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.

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. 
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.







 I am indebted to the meticulous research by Michael Quinion on his excellent webpage:      http://www.worldwidewords.org






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