Flatulent birds, questionable orchids, and trolling dames |
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MOST POPULAR THIS WEEK FARTRIDGES Most popular on HH this week was the fact that partridges take their name from a Greek word for farting. Hmmm. After lumpy-dicks last week, there’s a steady theme emerging in these “most populars”... Partridge is the result of one of those etymological word chains with which the English language is replete. Partridge is an English development of an Old French word, pertis, which is itself based on a Latin word, perdix, whose roots lie in Ancient Greek. And it’s that original Greek root that’s believed to be entwined with perdesthai, a Greek word meaning “break wind”. Why such a curiously flatulent name for what is otherwise a fairly unassuming bird? Well, the usual explanation is that the chuntering sound of the partridge’s wings as it, ahem, takes to the air, is meant with a little imagination to sound somewhat like a fart. So whoever decided to call them partridges and not fartridges has seriously missed a trick. Elsewhere this week we found out: |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME What do the words musk, avocado and orchid all have in common? This week, we found out that they all come from words meaning “testicle”. How did all that happen? Well, let’s play ball. Musk comes to us via French, Latin, Greek and, earlier still, Persian, but before all that it derives ultimately from a Sanskrit word, muska-s, meaning “testicle”. That ancient Sanskrit word is itself thought to come from the Sanskrit word for “mouse”, mus; a deer’s musk glands were supposedly thought to resemble another certain pair of male glands, which were in turn supposed to resemble mice. Or so the story goes. Avocado meanwhile is a word borrowed into English via Spanish from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. In Nahuatl, the avocado was known as ahuakatl, but that word also meant “testicle”; the fruit, as you might have guessed by now, was so called because of its resemblance to said male body part. (When that Nahuatl word found its way into Spanish, incidentally, it became confused with the Spanish word for “lawyer”, avocado, leaving us with a curious crossover between avocados and advocates.) Last of all orchids take their name from orkhis, the Greek word for “testicle”, which is said to be a reference to the shape of the plants’ roots. That’s an etymology shared by a handful of medical terms like orchitis and orchidectomy, the inflammation and surgical removal of an orkhis, respectively. |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK TROLLED An entry from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary also made it onto the most popular list this week: in lieu of a definition of the word trolmydames in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson merely included the caveat that “of this word I know not the meaning”. Why include the word at all if he didn’t know what it meant? Well, Johnson was keen to include as many Shakespearisms in his dictionary as possible, and so was compelled to include it thanks to a quote from The Winter’s Tale, in which Shakespeare wrote of “A fellow, sir, that I have known to go about with trolmydames”. Johnson wasn’t to know, but troll-my-dames—or pigeon-holes, or nineholes, as it was also known—was a game popular in Elizabethan England in which “the object was to ‘troll’ [i.e. roll] balls through arches set on a board”. Essentially, it was a kind of tabletop cross between croquet and ten-pin bowling. The name itself, meanwhile, is a corruption of the French trou-madame, or “hole, madam!”, which was apparently shouted by female competitors when they scored a point. So of this word, we now know quite a lot. |
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AND FINALLY... ANAGRAMS 39 Four more tricky anagrams to round things off this week: each of the words below can be rearranged to spell another dictionary word. What are they? HALTERE HEPCATS HEURISM HORMONE Last week’s solution: TREBLES, BIZARRE, LOWBRED, ENROBES |
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