Sunday Rest: Word Not To Use Today: bidet.

Is there a heavier word in the English language than bidet?

Oh, I do hope not!

Anyway, bidets were invented in France in the 17th century. At some point someone had the bright idea of attaching them to a water supply, and then in 1960 the electric bidet (a combination  bidet/lavatory) was unleashed upon the amazed world.

The twentieth century, that hotbed of innovation, came up with a further sophistication, the "paperless toilet", with a drying as well as a washing function.

I understand that bidets are sometimes referred to as garden hoses: personally, I much prefer not to refer to them at all.

Whoops...

Word Not To Use Today: bidet.  This word is from the French word meaning pony, and before that from the Old French bider, to trot.

Saturday Rave: The Sword in the Stone by TH White.

"Who's there?"shrieked Galapas, wheeling round at the fifth cell.
"It's nothing," cried Merlyn. "Only a mouse."
The giant Galapas whipped out his mighty sword, and stared backwards down the narrow passage with his torch held high above his head.
"Nonsense," he said. "Mice don't talk in human speech."
"Eek," said Merlyn, hoping this would do.

Young Wart is taken on a whole series of adventures by Merlin as he grows up (which he does, like all of us, without really noticing it).

The Sword in the Stone is a glorious mash-mash of beauty ('the big logs roared in the fire - the beech blue-flamy and relentless, the elm showy and soon gone, the holly bright, or the pine with his smoking scents') and anachronisms (one of Galapas's cells has an advertising man in it) and fun.

And then there's the cunning title, which lets us know from the start that there's going to be a happy ending at last.

There are knights, monsters, and the Questing Beast, too.

Really, what more could anyone want?

Word To Use Today: sword. This word is from the Old High German swert. Swords having been always special and useful, it's always meant pretty much the same thing.

Word To Use Today: murrain.

A murrain on it!

Cursing, then. Often a relief, and sometimes a necessary alternative to violence.

The currency of cursing is sadly much devalued, though. In my childhood there were several very shocking special-occasion words, but now I don't think there are any words left with that sort of strength. Yes, one or two words are still bleeped out on the TV, but they only usually raise a laugh.

So what to do? Well, be inventive, be scholarly - and be careful. Some of the mildest curses are the nastiest. Blimey is short for God blind me, for example, which surely no one would use if they understood for what they were wishing.

There are plenty of invented curses ready-made for the uninspired. Louisa M Alcott had the odd thunder turtles; the Ewoks have kvark; Red Dwarf has smeg; Jennings has ozzard, and I myself had great fun with the swearing in my Truth Sayer books. I'm still rather fond of soft as goose grot.

For the scholars, Shakespeare is, as so often, an inspiration. Cream-faced loon, from Macbeth has proved on occasion a great comfort to me.

Or there's always diseases to call upon: a pox on't! Pustules!

Or there's always the wonderful murrain!

Word To Use Today: murrain. This is any plague-like disease, particularly in cattle. The word comes from the Old French morine, to die, and before that from the Latin morī, which is also to do with death.

Hm. Perhaps we should all just try keeping calm...

Fixed! A rant.

British Gas has just been fined £2.5 million.

Hey, that's even more than my gas bill. Well, it was last time I checked, anyway.

British Gas has got into trouble for not replying to customers' complaints, that sort of thing. People are also complaining (how justly I don't know) about misleading tariffs and hidden charges.

I can't imagine why any of this should be a surprise, because British Gas has been very frank about its practices. Why, British Gas put a leaflet through my door the other day which proclaimed in large blue letters:

Our boiler installation quotes are fixed.

So what do people expect, then?

Word To Use Today: fix. (Though guaranteed is probably the word towards which British Gas was groping.) Fix is a lovely word which can of course mean mended, unchanging, or fiddled. 

The word fix comes from the Middle English fixen, and before that from Latin fīxus, from fīgere, to fasten.

(You know, the thing that really gets my goat is someone must have been paid to come up with that slogan.
Hey, I wonder if there's an opening for a Say What You Mean Consultant? I'd be very happy to oblige. For a consideration, naturally.)

Nuts and Bolts: onomatopoeia

Gosh, onomatopoeia is hard to spell, but it just means a word which sounds the same as the thing it describes.

Like hiccup and hum. That sort of thing.

But of course nothing's that easy.

Take a clock. They say (more or less) tick-tock in English and Filipino (tick-tack is generally commoner, elsewhere), but in Albania clocks run in waltz time: tik-tak-tok, tik-tak-tok.

This is very odd, I think, given that all early clocks had pendulums.

Or how about sheep. English sheep are supposed to bleat, but I've never heard a sheep say bleat in my life. Sheep round here go merrrrrr!

Sometimes the difference between an obvious attempt at onomatopoeia and the actual sound of the object is easy to explain. Frogs do go ribbit ribbit in America, but not here in England: our common species of frog goes (pretty much) croak.

And of course some sounds are just too difficult or spitty: no one wants to stop in the middle of a sentence to do an authentic imitation of a pig's grunt.

All the same, onomatopoeia gets everywhere, sometimes in quite subtle ways. All sorts of words, like laughter, or chain, have I think an echo of their sounds about them.

It's one of the things that make language so magical and evocative.

Thing To Do Today: listen out for onomatopoeia. This word is Greek, from the words onoma, which means name and poiein, to make.

Thing To Do Today: soap yourself.

Only dirty people wash.

In fact, only fairly modern dirty people wash.

Oh yes, all this washing is really quite new. 

People seem mostly to have stayed well clear of water, let alone soap, until Roman times, when bathing suddenly became hugely fashionable.

Mind you, Roman soap was made out of wood ash, so I'm not sure how good the baths were at actually getting people clean.

The Arabs brought proper soap to the West in mediaeval times, but the dread of water as a disease-carrying substance meant it wasn't used that much. Even the rich weren't that keen - Louis XIII of France, for example, had his second bath at the age of seven. Mostly, people got clean by rubbing themselves with a perfumed cloth.

By the 18th century this was thought to be slightly inadequate, so rich people kept "clean" by changing their clothes a lot.

Things finally changed once it was understood how disease spreads. It turned out that people had been quite right to distrust the water, but once that was sorted out people rather took to the whole splashing-it-all-over thing.

Some of the distrust lingered for a long time, though. I remember my grandfather washing his bad foot when he went to the doctor's - which was all right, until the doctor wanted to see the other (still dirty) one for comparison.

Now, however, we have heating and we can enjoy a good soapy splash.

Have fun!

Thing To Do Today: soap yourself. This word hasn't changed much for millennia, and both the Old High German form, seipfa and the Old French, savon, are very much like the original Latin sāpō.  

Spot the frippet: jelly.

Jelly. A jolly word, I thought, to start the week.

Let's do the British/American thing first. In Britain what we call jelly is usually the rubbery fruit-flavoured dessert which those in America call jello or gelatin.

We unite, however, in naming clear or savory preserves jellies, so that's one reason fewer for the next World War.

Phew!

Jelly is too weighty a subject for one post, but I must mention jelly shoes because they sound so mad (they're sandals made of soft plastic which looks like jelly) and royal jelly, which is too extraordinary to ignore.

Royal jelly is excreted from the heads of worker bees. It's fed to young bees for the first three days of their lives, and also to queen bees.

If a queen dies, or becomes weak, then the workers will continue to feed royal jelly to a young bee, and this will make her turn into a new queen.

So as far as I can see this means the stuff's magic, then.

Spot the frippet: jelly.  This word comes to us from the Old French gelee, which means frost as well as jelly, and before that from geler, to set hard, from the Latin gelu, frost.