Husbands, unparliamentary language and a French Y |
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MOST POPULAR THIS WEEK HOUSE HUSBAND Most popular on HH this week was the fact that husband literally means “house-dweller”. The history of husband is complicated, but we probably borrowed it from Scandinavia: the Old Norse word husbondi was used of the male head of a household, pieced together from hus, meaning “house”, and bondi, meaning “dweller”, “freeholder”—or more literally, “one who lives in bond”. When English speakers started using husband in the Old English period (the Oxford English Dictionary has a record of it in print from as early as the late 900s), it too was used to mean merely “the male head of a household”; it’s from there that the word husbandry, in the sense of management of livestock or resources, derives. But presumably because the male heads of households tended, more often than not, to be married to the female heads of households, by the Middle English period husband had come to be used of a male spouse, or the male partner in a marriage. Wife, incidentally, originally meant “woman”; an expanded for, wifman, eventually morphed into woman, while we’ve retained the word housewife—the female equivalent of the original husband—as a word for a woman in charge of running a household. Want more on these etymological tales? Check out The Accidental Dictionary, out now! Elsewhere this week we found out: |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK POLITICKING A list of words officially deemed “unparliamentary language” by the British House of Commons proved popular on HH this week—so here’s a bit more about them. The British Parliament operates under a tight and, in some instances, fairly arcane set of rules that prohibits everything from the wearing of suits of armour in the Chamber to the use of fellow Members’ names (all parliamentary comments, ultimately, have to be directed to “the honourable member” for each constituency, or words to that effect). According to Parliament’s official rules, “unparliamentary language” is also banned—by which the rules prohibit any language that “breaks the rules of politeness” in the House of Commons. Anyone who uses such language will be admonished by the Speaker of the House, and asked to withdraw their comments or else risk being removed or suspended from the house. Among the (otherwise extremely useful) words on the banned list are the likes of liar, traitor and hypocrite. But as we mentioned on Twitter this week, Parliament has such a lengthy history that the full list also includes a number of prize archaisms like pipsqueak, swine, wart, blackguard, guttersnipe, and stoolpigeon. It’s also against the rules to call anyone a bastard, an ignoramus, an idiot and a hooligan, to accuse anyone of speaking falsehoods or of being drunk, or—as the Labour MP for Bolsover Dennis Skinner found out in 2016, of calling anyone dodgy. |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK CAPITAL LETTER If you’re following HH on Instagram, you’ll have found out this week that there’s a town in northeast France simply called Y. Y stands around 30 miles east of Amiens in the Somme department of Hauts-de-France in northern France. Its name, incidentally, is pronounced as a short “ee”, not as the French name for the letter Y (“ee-greck”, which literally means “Greek y”). Perhaps unsurprisingly Y is the shortest place name in modern France—but it’s not the only single-letter place name in Europe and, on a global scale, is one of quite a few similarly frugally-named locations. For instance, there are several places named Å in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, in whose local languages the word å essentially means “stream” or “waterway”. On the subject of waterways, there’s a river in Scotland named simply E and another that flows across Dartmoor in southwest England named the O. The river D flows into the Pacific Ocean in Lincoln County, Oregon, USA, and there are also two L-shaped lakes each appropriately named “L” in rural Nebraska. And if you want to finish this tour back where it started, there was once an official “census-designated place” in Alaska also named Y—though unlike Y in France, this Y was pronounced precisely the same way as the letter Y, and takes its name from a Y-shaped intersection on a local highway. Once the northernmost and most highly populated single-letter town in the world, alas Y, Alaska, has since changed its name to the slightly more robust Sustina North. Who knows Y... |
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AND FINALLY... ANAGRAMS 31 Four more tricky anagrams to round things off this week: each of the words below can be rearranged to spell another much more familiar dictionary word. What are they? EPODIC AMNESIC PANGAMIC ALLOGENIC Last week’s solution: STEELINESS, WORDINESS, HURTFULNESS, IMPRESSIVENESS |
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