Etymology

When The Spectator took the pulse of Paris in 1897, it reported: ‘Macabre pictures, Macabre poems, and Macabre music are all the fashion. We hear of cafés where the tables are shaped like coffins.’ Macabre was a new word in English, and this was its sole 1890s Spectator appearance. Its connections are indicated by a phrase in a song by that uneven chansonnier Georges Brassens: croque-macchabée. It means ‘undertaker’, macchabée being ‘a corpse’. The French slang macchabée and the English macabre both originate in the Danse Macabre. There was a 14th-century French book called La Danse Macabré, with an accent, and Macabré seems to be an alteration of the Old French Macabé, a version of the biblical name Maccabaeus.

‘So, are the Tories going to win the election?’ asked my husband after listening to the engaging psephologist Sir John Curtice. I’d been paying attention, but was distracted by Sir John’s phrase ‘the rub in the ointment’. Typical of extempore speech, this a metaphorical mixture of the fly in the ointment and the rub. Ointment might suggest a rub like Vicks VapoRub, which originated in America in 1905. The Oxford English Dictionary says such a rub is likely to be a liniment, though I can’t quite see the difference. I do remember Sloan’s Liniment, its label bearing an engraved portrait of the thick-moustached inventor, Dr Earl Sloan (another American, a doctor by courtesy). How much a fly spoils your metaphorical ointment is not clear.

‘Why is there water all over the bathroom floor?’ asked my husband, without doing anything about it. It was my fault. During a bank holiday soak, I heard the Radio 4 book serialisation of Hands of Time by Rebecca Struthers say that ‘the origin of the modern word hour’ is the Egyptian god Horus. I rocketed up a few inches, like a surprised killer whale, then flopped back down, displacing a few cubic inches of water each side. It’s funny how ordinary words attract erroneous stories. Hour does not, of course, come from Horus. Few English words come from ancient Egyptian; pharaoh and oasis are exceptions. Hour derives from Norman French houre, from Latin hora, itself from Greek hōra, going back to an Indo-European root signifying ‘season’, giving us year and the Germans Jahr.

Sir Keir Starmer told his party conference last month that a Labour government would within a year set up a publicly owned company to be called Great British Energy. Perhaps it was thought to have a ring of the popular Great British Bake Off. (The series is called The Great British Baking Show in America because a company running competitive bake-offs there since 1949 claimed commercial ownership of the term.) I’m not sure that all the echoes of Great British Energy are entirely positive. Great British Public has been in use, chiefly ironically, since 1833, when the popular novelist Catherine Gore, known simply as Mrs Gore, wrote in The Sketch Book of Fashion: ‘No man had ever greater cause than the ex-premier to loathe and despise the ingratitude of the Great British public.

In his picture from 1932, ‘Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare’, Henri Cartier-Bresson caught the moment when a man in a hat launched himself forward from a ladder lying in some water, his leading heel not yet breaking the mirror-like surface, which reflected too a circus poster of a girl leaping. In 1952, when the photographer published his collection Images à la Sauvette, the title chosen for the English edition was The Decisive Moment, a phrase that Cartier-Bresson took from a sentence from Cardinal de Retz (1613-79), a statesman from a banking family: ‘Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment décisif’ (‘There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment’).

The Guardian kindly tells us that green is a colour whose time has come: ‘A blazer or a cotton shirt in Wimbledon grass-court green as a pop of saturated colour against white jeans and chunky flat boots is very Copenhagen Fashion Week.’ For the Express, it’s nails: ‘With polish costing from as little as £1, you can add a pop of colour to an outfit for next to nothing.’ This is the sassiest usage just at the moment of that vastly productive word pop. Yet in the papers, the predominant references by far are still to pop stars or (heaven help us) pop culture. That kind of pop simply comes from the abbreviated popular. Yet I suspect it props up etymologically unconnected uses of pop in, pop-up (restaurants), eye-popping or popping out.

The Budget (which the revolutionary fiscal act last week was technically not) is directly connected with bilge and with one of the circles of Dante’s Hell, the eighth, which houses the financial fraudsters, speculators, extortionists, counterfeiters and false forecasters. The circle is divided into the ten ditches of Malebolge. The Malebolge, singular bolgia, take their name from Latin malus (‘evil’) and bulga (‘bag’). The early commentator on Dante, Benvenuto da Imola, says that bolgia in Florentine speech means a concave and capacious ditch. In Dante’s Hell inside the Earth, the Malebolge are concentric. Budget also comes from the Latin bulga.

‘Dire?’ said my husband. ‘It’s something chronic.’ He was putting on his idea of an Estuary accent, in a manner that might soon be unacceptable. But it is true that everything has been called dire lately, and that’s no small claim. ‘Dreadful, dismal, mournful, horrible, terrible, evil in a great degree,’ was the semantic landscape sketched for the word by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary. Johnson illustrated its usage by quoting Milton: ‘Hydras, and gorgons, and chimæras dire.’ As a matter of fact, in the first published edition of Paradise Lost, the line (Book II, line 628) is ‘Gorgons and Hydra’s, and Chimera’s dire’, with apostrophes that might put us in mind of a classical greengrocer.

‘Wha, wha?’ said my husband in a slack-jawed way, throwing over a copy of the Guardian, as though it was my fault. ‘“Today,” it said, “just three crops – rice, wheat and corn – provide nearly half of the world’s calories.”’ I saw the problem. It was obvious, from a process of elimination, that by corn it meant ‘maize’. Elsewhere ambiguities abound. Since the Ukraine war began, discussion of wheat and maize has increased no end, but it is often impossible to tell whether wheat or maize is meant by corn. I thought we had agreed to differ with America on this.

It is easy to laugh at young people asking for sympathy because ‘I’ve got mental health’. I think I heard the journalist-turned-teacher Lucy Kellaway on the wireless recently noticing in a half-baffled way the tendency of pupils to call mental illness mental health. Mental health hasn’t quite achieved that meaning in standard speech, but it could. It is partly a matter of euphemism. Mad and madness are now hardly usable at all with reference to everyday circumstances, being reserved for different times and cultures, for King Nebuchadnezzar, King Lear or King George. A mental case is ‘increasingly avoided’, noted the Oxford English Dictionary in its 21st-century revision of entries that required no such cautions in its 1989 edition.

‘Quicksand!’ yelled my husband, flailing his arms wildly. Since he was sitting in his armchair, his dramatic representation of a scene from a western failed to convince, though it endangered the tumbler of whisky on the occasional table next to him. He’d been set off (not that it takes much) by my mentioning the ubiquity of struggling. Instead of the hard-working families that we were forever being told about, it is now struggling families, torn between having another pie for tea or turning on the heating in these sweltering days. Everyone is struggling. ‘Mateo Kovacic is struggling with knee problems,’ the Telegraph told me. Others are ‘struggling to care for dogs with health and behavioural problems’.

Someone in the Guardian wrote that Boris Johnson had his ‘out of office’ on, and the Chancellor was ‘missing in action’, but the Sun reported that ‘Downing Street denied Boris Johnson had been missing in action during the cost of living crisis’. Ed Miliband said: ‘The Tories are missing in action.’ A Liberal Democrat spokesperson called Christine Jardine said: ‘We have a zombie government and a Prime Minister missing in action.’ Dozens of people are using the phrase missing in action. What is the matter with them all? Don’t they realise it means ‘missing presumed dead’? Thomas Hood in his ‘Waterloo Ballad’ pictures a dying man on the battlefield found by his lady love.

‘Got any ’ose?’ asked my husband, falling into his Two Ronnies ‘Four Candles’ routine, in which he likes to play not only the shopkeeper but also the customer, with disastrous results. In both the pantyhose and the garden hose in the sketch, the hose was originally the same word. Hose meant the leggings or trousers our Germanic forefathers wore. In some contexts it long retained the archaic plural hosen. When Nebuchadnezzar in his rage commanded Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to be thrown into the burning fiery furnace, they were bound ‘in their coats, their hosen, and their hats’, according to the translation of 1611.

‘A law against catcalls?’ asked my husband sceptically. ‘What next, criminalising booing and hissing?’ He often gets the wrong end of the stick, but in this case I hardly blame him, for the press retailed widely Liz Truss’s resolve to make a law against catcalls and wolf-whistles. But to an older generation like my husband’s, catcalling is something to do with the theatre. In Practical Cats, T.S. Eliot assures us that Gus the Theatre Cat acted with Irving and Tree – Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905), who Shaw said revealed on stage ‘glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness’, and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917), noted for histrionic versatility.

‘Don’t you know the answer?’ asked my husband with mock surprise, throwing over to me from his armchair a copy of the Daily Telegraph. The question, from a reader on the Letters page, was what Mrs Beeton meant by flageons of veal. I had no idea and nor did the Oxford English Dictionary in 20 volumes. The recipe was for a sort of giant hamburger or hot meatloaf made from minced veal, suet, eggs and breadcrumbs. That gave no clues about its name. It could hardly have connections with flagons or flagellation. A day later another reader found in her edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management from 1915 the recipe under the name fladeons. It looked as though later editions had misprinted the word. But fladeon wasn’t in the OED either.

‘Come on, old girl,’ said my husband as though encouraging a cow stuck in a ditch, ‘you must know.’ It was because I’d asked him in the far-off days of last week what woman meant, just after Rishi Sunak had said: ‘We must be able to call a mother a mother.’ Penny Mordaunt, Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch then tussled in a hate-crime triangle on television over who said what, when about people self-identifying in a gender. Such matters are said to belong to culture wars, which we had thought an American phenomenon. Culture wars acquired their name only in the 1980s. Since then we have grown used to language (as part of their armaments) changing rapidly.

There was a word I didn’t understand in Boris Johnson’s resignation speech (in which he did not resign). He spoke of ‘our fantastic prop force detectives’. Prop? Prop forwards, clothes props, proprietors, propositions, propellers? Perhaps they are personal protection officers, though I don’t think those are detectives. Or it might be family slang made up by Wilfred, two: ‘Ook, Papa, prop-props…’ More cunningly deployed in the 900 words of the speech was our. Not just our props but ‘our police, our emergency services, and of course our fantastic NHS… our armed services and our agencies… our indefatigable Conservative party members… our democracy’.

Before pinch as a verb appears in any written sources, it already formed part of surnames. Hugo Pinch was walking, breathing and possibly pinching in 1190, and in 1220 in Oxfordshire Ralph Pinchehaste was repenting at leisure. When William Golding wrote the painful Pincher Martin, he knew that any sailor called Martin was nicknamed Pincher. A likely eponym is Admiral Sir William Martin, 4th baronet (1801-95), who headed a drive for discipline. In his biographer’s judgment, ‘his insistence on obedience was not always agreeable to captains and commanders, but if not loved, he was feared, and the work was done’. It seems to me that pinching was highly Victorian.