Thing To Do Today: intrigue.

Well, if you've got this far, then there's a good chance I already have.

Intrigued you, that is.

But then who could be other than permanently intrigued in a world where tadpoles, Shakespeare, and sherbert exist?

In a world of hair relaxer, butterflies and bar codes?

Of smoke, sewers, and snapdragons ?

If there is someone out there so block-headed that they can't be bothered to wonder about...well, about anything much, really...then they can always be involved in an intrigue, whether it's plot to get to sit next to the brainest person during the French test, or to convince someone that their business trip wasn't all about golf.

I suppose the deceitful but perennially fascinating cuckoo, who lays her eggs in other birds' nests, is carrying on an intriguing intrigue: but personally I'm nothing of a plotter, so for myself I'll stick with spending way too much time being intrigued by the rainbows on washing-up liquid bubbles.


Photo by George Hodan.

Thing to do today: be intrigued, or intrigue. This word comes from the Latin word intrīcāre, to entangle or perplex, from trīcae, which are trifles or perplexities.

 

Spot the frippet: something Swiss.

So, what do we associate with Switzerland?

Cuckoo clocks, chocolate, cheese, watches, mountains...

...yodelling...

...bank accounts...

The trouble is, none of these things is called Swiss - and the other trouble is, things that are called Swiss tend not to have much to do with Switzerland.

A Swiss ball, for instance:


 
was invented by Aquilino Cosani, an Italian, and first used therapeutically by Mary Quinton, who was British.

Swiss chard? It comes from Sicily.

The Swiss cheese plant:



is a native of Southern Mexico.

The Swiss Re Tower:



is in London; and the swiss roll:



comes from somewhere in Central Europe, no one's sure quite where, except that it's definitely not Switzerland.

Then there's the Swiss Guard:



which is, of course, to be found in Rome.

It is with some relief that I turn to the Swiss army knife, which has been made in Ibach, Switzerland since 1891.

Before that they were made in Germany.

Spot the frippet: something Swiss. The word Swiss comes from Switzer, from the Alemannic Schwiizer, which means an inhabitant of Schwyz. Schwyz is possibly from the Old High German Suittes, perhaps from suedan to burn, referring to the clearing of an area of forest.

This Spot the Frippet easy for me because I have a worryingly rampant Swiss cheese plant on my landing. Otherwise, any good supermarket should provide numerous examples of Swiss manufacture.

Sunday Rest. Word Not To Use Today: ubiquity.

This word tastes, as any perceptive person will be well aware, of the orange sheen of street lights on wet tarmac.

The one good thing about the word is that the alternative is ubiquitousness, which is obviously ridiculous as ubiquitousness tastes of the orange sheen of street lamps on wet tarmac that has millions of mosquitoes squashed into it.

Ubiquity is to do with existing everywhere, and one other good thing about the word is that, people having on the whole fairly good taste, ubiquitous isn't anything like ubiquitous.

And thank heavens for that.

Word Not To Use Today: ubiquity. This word comes from the Latin ubīque, which means everywhere.

 

Saturday Rave: The Priory School by Arthur Conan Doyle.

I could have chosen any of the Sherlock Holmes short stories to rave about, and so I've opened my collected works at random and this is the passage I've found:

The duke leaned back in his chair and stared with amazement at my friend.
"You seem to have powers that are hardly human," he said.

Riveting stuff, eh? It's page 691 in my 1928 copy of the collected short stories, which seems to have first belonged to a Mr Wilbee of Sarratt House. I can see why he wanted to stake his claim to the volume, because it must be one of the most tempting books to borrow or steal ever written.

Of course I can't tell you the story of The Priory School because that would spoil it, but I can reveal the very end. I want to do this because in all the gushing over the hawk-like unemotional Homes and his uncanny etc etc, the humour and warmth of the stories - and the man - tends to get overlooked.

"Thank you," he said, as he replaced the glass. "It is the second most interesting object that I have seen in the North."
"And the first?"
Homes folded up his cheque, and placed it carefully in his notebook. "I am a poor man," said he, as he patted it affectionately, and thrust it into the depths of his pocket.

Word to use today: cheque. Or check, if you live in the US. This word is the same as the check which means making sure. In England cheques over £50 are no longer guaranteed by the issuing bank, so they're more uncheques, really. The word comes originally from the Persian shāh, the king! as in the chess term.

Word To Use Today: bunyip.

Bunyip, as must be clear to everyone, is far too enchanting a word to ignore.

So what does it mean?

Well, many Aboriginal Australians will say "devil" or "evil spirit" (and, let's face it, they should know). There are those, though, who talk of the bunyip as the creator of all the watery places in Australia. The bunyip is certainly associated with swamps and rivers.

By the 1850s, the word bunyip had proved so irresistible that it had grown a new meaning and had come to imply imposter, or pretender. As an extension of this, the Bunyip aristocracy were Australians who aspired to be thought refined and important.

As for the original bunyip, this what The Geelong Advertiser had to say about it in 1845:

"The Bunyip, then, is represented as uniting the characteristics of a bird and of an alligator. It has a head resembling an emu, with a long bill, at the extremity of which is a transverse projection on each side, with serrated edges like the bone of the stingray. Its body and legs partake of the nature of the alligator. The hind legs are remarkably thick and strong, and the fore legs are much longer, but still of great strength. The extremities are furnished with long claws, but...its usual method of killing its prey is by hugging it to death. When in the water it swims like a frog, and when on shore it walks on its hind legs with its head erect, in which position it measures twelve or thirteen feet in height."
 

 

 

This is far from a definitive description, though, because some people have said the bunyip is really a stray seal; some have said it's a memory of an extinct marsupial; some have said it's inspired by prehistoric fossils.

The bunyip has also been said to look like an enormous starfish, and to have a dog-like face, a horse-like tail, walrus-like tusks and a duck's bill.

Some have even associated it with the bunyip bird, or Australasian bittern, which bellows mysteriously in the breeding season:



Perhaps we'll never be sure what a bunyip looks like. There's a theory that the bunyip is so scary that people don't bother to stop to get a proper look at it, they just run screaming and then make stuff up afterwards.

All we can say is that if it's big and scary and wants people to think it's dead posh, then the chances are it's a bunyip.

Word To Use Today: bunyip. Perhaps it's most easily used in its sense of a humbug or a pretender. Bunyip comes from the Wemba-Wemba or Wergaia language of the Aboriginal people of South-Eastern Australia.

 

 

 

 

 

Turning the other cheek: a rant.

'It's the oldest and simplest joke of all: the pratfall. If in doubt, fall on your face.'

That's from The Radio Times (the oldest British television and radio listings magazine) 27/4 - 3/5/2013.

Well, it made me laugh.

I suppose doing a pratfall while falling on your face is just about possible: but it would involve pretzel-like contortions.

Pratfall is marked in my Collins dictionary as a USA and Canadian word meaning to fall on the buttocks. Nowadays it's quite commonly used and understood in Britain (though, obviously, not universally understood, see above).

Never mind, it's a lovely word, pratfall, and prat is nice, too. In Britain it usually means an idiot, a fool, or an incompetent, but the old meaning of buttock still lingers in the insult, even if the word prat is no longer used in strictly anatomical senses.

The best thing about the word prat is that it's a reasonably polite way of insulting your friends (though not, if they're listening, those in authority), and as such will always be in demand and is greatly to be cherished.

Word To Use Today: prat. This word first appeared in English in the 1500s, when it meant buttocks. No one knows where it came from before that.

Nuts and Bolts: doublets

No, not one of these:
 

Giovanni Battista Moroni. 1570
 
but the literary sort of doublet.

These are two words which come from the same root word, but have evolved differently over time.
 
Sometimes doublets are very similar, like chief and chef; sometimes they're startlingly different, like cow and beef (in this case the common root is so far back it's in a language no one knows much about any more, Proto Indo-European); sometimes the meanings of doublets are clearly linked, as in warden and guardian; and sometimes the meanings are so different no one would guess their common origins, like mister and Mistral - or, most pleasingly, as in the opposites guest and host.
 
I'll leave you with one final example of a doublet: as a language enthusiast my very, very favourite is grammar and glamour.

I do try to aim for just a bit of both.

Words To Use Today: a doublet. The word doublet comes from double, of course, which is from the Latin words duo, two, and plus.