The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (16 page)

SPAM

SPAM

SPAM

SPAM

SPAM

SPAM

SPAM

On and on and on
ad infinitum et nauseam
.

Monty Python
is, for reasons best known to nobody, rather popular with computer programmers. There’s even a programming language called
Python
, based on their sketches. This leads us, inevitably, to
Multi-User Dungeons
, or
MUDs
.

Multi-User Dungeons are not, as you might have imagined, strange basement rooms in the red light district. Instead they were an early form of internet game that existed in the 1980s. Clever computery fellows would use MUDs to show each other programs that they had written, but the most popular of these programs was a very simple practical joke.

The first command in the joke program was that the computer should print the word SPAM. The second command was to go back to the first command. The result was that the lyrics to the
Monty Python
song would be printed out as a screenful of SPAM. This would scroll down your screen for ever and you couldn’t stop it.

By 1990 SPAM had become programmers’ slang for anything unwanted on the internet. When the
Monty Python
joke was continued on Usenet in the early 1990s the word
spam
gained wider currency. And that’s why, when that Nigerian prince with all the Viagra and the saucy photographs of Britney Spears started sending his emails, they were called
spam
, or more properly
SPAM
; for you must remember that SPAM is a proprietary name, just like
heroin
.

Heroin

Once upon a time, cough medicines all contained morphine. This made people worried. You see, morphine is addictive, which meant that if you had a bad cold and took the cough medicine for too long, you might cure the cough but wind up physically dependent upon the remedy. The poor cougher of a hundred years ago was therefore faced with a choice: keep hacking away, or risk becoming a morphine addict. Many chose the cough.

So in 1898 a German pharmaceutical company called Bayer decided to develop an alternative. They got out their primitive pipettes and rude retorts, and worked out a new chemical: diacetylmorphine, which they marketed as a ‘non-addictive morphine substitute’.

Like all new products it needed a brand name.
Diacetylmorphine
was alright if you were a scientist, but it wasn’t going to work at the counter of the drugstore. They needed a name that would
sell
, a name that would make people say: ‘Yes! I want to buy that product!’

So Bayer’s marketing chaps set to work. They asked the people who had taken diacetylmorphine how it made them feel, and the response was unanimous: it made you feel great. Like a
hero
. So the marketing chaps decided to call their new product
heroin
. And guess what? It did sell.

Heroin
remained a Bayer trademark until the First World War; but the ‘non-addictive’ part turned out to be a little misguided.

And that’s why heroines
are
connected to heroin. And it was all because people didn’t want to be in thrall to morphine.

Morphing De Quincey and Shelley

Morpheus, from which
morphine
derives, was the Greek god of dreams. He was the son of Sleep and the brother of Fantasy, and he lived in a cave near the underworld where he would make dreams and then hang them upon a withered elm until they were ready to use.

Morpheus was the
shaper of dreams
– his name comes from the Greek
morphe
meaning
shape
. This is why, if you are
amorphous
, it doesn’t mean that you’re fresh out of
morphine
, but instead that you are
shapeless
.

Drugs and dreams are an easy association. If you smoke a pipe full of opium you will, like as not, fall asleep and have a
pipe dream
. The most famous consumer of opium was a nineteenth-century fellow called Thomas De Quincey, who wrote a memoir called
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
, which contains a wonderful and strange account of his drugged dreams:

I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hated me; Seeva lay in wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris; I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. Thousands of years I lived, and was buried in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

De Quincey’s opium dreams sound a little less than fun, and much of his biography is about his efforts to give up the drug. The book is much more moving than it is honest.

In fact, when De Quincey wrote his
Confessions
, he was simply out of cash and couldn’t afford a fix. Luckily the book was so successful that he was able to maintain himself in top-drawer narcotics for the rest of his life. This life was surprisingly long. While near-contemporaries like Shelley, Keats and Byron fell out of boats, perished of consumption or died feverishly in Greece, De Quincey, drugged up to the eyeballs and beyond, survived them all by 35 years and died of a fever at the over-ripe age of 74. He had been taking opium for 55 years.

During his long and meandering literary career, De Quincey was a master-inventor of words. His opium-fumigated brain was a mint where neologisms were coined at a remarkable rate. The
Oxford English Dictionary
attributes 159 words to him. Many of these, like
passiuncle
(a small passion), are forgotten; yet many survive.

Without De Quincey we would have no
subconscious
, no
entourages
, no
incubators
, no
interconnections
. We would be able neither to
intuit
nor to
reposition
things. He was
phenomenally
inventive,
earth-shatteringly
so. He even came up with the word
post-natal
, which has allowed people to be depressed ever since.

Antenatal
had already been invented by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley wrote an (earth-shatteringly tedious) poem called ‘Prince Athenase’. The story goes like this: basically, there’s a prince and he’s great and stuff, but like every second bloody hero of romantic poetry he’s mysteriously sad. Nobody knows why.

Some said that he was mad, others believed

That memories of an antenatal life

Made this, where now he dwelt, a penal hell

Others believed that Shelley had talent, but needed a damned fine editor. Like De Quincey, when Shelley couldn’t think of a word he just made one up. By the time he drowned at the age of 29 he had already come up with the words
spectral
,
anklet
,
optimistic
(in the sense of a hopeful disposition), and
heartless
(in the sense of cruel). He invented
bloodstain
,
expatriate
,
expressionless
,
interestingly
,
legionnaire
,
moonlit
,
sunlit
,
pedestrianize
(although not in our sense),
petty-minded
,
steam
-
ship
,
unattractive
,
undefeated
,
unfulfilling
,
unrecognized
,
wavelet
and
white-hot
.

He even invented the phrase
national anthem
.

Star-Spangled Drinking Songs

A
spangle
is, of course, a little spang: a
spang
being a
small, glittering ornament
. Therefore, to be
spangled
is to be
covered in small spangs
, a fate that befalls the best of us at times.

The word
spangled
crops up in a poem by Thomas Moore – not the famous one, you understand, but the nineteenth-century Irish poetaster. He wrote:

As late I sought the spangled bowers

To cull a wreath of matin flowers,

It was one of Moore’s translations from the Greek poet Anacreon, who was an ancient boozer and lover and lyric poet. Anacreon’s poems (
anacreontics
) are all about getting drunk and making lyrical love in Greek groves. Anacreon was therefore a Good Thing.

Anacreon was, indeed, such a good thing that in the eighteenth century an English gentleman’s club was founded in his memory. It was called the Anacreontic Society and was devoted to ‘wit, harmony and the god of wine’. It was a very musical affair and two members wrote a society drinking song called ‘To Anacreon in Heav’n’. John Stafford Smith wrote the tune and the society’s president, Ralph Tomlinson, wrote the words. The first verse ran thus:

To Anacreon in Heav’n, where he sat in full glee

A few sons of harmony sent a petition,

That he their inspirer and patron would be

When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian

‘Voice, fiddle, and flute,

No longer be mute,

I’ll lend you my name and inspire you to boot,

And, besides, I’ll instruct you like me to intwine

The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.’

Bacchus’s vine is, of course, booze, and Venus was the goddess of sex. ‘To Anacreon in Heav’n’ was a good song with a very catchy tune (which you know). Because it was hard to sing, it became an
ad hoc
test of drunkenness used by the police in the eighteenth century. If you could sing ‘To Anacreon in Heav’n’ in tune you were sober and free to go. This is, if you think about it, an odd fate for a drinking song. It’s also rather unfair on those who can’t sing.

Unfortunately the song was so popular that it was usurped and stolen by a chap called Francis Scott Key, who wrote new words that weren’t about drink, but about being able to see a flag flying after a bombardment.

Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer. During the war of 1812, he was sent to negotiate with the British fleet for the release of certain prisoners. He dined aboard HMS
Tonnant
, but when the time came for him to leave, the British got worried. Key was now familiar with the British battleships: if he went ashore he could and would pass all this information on to the American forces. This was problematic, as the British were planning to bombard Baltimore first thing in the morning, and if the Americans found out it would spoil the fun. So they insisted that Key remain on board, and he was forced to watch the bombardment from the wrong side (or the right side, if you’re thinking about personal safety).

Bang went the guns, but the American flag at Baltimore remained high and visible amid the smoke. Key decided to write a song about it. He stole the tune from the Anacreontic Society, but wrote new words that went: