound
weight was 12 ounces; the £ money was equal to a pound
weight of silver.
The abbreviations for money, thanks to the Roman occupation of Britain, which began in 55 BC, was LSD or £.s.d = Libra,
solidus, denarius.
So when Britain turned to decimal, whilst
retaining the £, we lost the solidus and denarius, a 1000 years of history and replaced them
with a piddling little p.
A few years ago, I bought a multi-pack of panties but when I got them home, realised they were not my size.
I lived miles from the shop and only went into town once a month, so decided to sell them on an Internet site. I listed them singly and they went almost at once but one buyer complained bitterly. ‘I asked for a pair of knickers and you only sent one.’
Why do we say a pair of knickers or a pair of pants?
Because way back in the 16th Century, the pants or pantaloons were two separate legs, leaving a handy, or draughty, space at the crotch, although men wore a codpiece.
A pant was one leg, a pair of pants both - and very few people needed only one leg.
Other than the lady who bought my knickers.
My little boy once came running in from the
garden to tell me his brother had been, ‘stunged by a wops.’
Many children say ‘wops’ for wasp, a sound
change called metathesis. We hear it in
ask and asks too and occasionally in calvary and cavalry and hilariously
asterix for asterisk.
But back to the wops. The Old English gave a choice: waesp and waeps and in Latin it’s vespa which
gave its name to those buzzing little bikes which sounded like angry waepses.
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| Vespa 1955 |
A friend in Gisborne always boasts that the
gardens near her home produced the very first (and best) asparagus of the
season, so she gets to eat the succulent vegetable before anyone else.
‘Bought my
first Sparrowgrass’, she’d say and I always assumed that was a sort of
linguistic joke. Not a bit of it.
Again with a 1,000 year history in Britain, its
name in Latin being asparagus,
though over generations this was often shortened to sparagus. It underwent more changes, as
wors so often do, until in Shakespeare’s
day it was sperach or sperage.
Then along came Nicholas Culpeper the herbalist who knew its true Latin
name and included it in
his comprehensive herbal of 1653.
As Culpeper was widely known and
his herbal an invaluable household resource (as it still is today) the word
came back in its original form.
By Samuel Pepys
time, it was being called ‘Sparrowgrass’. He writes in his diary for 20 April 1667:
“So home,
and having brought home with me from Fenchurch Street a hundred of
sparrowgrass, cost 18d. We had them and a little bit of salmon,
which my wife had a mind to, cost 3s.”
‘Speak of the devil’ we say when someone we were discussing walks in.
Its full version, ’Speak of
the Devil and he will appear’ goes back
to the times when it was genuinely
believed that speaking names conjured up spirits.
Hence we get euphemisms
such as Old Nick and ‘What the Dickens!’
The Dickens, which in
Yorkshire at least was shortened to Dick was a common
name for Satan.
If came
home filthy, Mum would say, ‘Just look at the state of you, you’re as black as
Dick’s hat band’.
It’s strange to think, in
these prosaic times that people believed the Devil would actually pop up if
they said his name but superstition ruled lives and seeing a black cat was enough to spoil your whole day.
Politicians are often surrounded by sycophants or ‘yes men’
- people who agree with everything the boss says.
The Greek
word sūkophantēs is from sūkon phainein, meaning
'to show a fig'.
This is a very ancient superstition, widely used around the
world, to ward off the evil eye.
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| showing a fig |
In many places, now seen as a vulgar insult.
Sycophants, the embodiment of the protective symbol, perhaps fear what would happen if they dare to disagree with a politician.
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