Sausages, unlucky neighbours, men, women, boys and girls

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MISSING LINKS

Most popular on HH this week was the fact that sausages were known as bags of mystery in nineteenth century slang, because, as one dictionary put it, “no man but the maker knows what’s in them”. 

As if that wasn’t appetizing enough, other slang nicknames for sausages include chambers of horrors and penny puzzles (both likewise alluding to their questionable ingredients); sore legs and spotted dogs (references to their mottled appearance); and most delicious of all, Sharp’s Alley bloodworms, a nickname for either beef sausages or black pudding derived from the name of an infamous London slaughterhouse. 

Sausages were also once known as darbies, a word more usually used in English slang for a pair of handcuffs. In that sense, darbies comes from Darby’s band, the name of a type of usurer’s bond that debtors in sixteenth and seventeenth century England were sometimes compelled to enter into. Because the rules of the bond were so unreasonably crippling, Darby debtors would often find themselves in prison, and so by the mid 1600s darbies or darby’s bands had come to refer to a pair of handcuffs. But because a linked chain of sausages somewhat resembles the linked chain in a set of handcuffs, by the mid nineteenth century that name had morphed into yet another nickname for the bags of mystery in your full English breakfast. 

Elsewhere this week we found out that: 

• an utterly devoted supporter or blinkered advocate is literally a “damned soul”
• Native American tobacco or kinnikinnik has a curious linguistic claim to fame
• the word propinquities is a lot more interesting than might first appear
• the season of hearing bombylious noises in the garden is drawing to a close
• and a government of untried amateurs is a neocracy, should you ever need to know... 

FROM THE ARCHIVES

LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE

Yesterday was the 351st anniversary of the Great Fire of London, which started shortly after midnight on Sunday 2 September 1666 in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane. By the time it finally burned itself out the following Wednesday, some 10,000 homes across the city had been destroyed. 

To mark the occasion, we reposted a personal favourite HH tweet: the fact that a ucalegon is a neighbour whose house is on fire.

And because it’s such a peculiar word, here’s the story behind it. 

As we pointed out on Twitter, the word ucalegon is an allusion to a character who appears both in Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. A close friend of King Priam and one of the counsellors of the city of Troy, Ucalegon—whose name essentially means “unworrying” or “unconcerned” in Greek—had his house set on fire when the city was sacked by the Achaeans:

Then Hector’s faith was manifestly clear’d,

And Grecian frauds in open light appear’d.

The palace of Deiphobus ascends

In smoky flames, and catches on his friends.

Ucalegon burns next: the seas are bright

With splendour not their own, and shine with Trojan light.

Aeneid (II, 307–12)

What became of Ucalegon after that we aren’t told.

But it’s from here that his name fell into allusive use in English in the late seventeenth century.

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MAN AND BOY

The origins and histories of four everyday words cropped up on HH this week: man originally meant “human”; woman literally means “wife-man”; boy originally meant “servant”; and girl originally meant “child”.

Whereas man meant simply “person” or “human” in Old English (a meaning that still survives in words like manslaughter, mankind and manhandle), the word for an adult male in Old English was wer (which still survives today, oddly enough, in werewolf).

The opposite of wer was wif. Despite being the origin of wife (and so only referring to married women today), it originally meant merely “adult woman”—a more general sense that survives in words like midwife and housewife.

Over time, however, wif gradually came to be used more specifically to refer to married women. But that meant that English needed another general word for any adult female, regardless of their marital status, to take its place. Step forward, then, the word woman—a mixture of the Old English words wif and man, the adoption of which had the knock-on effect of making man the more usual term for an adult male, thereby ousting wer from the language altogether. 

As for girl and boy, it might seem strange that girl was originally gender-neutral, but it’s entirely true: when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote of  “the yonge gerles of the diocise” in the prologue to his Canterbury Tales, he was really talking about all “the young children of the diocese”. 

Curiously, no one is entirely sure where the word girl comes from: one theory claims it comes from an Old English word, gyrela, for a robe or item of clothing, while another points to a corruption of the Latin word garrulus, meaning “chatty” or “talkative”.

As for boy, it too is something of a mystery. But given that it originally meant “servant” or “slave”, one explanation suggests it might derive from a French word, embuie, meaning “held in fetters”.

Whatever its origin, by the Middle English period boy had begun to be used exclusively of all male children, regardless of their status or employment, and in that sense it started to encroach on the meaning of girl. In response, girl became more specific and began to refer exclusively to female children. After co-existing for a time, the pair finally settled into their meanings in the late Middle Ages, and we’ve had girls and boys ever since.

Want more etymological stories like these? Check out The Accidental Dictionary—which thanks to the lovely folk at Pegasus Books, is on its way to the US very soon...

ANAGRAMS No. 5

Four more tricky anagrams to finish things off this week: the letters of each of these words can be rearranged to spell another dictionary word. What are they?

VAINER

THEATRE

BREAK-INS

PLATINOUS

[Answer to last week’s puzzle: ATONED, IRKSOME, BASELINE, ESPRESSOS]