Noses, arses, and a fake Javanese princess

POPULAR THIS WEEK

WON BY A NOSE

By far this week’s most popular tweet was the word nasothek, defined as “a collection of the broken noses of statues and busts”. 

Derived from the Latin for “nose”, nasus, plus the Greek theke, meaning “repository” or “container”, use of the word nasothek is credited to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek art museum in Copenhagen, whose collection of broken noses (so to speak) is out on public display—and is, incidentally, where the picture accompanying our tweet was taken.

But the items in the Ny Carlsberg collection are not impossibly ancient broken antiquities. In fact, they’re a lot more modern than they might first appear. 

In the past, a trend existed for restoring broken sculptures to their former glory by attaching modern replicas of any missing appendages—noses, eyes, ears, chins, fingers, and any other anatomical extremity that was liable to fall off. The mind boggles... But over time that trend reversed, so that nowadays complete authenticity is the key to any museum collection. The Ny Carlsberg ultimately opted to “de-restore” their Greek and Roman statuary, breaking off any modern plaster additions in the interests of keeping their displays as original and as authentic as possible. And with dozens of broken noses now on their hands, the museum chose to display them all in a nasothek as a visual reminder of how the trend for art restoration has changed. 

Elsewhere this week we found out that:

• when you crack a joke but just end up insulting people, you might be a witwanton
• if you don’t know what you want, you might at least want to know you’re a zebedist
• by the holy poker, those 18th century lot knew a good interjection when they saw it
• you probably know (but wish you didn’t) a Sir Wrig Wrag
• and Ethelred the Unready was actually perfectly well prepared—but very ill-advised...

FROM THE ARCHIVES

P-P-P-PICK UP AN ARSE-FOOT

Christmas. Birthdays. World Penguin Day. They seem to come around earlier every year, don’t they?  

It was twelve months ago this week, on 25 April, that HH first posted the fact that penguins were once known as arse-feet. But World Penguin Day has rolled around once again, which gave us the opportunity to revisit our favourite penguin-related fact over on Twitter—and to mark the occasion here with the story behind the word penguin itself.

Penguin dates back to the sixteenth century, with the earliest record we know about coming from the logbook of Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind. According to Drake’s admiral Francis Fletcher as he sailed through the Magellan Strait in 1577:

[20 August] In these Islands we found great reliefe and plenty of good victualls, for infinite were the number of fowle, which the Welsh men named Pengwin … [The birds] breed and lodge at land, and in the day tyme goe downe to the sea to feed, being soe fatt that they can but goe, and their skins cannot be taken from their bodyes without tearing off the flesh, because of their exceeding fatnes. 

Yep, not only do penguins have to contend with waddling around in sub-zero temperatures and being called “arse-feet”, but Drake and his crew decided to announce their presence in the Southern Ocean by eating every penguin they could lay their hands on.

But confusing this particular etymological tale is this:

New found land is in a temperate Climate… There are Sea Guls, Murres, Duckes, wild Geese, and many other kinds of birdes store, too long to write, especially at one Island named Penguin, where wee may driue them on a planke into our ship as many as shall lade her. These birdes are also called Penguins, and cannot flie.

If you know anything about natural history, that quote might strike you as a little odd—penguins are only found in the Southern Hemisphere, so what the dickens were they doing in Newfoundland?

Well, that second quote isn’t from Drake’s logbook, but from a letter written on 13 November 1578 by a Bristol merchant sailor named Anthony Parkhurst, to the acclaimed geographer Richard Hakluyt. And, more importantly, the penguins Parkhurst is talking about here aren’t the same penguins we know today. In fact, the penguins he’s talking about haven’t been seen by anybody for 150 years. 

Parkhurst’s Newfoundland penguins were in actual fact great auks—tall, flightless, black-and-white seabirds (whose arses were just as close to their feet) that were once native to much of the North Atlantic. Although the great auk is now extinct (and the story of its slow demise makes for a sobering read, alas) in Drake and Fletcher’s day they were still widely abundant—so abundant, in fact, that as Parkhurst points out they could be driven in huge numbers from “Penguin Island”, along a plank, and onto a ship to provide food for the crew.

Fletcher’s quote might predate Parkhurst’s by over a year, but it’s thought that the birds Parkhurst wrote about were the original “penguins”—after all, for there to be a place called “Penguin Island” in 1578, we can presume the word penguin was in use in reference to the great auk long before then.

Drake’s crew, meanwhile, would presumably have been familiar with the sea birds they knew from back home, and so when they saw remarkably similar flightless black-and-white birds in the equally freezing cold waters of the Southern Ocean in 1577, they either mistook them for the great auks they knew from home, or simply referred to them by the same name, penguin, because they were so similar.

That’s all well and good of course, but what does the word penguin actually mean? Well, Fletcher’s reference to the birds’ “exceeding fatness” points to one possible theory: that penguin might derive from a Latin word, pinguis, meaning “plump”, “dense”, “fatty”—or pinguid. But a more likely explanation lies with Fletcher’s “Welsh men”: penguin is thought to derive from pen gwyn, the Welsh for “white head”, and sure enough the great auk had a noticeably bright white patch of plumage between its bill and its eyes.

So all that means that the original “penguins” weren’t actually penguins, and weren’t from the Antarctic—but their feet were still close to their arses... 

POPULAR THIS WEEK

ROYAL PRETENDER

The fact that an Englishwoman named Mary Baker managed to successfully pass herself off as a Javanese princess cropped up on the HH feed this week—as did the curious fictitious language she invented as part of the ruse. 

If you’ve heard of “Princess Caraboo”, then you’ll know this story already. If you haven’t, brace yourselves—it’s a good one...

On 3 April 1817, a young woman appeared in the village of Almondsbury, near Bristol, dressed in a shabby black gown and turban, carrying a small bundle of belongings under her arm, and speaking some exotic language no one in the village could understand. The locals at first presumed she was nothing more than a lost tourist, but given the tense international climate of the day (the Napoleonic Wars were only recently concluded, after all) the woman was taken to a local magistrate, Samuel Worrall, for questioning. 

Mr Worrall’s Greek valet was initially called on to try to translate what the woman was saying, but with little success: when asked via a series of gestures to produce identification papers, the woman merely emptied a few coins from her pockets. Eventually, she managed to communicate that her name was “Caraboo”, and that she had somehow travelled a great distance to reach England. Worrall, however, was unconvinced.

Believing that the woman must be nothing more than a beggar—or worse, a foreign agent or spy—the magistrate had her arrested on a charge of vagrancy and imprisoned. But his wife was more understanding. 

Fascinated by the mystery woman’s sudden appearance, Mrs Worrall stepped in and had Caraboo released from prison, and arranged for her to be allowed to lodge in her husband’s offices until the mystery could be solved. As word spread of the Worralls’ bizarre houseguest, an ever-growing number of visitors—including doctors and physicians, scholars, linguists, and translators—began to drop by, all hoping to decipher what she was saying. All failed, except one: a Portuguese sailor named Manuel Eynesso.

Having travelled extensively in eastern Asia, Eynesso claimed to recognize what Caraboo was saying as a rare language native to Sumatra, and immediately began to translate her extraordinary story. Caraboo was no beggar, he explained: she was a princess from the island of “Javasu”, who had been kidnapped by pirates and held captive on a ship that had crossed two oceans before she had jumped overboard, reached the English coast, and found herself in Almondsbury. Mrs Worrall was understandably captivated, and could not wait to introduce her Javanese princess companion to her high-society friends: for the next two months, Caraboo was wined and dined at parties and soirées held in her honour, and soon word had spread far and wide of her incredible story of survival.

Frankly, it all seemed too good to be true. But that’s because not one word of it was. 

The Bristol Journal eventually got hold of the story and ran an article on Princess Caraboo’s story featuring an illustration of the mysterious princess herself. A copy soon found its way into the hands of a local boarding house, Mrs Neale—who immediately recognized the woman not as a Javanese princess, but as a former lodger of hers named Mary Baker, the daughter of a cobbler from nowhere more exotic than Witheridge, a village just 70 miles away.

When confronted by Mrs Neale, Baker confessed to everything, from her entirely fictitious language to the Portuguese acquaintance who had agreed to corroborate her story. Princess Caraboo’s audacious hoax was finally over. But her place in the history books was nevertheless guaranteed.

TEMPLATE No. 14

And finally, four more tricky word templates this week: only one English dictionary word (that we could find) fits each of the templates below. What are they?

_ONE_ _ _ _K_ _

_ _ _ _TWO_ _ _Y

THR_ _ _E_E_

F_ _ _ _OUR_

[Answer to last week’s puzzle:

BANDWAGON, BANDWIDTH,

HANDWRITTEN, GROUNDWATER]