Fashionably Speaking

As it’s Halloween time, the latest video looks at the word “Costume”:

The main point behind this one is the interesting fact that costume and custom are essentially the same word, but came into English through different routes. Furthermore costume/custom show a similar semantic development to the two senses of the word habit. This kicked off the set of associations, but I also explore not only the interesting vocabulary of fashion, but fashion as a communicative language itself. The semiotics of fashion, that is the study of how fashion conveys meaning, is a large and very rich subject, of which I can only barely scratch the surface. Already this video was quite a long one, and there were a lot of interesting bits I had to leave out of the video.

First of all some side notes about the words custom and costume themselves. The plural form customs as in a duty that needs to be paid when importing goods comes from the sense a “customary tax”, and by further extension a customer is someone with whom we have customary business dealings. Costume was first used in English, in the periods of art history sense, by diarist John Evelyn, whom I’ve wanted to include in a video for some time as he’s one of those hyperconnected individuals, and is responsible for coining quite a few words and senses of words, and is just generally a very interesting person.

Now as for Halloween costumes and where we get the tradition of dressing up for this holiday, the ancient Celts in their harvest festival Samhain are said to have dressed up in scary disguises, either to blend in with or scare off other spirits who were believed to arise at that time of year. There’s also the English tradition of souling, going door-to-door in costume around All Souls Day carrying turnip lanterns representing the souls in Purgatory, and offering blessings or songs in return for soul-cakes. Similarly there’s the Scottish and Irish tradition of Guising, going door-to-door in costumes asking for handouts. And then there’s Mumming, an old  tradition of costumed dances and little plays performed at various seasons of the year. These various tradition seem to have served two purposes. For one, it relieves the tension from the fear of evil spirits or the souls of the dead. Another is the element of misrule and breaking of taboos which I mentioned in the video. Both of these elements highlight the use of jest and game to lessen the impact of very serious cultural realities. If you’re interested in more about these and other Halloween traditions, I covered many of them in last year’s Halloween video “Jack-o’-Lantern”.

Now getting back to clothing and fashion. One of the sources I looked at suggested that the wimple may have been influenced by or adopted from Muslim women, and thus brought to Europe from the middle east during the crusades. If anyone can provide more information on this I’d be grateful, but there certainly is a similarity between the wimple and the hijab. Sticking with head coverings, I mentioned the 18th century vogue for the wig. An interesting puzzle is the word wig itself. It’s actually short for periwig, which has the earlier forms perwike and peruke, and comes from French perruque and Italian perrucca. But before that the trail runs cold.

On the other hand, I can give some deeper etymologies of some other words mentioned in the video. As I said, jeans comes from Genoa. But where does the name for this Italian city come from? Well there are a couple of theories. First of all the Latin form of the name is Genua. Etymonline suggests it might come from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “curve, bend” and would thus be cognate with Geneva. This root is presumably *genu- meaning “knee, angle”, and also gives us the words knee, kneel, genuflect, and diagonal. Another theory is that it’s related to Latin janua meaning “gate”, and thus also the Roman god Janus, as well as the month name January. As for denim from the city Nîmes, the French placename come from Latin Nemausus and ultimately from the Gaulish word nemo meaning “sanctuary”. This also seems to be connected to a Celtic god which the Romans referred to as Deus Nemausus, the god of a healing-spring sanctuary in the ancient town there. So if you think you look divine in those jeans, what with Nemausus and Janus, you may be right!

And speaking of jeans, I refer to them as an icon of contemporary fashion, probably the 20th century’s most enduring one. But to complete the look I suppose we could include T-shirts and sneakers. So as for the T-shirt, obviously named for its shape, it was originally designed as an undershirt to go with US military uniforms, but many servicemen began wearing just their T-shirts with their uniform trousers as a casual outfit during their off-duty hours, and when film star Marlon Brando appeared in the movie A Streetcar Named Desire dressed in a T-shirt, a fashion style was born.  And next the sneaker, an early example of which is the Converse All-Stars, which was also one of the first instances of a celebrity endorsement when basketball star Chuck Taylor joined their sales force in 1921, suggesting improvements to their shoe design, and his signature was added to the ankle patch on the shoes we now often refer to as Chuck Taylors or simply Chucks. The term sneaker by the way dates from the end of 19th century and is originally American, though it’s predated slightly by the term sneak. There are of course many other names for different varieties of casual soft-soled shoe including running shoes, trainers, sand shoes, deck shoes, tennis shoes, and plimsolls, an eponym from politician Samuel Plimsoll who devised the plimsoll line, the water line markings on the side of a ship which showed the maximum load a ship could safely carry — the shoes took their name from the similarity of their appearance to ships with these lines on the side. And as for celebrity endorsements, they have since become quite the big deal with sneakers, and T-shirts have become an important canvas on which to display a variety of messages the wearer wishes to convey to the world, so again fashion as language.

In addition to T-shirts with political or social slogans (which became particularly popular starting in the 1980s), fashion can often be used to make political or social statements. To give just two such examples of statements calling for change, at the 1968 Olympics  African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos held up black-gloved fists during their medal ceremonies as an anti-racism statement. And the name of  19th century feminist Amelia Bloomer, who advocated against the restrictive clothing women were forced to wear at the time, became associated with bloomers, a kind of loose fitting split-leg garment, sometimes worn as more comfortable underwear and sometimes as trousers. Once again, the language of fashion and fashion as language. Let me know of any other examples of this kind of use of fashion in the comments below.

But getting back to the 20th century US military influence on fashion, one perhaps surprising example is the bikini, which inventor Louis Réard named after the Bikini Atoll where the US military conducted its first peace-time nuclear weapons test. Réard hoped his invention would cause a similar "explosive commercial and cultural reaction", and indeed it did. The placename Bikini, by the way is Marshallese for “coconut place”.

In the video I mentioned Beau Brummell’s influence on the men’s formal suit. Brummell was fond of wearing dark colours as opposed to the more brightly coloured outfits of preceding generations.  But we have another historical figure, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who by the way gave us the cliche novel opening “It was a dark and stormy night” (you may remember him from our “Beef” video), to thank for the habit of wearing black as formal wear, as in the tailcoat and the tuxedo. As for the invention of tuxedo itself, one story goes that Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, wanting a more comfortable formal outfit than the black tailcoat, took to wearing a short military style jacket. His American guest at the time, James Potter, brought the style back with him, and after wearing it at the fashionable resort of Tuxedo Park in New York, a style and its name were born. The place name itself, by the way, seems to come from Algonquian p'tuck-sepo meaning “crooked river”. On the subject of the tuxedo, the term Canadian tuxedo refers to wearing denim on top and on bottom, so jeans and a jean jacket for instance. And the term Canadian passport, according to Urban Dictionary, is another term for the mullet cut. I don’t want to think what all this implies about Canadians!

But while we’re still on the subject of men’s formal wear, the top hat is said to have been invented by John Hetherington, who supposedly first wore this shiny silk hat designed to “frighten timid people” on January 15, 1797, causing a riot with women fainting, children screaming, and dogs yelping, leading to his being charged with a breach of the peace! Unfortunately this story may be apocryphal. Nevertheless, the hat did become a major fashion trend of the 19th century, and already by 1814 we have the first recorded instance of someone pulling a rabbit out of a top hat, the French magician Louis Comte.

Another probably apocryphal hat story is about the invention of the bowler. Finding the tall top hat inconvenient when horse riding as it got caught up in low-hanging tree branches, wealthy British landowner William Coke commissioned a hat with a low round crown. The hat was manufactured by one William Bowlers. Of course it might just be the bowl shape of the hat that led to its name. But I’ll make the hat trick by relaying a third hat story. The fedora takes its name from a play, the only such instance of an etymology I can think of. In the play Fedora by Victorien Sardou, famous actress Sarah Bernhardt wore a soft felt hat while playing the title role of Princess Fedora Romanoff, and the hat became a popular fashion choice.

Speaking of fashion trendsetters, I mentioned Empress Josephine’s role in popularizing the empire waist dress, a neoclassical reinvention of the ancient Greek peplos. Another important trendsetter in the development of this type of dress was Emma, Lady Hamilton (or Emma Hart as she was known at the time), who was the lover of Charles Greville (whom you may remember as a friend of Erasmus Darwin in our previous video on him). Greville, tiring of his mistress, shipped her off to Italy to become the mistress and eventually wife of Sir William Hamilton, who was the English ambassador in Naples. While there Emma invented a kind of performance art she called Attitudes, posing in various alluring poses recreating scenes from Greek mythology, and wearing that type of ancient dress. The artist George Romney painted many of these scenes, and her fashion sense took Europe by storm. Well, I guess high fashion is all about attitude.

Speaking of ancient Greece, professional barbers or hair cutters go back at least as far as ancient Greece, where the barbershop was already an important location for conversation and gossip. The Greeks introduced the profession to the Romans who called the barber a tonsor, related to our word tonsure. During the middle ages barbers also served as surgeons — after all they already had sharp razors — and that’s the source of the barber pole, the red stripes reflecting the blood involved. The word surgery by the way comes through Latin chirurgia ultimately from ancient Greek kheirurgia meaning literally “hand work”. So some extra tidbits next time you’re gossipping with your barber.

Also in the ancient world, I briefly mention the toga, which connects nicely with our last video “Ambition” and the toga candida, the “whitened toga”, worn by political candidates in Rome, and indeed that’s where the word candidate comes from. Also worthy of mention is the toga praetexta, which had a purple border, and was worn, curiously, by both by young boys who were not yet of age and by magistrates, purple being a colour that signified high status, but more on this when we come to purple in our ongoing series of colour podcasts. Interesting too that the one exception to the rule that only freeborn males were allowed to wear togas was that prostitutes were required to wear them, an example I suppose of boundary crossing. They couldn’t wear the traditional stola, the dress of the Roman matron, and I suppose had something of the male freedom in terms of their status—in the sense that they were not restricted by the modesty of a respectable woman. The toga, though, showed that they also lacked the legal protection of a citizen woman, and that their bodies were essentially common property. 

In the video I highlighted the importance of France as the home of fashion by tracing the series of leaders from Louis XIV and his wigs, to Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour, to Louis XVI and his wife and “queen of fashion” Marie Antoinette, leading up to the French Revolution, to finally the more reserved styles after the revolution with Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. I could perhaps add one other link to this chain, with Napoleon’s nephew and heir Napoleon III and his wife Eugénie de Montijo. She influence the work of designer Charles Worth, who is known as the father of haute-couture, and who founded the first great fashion house, the House of Worth.

And finally one last point about fashion as language. A friend once pointed out to me that someone mixing clashing styles of clothing was engaging in something like code-switching. Code-switching is a linguistics term that refers to when speakers of more than one language naturally switch back and forth between languages in the middle of conversation. It’s not a random phenomenon, but is indeed itself a communicative element of language — the choice of language at any one instant communicates something of importance in the discourse. Applying this to clothing is, I think, quite relevant, particularly in our modern, uncentred contemporary fashions. So feel free to add in the comments any other ways fashion is like language — I’d love to hear some other views.

The words they are a-changin': Making change in the world of politics

This week’s video takes on all the election hoopla by looking at the word “ambition” and other political vocabulary:

Ambition itself was the jumping off point here, and its surprising etymology and background in the world of Roman politics, and since politics is in the news so much lately with the US 2016 election going on, it seemed a fitting time to take this one on. But more than just giving a rundown of political vocabulary, which has already been so well done by others such as the Allusionist and numerous Mashed Radish posts (such as this excellent one on the word “candidate”), I wanted to add the further dimension of how language change and changing values go hand in hand. Our words reflect our current value systems, and both are very changeable, as with the positive and pejorative senses of the word “ambition”. Another literary example of this that I mentioned before in our video “Paddle Your Own Canoe” is the continual reinterpretation of the figure of Odysseus/Ulysses over the years. In the ancient epic The Odyssey, after returning home from the Trojan War, Odysseus is giving a prophecy that he must make another journey, and having already been away from home for 20 years and struggling so hard to return he isn’t really happy about this. In the medieval poem The Inferno (the first part of his Divine Comedy), Dante puts Ulysses in Hell for going journeying again as he takes it as an act of ambition. When the Victorian poet tells the story in his poem “Ulysses” he celebrates the hero’s ambition and striving. We make of ambition what we will, depending on values and contexts.

I don’t have too much left on the table for this one, just a few little tidbits that didn’t fit into the final video. The word “poll”, meaning originally “head” may well come from the same root as “ballot”, or at least one akin to it (see the excellent Mashed Radish post on the word “poll”). If so, that would be a nice extra connection tying “poll” and “ballot” together.

In Canadian political circles by the way, the riding is not officially termed a riding. It’s officially an electoral district, but the name is so commonly used that even Elections Canada, the body that oversees elections, uses the term in common contexts. By the way, we can see a similar formation to that thrithing sense of three parts in the word farthing, an old denomination of coin in Britain. It’s worth a quarter of a penny, hence the name, and in the middle ages it was even common to produce one by literally cutting a penny in four, as you can see below:

And as for the Canadian Parliament, the upper house is actually called the Senate. I wonder how this term was adopted. It obviously couldn’t be called the House of Lords as in Britain, so did they borrow the name from the US? If there are any experts out there on Canadian political history, I’d love some insight. Also, are there other countries that have senates? Let me know in the comments. Also, I greatly simplified the discussion of the history of early US political parties — there were numerous parties back then with shifting platforms, and I’m only vaguely aware of this fascinating complexity so also feel free to chime in with any interesting points I’ve left out.

But speaking of Icelandic etymologies, the Althing makes me think of the temporary dwellings that attendees of these old medieval councils stayed in — which were called “booths”. That’s where we get the word “booth”. It comes from a Germanic root that means “to dwell” and also gives us the second elements in the words neighbour and husband, and goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root which means to exist, giving us “be”. There’s a wonderfully detailed post on the word “booth” by Anatoly Liberman.

If you want to hear more about neoclassical and gothic architecture, check out our video “Sublime” in which we get into the topic in much more detail. Oh and if Thomas Nast rings a bell, you may remember him from our “Cocktail” video from way back, with his connection to the first celebrity bartender Jerry Thomas.

Since I gave the Greek origin of the term “idiot” I thought I might here round out Goddard’s other categories. The word “imbecile” comes through French from Latin in- meaning “not” and baculum meaning “stick”, the idea being that someone is “weak” because they lack support, and this weakness narrowed in sense to refer to those weak in the mind. "Moron" comes ultimately from Greek moros meaning “foolish, stupid”, and though there isn’t an earlier etymon for this, there does seem to be a Sanskrit cognate murah. By the way, Goddard himself had this to say about democracy: “Democracy, then, means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent and most human to tell them what to do to be happy.” I’m not sure that this fits with most people’s definition of democracy.

And finally a little bit more about politics in the ancient world. In ancient Athens, though opinions about democracy were indeed mixed, that didn’t stop them from personifying the concept as the goddess Demokratia, and making offerings to her. The assembly was called the Ekklesia, literally meaning “calling out”. The word was adopted to refer to the church in Christian times, and we get the English word “ecclesiastical” from it. Voting was done initially by a show of hands, though without an exact count — I guess they just estimated. Ballots were, however, used in the law courts. One particular instance of voting in ancient Greece is ostracism, which was exiling someone dangerous to the state for a period of 10 years. Voting was done with pottery fragments called in ancient Greek ostrakon, related to osteon meaning “bone” (from which we get medical terms like osteoporosis and osteoarthritis) and ostreon meaning “oyster” (from which we get the word oyster). The most notable difference between Athenian democracy and our modern systems, by the way, was that with the exception of some military positions, the government officials were not elected, but chosen by lot, essentially at random out of the entire citizen body, and officials only held their positions for a year. This meant that there were very few political campaigns, and prevented the development of an exclusive political class like at Rome. (This radical form of the democracy was fairly short-lived, however, lasting about 150 years).

In ancient Rome voting was initially oral, with officials called rogatores (literally “questioners”) asking each voter for their vote and then writing it down, but later secret ballots involving wax tablets were instituted. Interestingly, it was not simple majorities but voting blocks that decided elections, with voters voting in assigned groups and the group vote as a whole following the winner of that group, a bit similar I suppose to the winner-take-all system of winning whole states in the US Electoral College system. In terms of the popularism in Roman politics, we can talk of the two major factions, the Populares who appealed to the lower classes and the popular assembly to achieve political ends, countering the ruling elite who stressed the authority of the Senate, known (at least to themselves) as the Optimates meaning literally “the best” — though the leaders of both groups were from the elite senatorial class, so we shouldn’t think of the Populares as proto-Marxists or anything. This political situation is one of the major features of Roman politics, especially during the later Republic — for instance Julius Caesar was considered one of the Populares, and Cicero was an Optimate. It’s not dissimilar to modern politics in the US and many other countries, where even though the political platforms of the parties may be aimed at the working class or the middle class, the politicians all usually end up coming from the wealthy elite. Some things don’t change, I guess!

The Slippery History of Linoleum

This week’s video looks at the word “Linoleum”:

The real subject of the video is trademarks, as linoleum is the first example of genericide, when a trademark name loses its trademark status and becomes the generic term to refer to the product category rather than one particular maker of the product. And as such it completes a series of videos we’ve made about intellectual property, first “Bug”, which also told the story of the history of patents:

And then “Freebooting”, which also told the story of the history of copyright:

If you haven’t seen those earlier videos, do go back and check them out. As for this blog post, there are just a few tidbits that didn’t make it into the video. Of course the other major use that linoleum has been put to is linocut, a kind of more modern version of woodcut printing, in which an image is carved into a sheet of linoleum which can then be inked and pressed onto paper to reproduce the image. Linocut became popular with artists in the early 20th century, but it had also been used to produce wallpaper.

And speaking of wall coverings, Frederick Walton, the inventor of linoleum, also invented Lincrusta, a wall covering similarly based on linseed oil, but instead embossed to produced its decorative effect. In addition to being used in many Victorian era buildings, it was famously used in the White House, and as with linoleum there’s a nautical connection here, as it was used in the staterooms on the Titanic. As for the name, Walton initially called his new invention Linoleum Muralis, literally “wall linoleum”, changed it to Lincrusta-Walton, still reflecting the crucial linseed ingredient with “crusta” to reflect the embossed nature of the product, and notable attaching his own name to the product, having seemingly learnt from his previous problems with genericide.

You may also be wondering about the word linotype by the way. In fact it has nothing to do with linoleum or linseed oil, but is instead a typesetting technique that produces full lines of type at a time instead of letter by letter, so is literally a contraction of “line o’ type”.

As one helpful commenter (Frahamen) on the video points out, the Manet painting “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” was painted with linseed oil based paint, so there’s another nice connection. According to art historian Kenneth Bendiner, the inclusion of the English Bass ale instead of German beer is a nationalist and jingoistic reaction against Germany, as the French had recently lost Alsace to the Germans after the Franco-Prussian War. (Another interesting outcome of the Franco-Prussian War is that it led to the invention of Bovril, a story I tell in the video “Beef”).

The Krupp company has come up before in our videos, in “Rune”, because of their logo and manufacturing of the famous gun Big Bertha. As another helpful commenter (Zheeraffa1) on the video points out, the modern incarnation of the company, ThyssenKrupp, is a major escalator manufacturer, tying it back into another one of those genericided trademarks.

And finally on to what is probably the most interesting etymological story in the video, that of gasoline. It had previously been assumed that gasoline simply came from gas, a little odd given that gasoline is a liquid not a gas, that is until researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered the evidence about John Cassell and his Cazoline, about which discovery you can read more in the Oxford Dictionaries blog. Still, it seems likely that the word gas still had some influence on the form gasoline, not to mention the common North American abbreviation gas. And as per the video, we have Jean Baptist van Helmont’s Flemish pronunciation of Greek chaos to thank for that word. Here’s van Helmont’s actual quotation on the subject (quoted from the OED):

‘halitum illum Gas vocavi, non longe a Chao veterum secretum’, ‘I have called this vapour gas, not far removed from the Chaos of the ancients’

Here is the passage from Hesiod’s Theogony that introduces the Chaos, that is the void before creation, that van Helmont was referring to (quoted from Wikisource):

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods. And she brought forth long Hills, graceful haunts of the goddess-Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the hills. She bare also the fruitless deep with his raging swell, Pontus, without sweet union of love. But afterwards she lay with Heaven and bare deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire.”

And for comparison, here is the Ginnungagap from the Norse story of creation, as told by Snorri Sturluson:

“Ginnungagap, the Yawning Void ... which faced toward the northern quarter, became filled with heaviness, and masses of ice and rime, and from within, drizzling rain and gusts; but the southern part of the Yawning Void was lighted by those sparks and glowing masses which flew out of Múspellheim”

And one last detail. I mentioned that the British term petrol is short for petroleum. Specifically it came to the British idiom from the tradenamed product of the appropriately named company Petrochem Carless Ltd, one of the first oil companies. The company tried to register the name Petrol as a trademark, but this attempt failed presumably because the word had already been used to refer to a lamp oil in French. I say appropriately named because this petrol was initially intended as a solvent for removing nits, that is the eggs of lice, not as a fuel for cars. It was only later with the advent of the internal combustion engine that the petrol was found to be an ideal fuel. The company was actually called Petrochem Carless because it was founded by one Eugene Carless in 1859, coincidentally the same year the first oil well was drilled (in Titusville Pennsylvania), kicking off the first oil boom in the United States. Here’s a picture of that historic first oil derrick, Drake Well.

Making it weird

In honour of the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, and his weird sisters, this week’s video looks at the history of the word weird:

The word for this video was chosen by popular vote after I asked for feedback in a previous video over the summer, so thanks to everyone for voting and giving me your feedback. “Weird” was the clear winner, and it certainly made it easy on me as it intersected with my dissertation topic from my grad school days, which looked at the conceptualisation of futurity in Old English. In my dissertation I looked at the nascent constructions for expressing future time in Old English, which didn’t have a regularized future tense. It started off with the question of how Anglo-Saxon translators handled Latin with its future tense, particularly with all the Christian texts which often dealt so explicitly with the future and the afterlife, and then expanded from there into a broader question of what language and language change can tell us about cultural concepts about time and the future. So wyrd in its original sense of fate was an element in that work. I’ve also blogged before about my ongoing interests about time, cognition, and language, so if you’re interested in reading more on the topic, you can see here and here.

The timing also fit well with the Shakespearean anniversary, and as an extra tie-in you can also have a listen to our Shakespeare film podcast episode on the recent film adaptation of Macbeth featuring Michael Fassbender. The great similarities and significant differences between Shakespeare’s treatment of the Weird Sisters and what he found in his source, Holinsed’s Chronicles, are interesting and instructive, and I’ll quote Holinshed’s version of the entire encounter at the end of this blog post below, but in his passage the three women are referred to as being “in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world” and are referred to as “either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science”. 

It’s a curious thing that the word ‘weird’ owes its reintroduction to the language pretty much entirely to Shakespeare’s play, and even more curious because it was a misunderstanding of the sense of the word. It really does seem to be the Romantic poets, particularly Percy Shelley, as well as John Keats, who popularised the new sense of the word. It’s in Shelley’s 1816 poem Alastor that we see the first glimpse of this new sense in the lines “ In lone and silent hours, / When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness” and “the woven leaves / make net-work of the dark blue light of day, / And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable / As shapes in the weird clouds.” Then a few years later John Keats seems to pick up on his friend’s unusual word in the 1820 poem Lamia: “I took compassion on her, bade her steep / Her hair in weïrd syrops, that would keep / Her loveliness invisible, yet free / To wander as she loves, in liberty.” Given that the word was somewhat recherché to begin with, only known through Shakespeare and in Scots English, it’s perhaps not too surprising that we owe such a now seemingly common and even slangy word to the pens of Romantic poets. Interestingly the word doesn’t really seem to pick up until the latter half of the 19th century, and even suffers something of a decline in the first half of the 20th, only gaining in popularity again around 1980 (see the chart below for the for the frequency of weird and some of its close synonyms). As the citations in the OED suggest, the word was picked up by such potboiler writers as Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (about whom I’ve spoken earlier in “Beef”), which might explain the mid-19th century uptick. As for the 1980s I suppose we can look to the pop culture references like the ones I mentioned in the video (Weird Al Yankovic and the movie Weird Science). It does seem to be in fairly contemporary usage that the word has reached its peak.

Now a few words about the Proto-Indo-European root. From the base *wer- derives a number of other PIE roots which then lead to a variety of English words through different routes. The main one from the video is *wert- which gives us not only weird and the various words ending in -ward but also worth, and the universe of words from the versatile Latin word vertere (including of course universe and versatile). The derived root *wreit- (also meaning “turn”) gives us wreath and wrath (think twisted with anger), and the root *wergh- gives us words such as wring, worry, and wrong. The root *werg- gives us wrench and wrinkle, *wreik- leads to wry, wrigle, and wrist, *werb- gives us reverberate, and *werp- gives us wrap. And of course as mentioned in the video, *wrmi- gives us worm, as well as vermicelli — think about that the next time you eat noodles. So as you can see this is a very large collection of cognates, and enough turning words to make your head spin.

Now for a bit more about the Norns. By some accounts there were actually many other Norns, who attended the birth of every child, but Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld were the chief ones. Here’s the description in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda: “There stands a fair hall under the ash, by the well, and out of this hall there come three maidens, who are called Urd, Verdandi and Skuld. These maidens shape the lives of men; we call them Norns. But there are other Norns who visit every child that is born, to shape its life, and they are descended from the Æsir, others still are descended from the Elves, and a third kind from the race of Dwarfs … good Norns, from a noble line, shape good lives, but wicked Norns are to blame for those whose lives are miserable.” This may be echoed in the idea of good and wicked fairy godmothers in fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty. The name Skuld also appears as a name of one of the Valkyrie, but these two groups of women seem to have been conflated somewhat in some traditions. The forest maidens mentioned in Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (“Deeds of the Danes”) are indeed a striking parallel with the Weird Sisters and come across as something like the Norns, but are also similar to the Valkyrie: “About this time Hother chanced, while hunting, to be led astray by a mist, and he came on a certain lodge in which were wood-maidens; and when they greeted him by his own name, he asked who they were. They declared that it was their guidance and government that mainly determined the fortunes of war. For they often invisibly took part in battles, and by their secret assistance won for their friends the coveted victories.” And like Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, they appear to Hother again later to render him further assistance.

And finally some more senses of “weird”. In the video I focussed mainly on the noun and adjective uses of “weird” but it can also appear as a verb, from the Middle English period in the sense of “to assign a fate” or in the passive voice meaning “to be destined”. When Frank Herbert used the word “weirding” in his novel Dune, he was drawing both on the supernatural or magical sense of the word that developed later and on its earlier fate-related elements. But perhaps the most familiar use of the verb today is in the expression “to weird out” as in “to make someone feel uncomfortable”. In mathematics there’s also a concept called “weird numbers” which are explained in Wikipedia: “ the sum of the proper divisors (divisors including 1 but not itself) of the number is greater than the number, but no subset of those divisors sums to the number itself.” So for instance 70 whose “divisors are 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, and 35; these sum to 74, but no subset of these sums to 70.” There’s also an acronym WEIRD, “western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic” used in psychology to refer to the statistical bias that often occurs in psychological studies that are, as is often the case, based on a sampling of the easily available undergraduate students, who therefore might not represent the population at large. So I suppose in a certain sense what seems normal might actually be weird. (And again, as Professor Elemental tells us, "There's no such thing as normal, everybody's weird!")

Here’s the full passage from Holinshed:

Shortlie after happened a strange and vncouth woonder, which afterward was the cause of much trouble in the realme of Scotland, as ye shall after heare. It fortuned as Makbeth and Banquho iournied towards Fores, where the king then laie, they went sporting by the waie togither without other companie, saue onelie themselues, passing thorough the woods and fields, when suddenlie in the middest of a laund, there met them thrée women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world, whome when they attentiuelie beheld, woondering much at the sight, the first of them spake and said; "All haile Makbeth, thane of Glammis" (for he had latelie entered into that dignitie and office by the death of his father Sinell.) The second of them said; "Haile Makbeth thane of Cawder." But the third said; "All haile Makbeth that héerafter shalt be king of Scotland."

Then Banquho; "What manner of women (saith he) are you, that séeme so little fauourable vnto me, whereas to my fellow heere, besides high offices, ye assigne also the kingdome, appointing foorth nothing for me at all?" "Yes (saith the first of them) we promise greater benefits vnto thée, than vnto him, for he shall reigne in déed, but with an vnluckie end: neither shall he leaue anie issue behind him to succéed in his place, where contrarilie thou in déed shalt not reigne at all, but of thée those shall be borne which shall gouerne the Scotish kingdome by long order of continuall descent." Herewith the foresaid women vanished immediatlie out of their sight. This was reputed at the first but some vaine fantasticall illusion by Mackbeth and Banquho, insomuch that Banquho would call Mackbeth in iest, king of Scotland; and Mackbeth againe would call him in sport likewise, the father of manie kings. But afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, bicause euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken. For shortlie after, the thane of Cawder being condemned at Fores of treason against the king committed; his lands, liuings, and offices were giuen of the kings liberalitie to Mackbeth.

Spirit of the Age

In honour of April Fool’s Day, this week’s video looks at the classic cocktail the “Tom Collins”:

The name Tom, by the way, is a biblical name from a semitic root meaning “twin”, and the name Collins is a diminutive of Nicholas, which comes from Greek meaning “victory people”, the first element being Nike, the goddess of victory, who of course lends her name appropriately to the sportswear company. The inspiration for this video came from the story of the “Tom Collins” hoax, which presented the opportunity to cover a number of historical hoaxes, many of which I knew about because I’d been reading Justin Pollard’s entertaining book Secret Britain. The obvious timing for such a video was April Fool’s Day, so I could also include a bit about the history of that tradition as well. I should also draw special attention to the website of The Museum of Hoaxes, which provided much useful research, and is excellently well documented. (See the show notes page for all the sources used.) There’s also a timely footnote to this video in the recent rediscovery of that book Houdini hired H.P. Lovecraft (and co-writer C.M. Eddy) to write. You can read about the recovery of the manuscript of The Cancer of Superstition here.

The underlying theme behind this video, beyond the cocktail and the hoaxes and practical jokes themselves, is the way hoaxes tend to capture the spirit of the age they’re from. This is a bit similar to myth and urban legend, as I discussed in the video “The Story of Narrative”. When a hoax captures the public imagination, it sometimes does so because it is in tune with the zeitgeist, and reflects the preoccupations of the time. In this blog post I’ll have another look at some of the hoaxes mentioned in the video, as well as some others, in their historical context, to track this phenomenon.

But first a few more details about the origins of April Fool’s Day. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest English use of the phrase April Fool is from 1629 in Edmund Lechmere’s A Disputation of the Church wherein the Old Religion is Maintained: “For my part, I was not willing at the sight of yours (which I espied by meere chaunce, and neuer sawe but once) to be made an Aprill foole, and therefore would not be so farre at your commaund.” So the tradition has been in England since at least that time. John Aubrey’s reference mentioned in the video is somewhat later in 1686. Though it isn’t a clear reference to April Fool’s Day itself, the earliest use of the French phrase poisson d’avril is apparently from 1508 in the poem “Le livre de la deablerie” by French composer Eloy d’Amerval: “maquereau infâme de maint homme et de mainte femme, poisson d'avril.”

Now as for Geoffrey Chaucer, he establishes the date for the story "The Nun's Priest's Tale" in a rather roundabout and perhaps intentionally foolish way: “whan that the month in which the world bigan, that highte March, whan God first maked man, was complet, and passed were also, sin March bigan, thritty dayes and two” (3187-90). (You can hear me reading out the full passage here, if you wish). Thirty two days since March began would be April 1st, but the following passage gives complex astrological indications that are more in keeping with a date in May: “Bifel that Chauntecleer, in al his pryde, his seven wyves walking by his syde, caste up his eyen to the brighte sonne, that in the signe of Taurus hadde y-ronne twenty degrees and oon, and somwhat more; and knew by kynde, and by noon other lore, that it was pryme, and crew with blisful stevene.” (3191-97). Now apparently, this information, if you account for the 12 days offset because of the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, would yield a date of May 3rd, so many editors emend the text to “sin March was gon thritty dayes and two” making the date instead May 3rd there as well, a date Chaucer mentions quite often in other contexts as well and so is often referred to as his favourite date. What I wonder, though, is how much would this be off because of orbital precession in the 600-plus years since Chaucer’s time? At a rough guess I figure it would be out by over a week. Perhaps someone with more astronomical knowledge than I have can work this out. And in any case, all the manuscripts seem to agree on the reading “sin March bigan” so I’m inclined not to emend to “sin March was gon” and to try to make sense of the text as we have it. Since the tale contains a rooster and a chicken debating the philosophy of predestination and prophetic dreams, perhaps this dating is supposed to be inconsistent. In any case, take it as you will, but it may be of some small interest that Valentine’s Day also may owe its origin to a confused date in a Geoffrey Chaucer poem, The Parliament of Fowls, as I discussed in my video “Cuckold”. Or maybe Chaucer is just pranking us! (For more information, you can read The Museum’s detailed analysis of the Chaucer question here.)

There’s another connection here to Chaucer and my video “Cuckold”, in which I talk about the cuckoo bird. In the Wise Men of Gotham story we hear about the foolish attempt to fence in a cuckoo bird. Also, the cuckoo makes another appearance in the Scottish tradition, where April 1st was (and perhaps still is?) known as Hunt the Gowk day, gowk being the Scottish and northern English word for the bird, related to Old English geac. In the Scottish tradition the celebration continued with April 2nd being Tail day, when you stick a paper tail on people’s back, reminiscent of the French paper fish prank. So there does seem to be cluster of connections here, for what it’s worth.

In addition to the King John Gotham story, a number of historical events have been connected with April Fool’s Day over the years, such as the Dutch capture of Den Briel from Spanish forces on April 1, 1572, but none of these connections seem entirely convincing either. Now it’s possible that the tradition reaches back to some misrule festival which often takes place in the spring, such as the Roman festival of Hilaria, though there is little direct evidence for such links, but it’s been argued by Ronald Hutton (see show notes page) that as the misrule elements traditionally associated with Christmas faded, greater emphasis came to be placed on the spring equinox and April Fool’s Day. For more on the many and varied theories on the origins of April Fool tradition, see the Museum of Hoaxes very detailed page on the topic.

The Dreadnought hoax (about which you can read in full here) actually had a precursor. While studying at Cambridge, Horace de Vere Cole became friends with Adrian Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s brother), and the two started to get up to a number of minor pranks to entertain themselves. Their most elaborate was to pose as dignitaries from Zanzibar and enjoy an official reception from the mayor of Cambridge. It was years later that they decided to pull off a more elaborate version of the same prank, this time with some other confederates involved. The stunt seems to have been responsible for launching into public attention the loose collective of artists, writers, and other intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group, which most famously included Virgina Woolf, and was in keeping with their pacifism and rejection of Victorian values.

There’s an interesting backstory to the Cock Lane Ghost affair. William Kent and Fanny Lynes were not legally able to be married as she was the sister of his now-deceased wife, and by law that was considered incest. They had thus moved from Norfolk to London to take advantage of the relative anonymity of the big city, where they could pose as a married couple. While staying at the house of Richard Parsons, Fanny would hear an otherworldly scratching noise, which she took to be her sister’s warning from beyond the grave of some great danger. This backstory and the mayhem of the Berners Street hoax (about which you can read more fully here), highlight the dramatic demographic changes going on in England in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the staggering shift in population from the countryside to the urban areas. From the 18th century onwards there was a dramatic overall rise in the English population, and following a trend already beginning in that century, at the start of the 19th century something like one-fifth of the population lived in cities, but by the end of the 19th century it was more than three-quarters, while the rural populations dropped.

This alarming trend in demographics and the perceived threat of industrialisation is also one of the things that lies behind the celebration of nature and the countryside by the Romantic poets and artists. And it also explains their attraction to the medieval which they saw as a kind of golden age of a rural, pastoral world, with knights riding through the idyllic country on their chivalric quests. So they were ripe for the Ossian and Thomas Rowley medieval literary forgeries perpetrated by James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton respectively.

Of course the science vs superstition tension also lies behind the Piltdown Man and Cottingly Fairies hoaxes. Photography was still relatively new by the beginning of the 20th century, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that people were fooled by photographs of cardboard cutout fairies. It’s interesting to note the impact that near ubiquitous camera phones have had on similar phenomena like UFOs and Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster pictures. If one were to extrapolate from the frequency of such pictures before the camera phone, we should be flooded with evidence of the supernatural by now. Times change.

There are some other hoaxes that I didn’t have time to mention in the video, such as the 18th century rabbit babies of Mary Toft about which you can read the (disturbing) details here. What’s most notable about this hoax, which was accomplished by inserting rabbits (or parts of rabbits) into Mary Toft’s birth cavity after a miscarriage, is the number of highly respected physicians of the day who were fooled by it. This became the subject of scandal and satirical mockery, most notably by famous artist and pictorial satirist William Hogarth, who was critical of the gullibility of the so-called men of science in particular and of the general public more broadly, producing satirical cartoons about hoaxes of the day such as that of Mary Toft and Scratching Fanny. See for instance below, Hogarth's Cunicularii, or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation (1726) illustrating Mary Toft and her rabbit babies, and his Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762) featuring references to both Mary Toft and Scratching Fanny, as well as other contemporary examples of secular and religious credulity.

I mentioned a couple of hoaxes that Edgar Allan Poe was involved in, but in fact the Museum of Hoaxes documents a number of others here. As it turns out Poe was quite interested in hoaxes, not only perpetrating them but debunking them, as he attempted to do with the famous chess-playing Turk automaton, which appeared to be a mechanical device that could play and win against living opponents. Of course, as Poe suspected, there was an expert chess player hidden inside the machine (though not as he imagined in the body of the Turk itself, but in the mechanism beneath it) who was making the actual moves by means of a pantograph-like connection to the Turkish automaton above his head. The Mechanical Turk came with the Industrial Revolution, when machines were beginning to replace the labour of people. The idea of an actual thinking machine therefore played into the fears people might have of being replaced by machines.

The Mechanical Turk was invented by one Wolfgang von Kempelen who designed the speaking machine that Charles Wheatstone constructed and improved on that I mentioned in the “Erasmus Darwin” video. Interestingly, Poe used the name von Kempelen in another of his hoaxes. He published a newspaper article claiming that a German chemist named Baron von Kempelen had discovered an alchemical process to transform lead into gold, in the hopes of dissuading the inevitable gold rush that was about to ensue after reports of gold in California. One might imagine this was also a swipe at the creator of the Mechanical Turk as well.

One of my favourite hoaxes is the fictitious theologian Franz Bibfeldt. It began as a invented footnote in a student term paper, and eventually grew into an enormous in-joke. Academics and their senses of humour!

Speaking of academics, some scholars believe that Marco Polo’s Travels were a hoax, and that he never actually visited China, but instead based the book on second-hand accounts, due to omissions and inconsistencies in his record. There is much debate on this text, and ultimately it’s probably unprovable one way or the other. Of course the medieval period was full of faked holy relics — you can imagine how easy it would be to fake the finger bone of a saint or some such, and how lucrative it would be for the church donation box to have such relics. I mentioned perhaps the most amusing example of this in the Holy Prepuce, the supposed foreskin of Christ, in the Christmas video “The Twelve Days of Christmas”.

Of course sometimes writers can be taken in by hoaxes, as in the famous case of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, who seems to have been taken in by a kind of crazy pseudo-history book about the supposed continued bloodline of Christ, co-written by Doctor Who scriptwriter Henry Lincoln, if that gives you any sense of the level of fantasy involved here, called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which was itself based on ‘evidence’ created by a surrealist hoax perpetrated by one Pierre Plantard and his confederates in the 1960’s. According to both books, the secret society known as the Priory of Sion, and the the Knights Templar preserved the Holy Grail, which was not the cup of Christ, but actually the secret bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalen, which ran through the Merovingian royal family and right up to the present day, with secret messages and clues to its existence hidden in the art and architecture of the middle ages and renaissance. At least the convolutedness of Dan Brown’s plot lives up to the convolutedness of the trail of this hoax!

Apparently Plantard was trying to fabricate a connection between himself and the medieval French Merovingian royal family (and denounced the whole thing as fiction once the holy bloodline business had been introduced by Lincoln and his co-writers), and this is an interesting parallel with the hoax of the Vestiarium Scoticum, a supposedly old manuscript that established the provenance of the clan tartans in Scotland. This hoax was perpetrated by John and Charles Allen who were trying to claim they were the grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Unfortunately, though it was all made up, many of the tartan patterns are still considered as genuinely old and therefore official. As with the Da Vinci Code, which generated considerable tourist traffic to sites mentioned in the book, sometimes hoaxes get out of hand and take on a life of their own.

And it seems that the spirit of our current age is such that we want to believe in ancient or secret origins to things, and the easy availability of vast amounts of information appears (perhaps surprisingly) to make it easier to spread misinformation — so that we’re often taken in by conspiracy theories or other such hoaxes. If only our gullibility were just the result of too many Tom Collinses!