The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (20 page)

But to return to Amerigo: not being as noble as his cousin, Amerigo was sent to work in a bank. However, the world of finance couldn’t hold him and, at the invitation of the King of Portugal, he set off on an early expedition to the New World. On his return he wrote several accounts of his travels. These accounts were written in Latin and so he signed his name using the Latin form of Amerigo:
Americus
.

One of these accounts fell into the hands of a man called Martin Landseemuller, who, being a map-maker, ran off and made a map with the New World marked on it. He was going to call it
Americus
, but decided that ending a continent name with
–us
simply wouldn’t do.
Africa
,
Asia
and
Europa
all ended with the feminine A, so he called it
America
instead.

Finally, Amerigo Vespucci named part of South America
Little Venice
, or in Spanish,
Venezuela
, because lots of the local tribesmen lived in huts that were built out into the water and supported by stilts, making it a sort of ramshackle miniature Venice.

What News on the Rialto?

For all its drainage problems, Venice has given the English language a fair number of words besides
terra firma
. Several parts of the city have entered the language. It was Venice that had the original
Ghetto
and the original
Arsenale
, where the warships were made. The first
regattas
were held on Venice’s Grand Canal; and the lagoon in which Venice stands was the original
lagoon
(and is cognate with English
lake
and Scots
loch
and even the bibliographic
lacuna
).

Venice was the first modern democracy, which is why
ballot
comes from the Venetian word
ballotte
, which means
small balls
. Indeed, the word
ballot
arrived on English shores inside
The Historie of Italie
by William Thomas, because the Venetians would cast their votes by placing different coloured
ballotte
in a bag.

The same naming process happened with the voting in ancient Athens. When the Athenians wanted to banish somebody for not being classical enough, they would vote on the question by putting little black or white fragments of pottery in a box. White meant he could stay: black meant banishment. These tiles were called
ostrakons
. Hence
ostracism
. Ostracism has nothing to do with
ostriches
but is distantly related to
oysters
(both words relate to bone).

The method and term survives to this day in
blackballing
. In the gentlemen’s clubs of London, an application for membership may be refused on the basis of a single black ball in the
ball
-ot box.

In ancient Syracuse, votes for banishment didn’t use shards of pottery. They used olive leaves and so ostracism was called
petalismos
, which is far more beautiful.

Venice was also the first place to introduce what we would now call newspapers. These appeared in the mid-sixteenth century and were little sheets describing trade, war, prices and all the other things that a Venetian merchant would need to know about. They were very cheap and were known as
a halfpennyworth of news
or, in the Venetian dialect, a
gazeta de la novita
.
Gazeta
was the name for a Venetian coin of very little value, so called because on it was a picture of a magpie or
gazeta
.
Gazette
was therefore a doubly appropriate name: it referred both to the cheapness of the news and to the fact that newspapers were, from the first, as unreliable as the chattering of a magpie, and filled with useless trinkets like the thieving magpie’s nest. The Elizabethan linguist John Florio said that gazettes were ‘running reports, daily newes, idle intelligences, or flim flam tales that are daily written from Italie, namely from Rome and Venice’.

How different from our own more modern magazines. Now, can you take a guess as to why a
magazine
is a glossy thing filled with news and a metal thing filled with bullets?

Magazines

Once upon a time there was an Arabic word
khazana
meaning
to store up
.
From that they got
makhzan
meaning storehouse and its plural
makhazin
. That word sailed northwards across the Mediterranean (
the middle of the earth
) and became the Italian
magazzino
, which then proceeded by foot to France and became
magasin
,
before jumping onto a ferry and getting into Britain as
magazine
, still retaining its original meaning of
storehouse
, usually military, hence the magazine in a gun. Then along came Edward Cave.

Edward Cave (1691–1754) wanted to print something periodically that would contain stuff on any subject that might be of interest to the educated of London, whether it be politics or gardening or the price of corn. He cast around for a name for his new idea and decided to call it
The
Gentleman’s Magazine: or, Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer
. So far as anyone can tell (and in the absence of a séance we can only guess at Mr Cave’s thought process), he wanted to imply that the information in his publication would
arm
the gentleman intellectually, or perhaps he wanted to imply that it was a
storehouse
of information.

The first edition came out in January 1731. It was largely a digest of stories that appeared in other publications, but it also had its own column of amusing stories from around the world, such as the following:

From
Dijon
in France, ’tis written that a Person having withdrawn himself, his Relations charg’d one who was his sworn Enemy with his murder, and examin’d him with such exquisite tortures that, to shorten them he confess’d the crime: whereupon he was broke alive, and two others as his accomplices were hanged. The Man supposed to be murder’d, soon after return’d home.

Or this pleasant round-up from the courts:

This day one
Tim. Croneen
was, for the murder and robbery of Mr
St. Leger
and his wife at
Bally volane
, sentenc’d to be hang’d 2 minutes, then his head to be cut off, his bowels to be taken out and thrown in his face; and his body divided in 4 quarters to be placed in 4 cross ways. He was servant to Mr Leger, and committed the murder with the privity of Joan Condon the servant maid, who was sentenced to be burnt.

In fact, most of the first issue was taken up with stories of murders and executions,
10
and as the reading public has always loved a good bit of gore,
The
Gentleman’s Magazine: or, Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer
was a big hit. But it was still a bit of a mouthful. So in December 1733 the
Monthly Intelligencer
part was dropped from the title and replaced with the slogan:
Containing more in Quantity, and greater variety, than any Book of the Kind and Price
.

But imagine if Cave had decided to drop the
magazine
bit instead: we might all now be buying
intelligencers
. Cave’s caprice altered English. If it weren’t for him,
porn mags
might now be called
carnal intelligencers
and that, I’m sure, would make the world a Better Place.

Moreover, Cave’s
Magazine
gave employment to a young, penniless and unknown writer whose name was Dr Samuel Johnson.

10
I tried to count them all, but gave up.

Dick Snary

It’s absolutely necessary and fitting that a book such as this should devote a chapter to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. So we won’t. After all, Johnson didn’t write the first English dictionary. There were plenty before him and there have been plenty since. The chief recommendation of Johnson’s is that he defines a cough as: ‘A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity.’

Dictionaries had been around for ages before the Doctor. Johnson’s dictionary was published in 1755 but the joke name
Richard Snary
was first recorded in 1627. Who was Richard Snary?

A country lad, having been reproved for calling persons by their Christian names, being sent by his master to borrow a dictionary, thought to show his breeding by asking for a Richard Snary.

A word is always older than its pun. The word
dictionary
was invented by an Englishman called John of Garland in 1220. But it wasn’t what we would call a dictionary; he had merely written a book to help you with your Latin
diction
.

The first dictionaries that we would recognise were dual-language ones for the use of translators. For example, the
Abecedarium Anglico Latinum
of 1552 is a terribly useful volume if you want to know that the Latin word for
wench always beaten about the shoulders
is
scapularis
. It also contains English words of indescribable beauty like
wamblecropt
(
afflicted with queasiness
) that have since vanished from the language.

The first dictionary that wasn’t just there to help translators was Cawdrey’s
Table Alphebetical
of 1604, which is a list of ‘hard usual English words’ like
concruciate
(
to torment or vex together
),
deambulation
(
a walking abroade
),
querimonious
(
full of complaining and lamentation
),
spongeous
(
like a sponge
), and
boat
(
boat
).

However, the first English dictionary that actually had
dictionary
in the title was Henry Cockeram’s
The English Dictionarie, or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words
, which hit the printing presses in 1623. Again, it’s not complete, but it is useful. Before 1623 there were actually people who didn’t know that an
acersecomicke
was
one whose haire was never cut
, or that an
adecastick
is
one that will doe just howsoever
. After 1623 they could look up such useful terms, and four years later Dick Snary was born.

Next up was Nathan Bailey’s
Universal Etymological Dictionary
of 1721 that contained 40,000 words, which is only a couple of thousand short of Dr Johnson’s. The point of Johnson’s dictionary is not that it was bigger or more accurate than the others (although it was slightly both); the point of Johnson’s dictionary was that it was
Johnson’s
. The most learned man in Britain had poured out his learnedness onto the page.

Suppose that you were an early eighteenth-century Englishman and you were arguing with a friend about the meaning of the word
indocility
. You pull out your copy of Nathan Bailey’s
Universal Etymological Dictionary
, you flip through the pages and you find: